Tip 94: Memorize famous poems about Chinese holidays.

Every year when Qīngmíng Jié 清明节 rolls around I’ve always thought about (and then promptly forgotten about) memorizing this little poem.

Well for whatever reason, after years of not doing it, I’ve finally decided to commit it to memory. With the Qingming holiday and the accompanying “Bǔkè 补课 Bonanza” fast approaching, I’ve only got a few days to recite this to as many people as possible (no good doing it AFTER the fact, you know).

Go ahead. Quiz me on it next time you see me.

(The full text and English translations are here.)

• Tomb Sweeping Festival
• Fairy Tale (an easy song to learn)
• Stuff you might be hearing – Restaurants
• Language Learning is Messy III: Learn What You Need
• Language Learning is Messy II: Talk a Lot

I’m very happy to announce that faceless has made it into the Quarter Finals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest in the Young Adult Fiction category (because the main character is 17 years old).

A quick outline of the contest rounds and number of entries:

1. 5000 entries submitted in each category (Adult / Young Adult)
2. Top 1000 entries chosen based on 300-word “pitch” (I won’t give you the pitch because it spoils the whole story)
3. Top 250 chosen based on 5000-word “excerpt” (announced here)
4. Top 50 chosen by Publishers Weekly editors, who read the whole book (to be announced April 24, 2012)
5. Top 3 chosen by Penguin editors.
6. Winner chosen by Amazon customers.

We’ll see what happens next. It’s fun to be in the contest because no matter what, I’ve already got the book finished!

Get all faceless news updates delivered to your inbox by subscribing here.

• And the Title Is: Chinese 24/7
• Will Amazon Sell Chinese 24/7?
• Book Update: Proofing done. Book at Printer.
• Book in Hand
• Vote on the Book Title

The other day in English class we were talking about hair styles and one boy said he thought the shīfu 师傅 (in this case, “barber”) should consider your face shape (liǎnxíng 脸型) when recommending a hair style.

This lead me to say, “Um… what are the choices for face shapes?”

The class agree there were some “standard” face shapes that everyone talks about (I think it’s girls mostly).

A quick Google Images search for each of the four, respectively, lead me to some images.

The two everyone wants are:

1) guāzǐ liǎn 瓜子脸 = Mellon-seed Face

2) é dàn liǎn 鹅蛋脸 = Goose-egg Face

I don’t see a huge difference, but I think the guāzǐ liǎn is just higher cheekbones and a sharper chin, generally (even though we can’t actually SEE her chin in the first picture).

Then there are the less desirable ones:

3) guó zì liǎn 国字脸 = “Country”-character Face

4) bǐng liǎn 饼脸 = Flat-cake Face

(Didn’t feel right somehow, putting up pictures of these two. You’ll have to do your own Google Search.)

Seems like those are the two that girls don’t want to have.

Anyway, it got me thinking:

1. I don’t think there are handy, standard expressions like this to describe face shapes in English. I mean, a discussion about face shapes with people in general would be weird for me, personally. But even stranger would be if I discovered that everyone had a shared vocabulary for this in English.
2. How funny that I could say to a Chinese girl, “You’ve got a face like a melon seed” and her response would be to beam back a huge smile and say, “Why thank you! And you’ve got a goose egg face yourself.”

Because of the high romance of that second thought, this is getting filed under “Love and Dating“! (only the second ever post to be awarded that prestigious label)

Do these seem to be well-known face shapes all over China? Feel free to leave a comment to let us know.

• The Curse of the Convergent Concepts
• Linguistic Laughingstock-a-phobia
• Stump the Chinese: Velcro and Boombox
• Google Translation Bot
• How to Find Chinese Medical Terms

Anyone want to make some money? You’re welcome to my idea about how I think hanzi should be taught:

Inspiration

If you’ve never had the chance to play an adventure video game (or even some RBGs), you’re missing out on the virtually-fueled feelings of constant improvement and the thrill of using your ever-increasing resources to make progress. You’ll never know the feeling of coming to a locked door and wondering where the key is, only to find it was in the chest in the very first room of the game and you’ve been walking right past it this whole time! The discoveries, improvements, progress, and collection of items all help you work toward your end goal in those games.

I think the spirit of adventure games could be put to work to teach hanzi a lot more efficiently and maybe even more funly than it is currently. Allow me to explain.

How Hanzi Is Taught Now

The following are currently emphasized when teaching hanzi (as I understand it from people who have actually taken Chinese classes):

1. Learning to write hanzi from the first day of class
2. Hand writing
3. Number of strokes / stroke order
4. Radicals (the ones on this list)
5. Learning to write 你好 (nǐ hǎo) on the first day of class

Let me go through those one by one and tell you why I think it’s time for an updated approach.

1. No need to learn hanzi until you’re already speaking. You can if you want to (indeed, some people ONLY want to learn the characters because of their beauty, etc.), but for communicative skills I think it’s better to build up a fluency in the language using only pinyin before introducing the hugely time-consuming characters. That is the same order, of course, that Chinese children learn oral and then written fluency.

2. No need to learn hand writing. Again, you can if you want to (and I would recommend Skritter if you want to because I think it’s very cool), but I think recognition is more important than handwriting. (Here’s a 12-year-old article (PDF) that agrees with me … oh …  I mean, that I agree with.)

3. (see number 2) Besides, we’re looking stuff up in pinyin dictionaries or computerized / iPhone dictionaries now (one of the main uses for number and order of strokes in the past was to be to help us find things in complicated hanzi dictionaries). If you’re not going to write the characters by hand, the number of strokes and their order isn’t really that important now.

4. Some of those radicals are pretty complicated. Look, 高 (gāo = high) is listed as a radical with 10 strokes! Yikes! Aren’t there smaller pieces? (Yes there are, I’m getting to that.)

5. 你好 is too complicated for a first hanzi lesson. Once you are ready for hanzi, 你好 is not the place to start. I know not every teacher of Chinese will try to get the students writing 你好 on the first day of class, but that’s exactly what happened in some classes I’ve heard about from friends. The teacher’s idea is: “Well, that’s the first thing you say in Chinese so you might as well write it too.” Actually, as long as you accept my idea to get the students’ verbal proficiency way ahead of their hanzi proficiency (see number 1), it won’t matter what the first thing they said was (way back then). You are now free to learn hanzi in any order you want.

Minecraft

I turn now to Minecraft, a game I’ve never played, as the perfect example of how hanzi should be taught. (For my purposes I’ll call Minecraft an adventure game.)

My brother explained to me that, in Minecraft, you walk around and get stuff that you use to make other stuff. You have a 3 x 3 “workbench” that you can put raw materials onto and then: voila! Out come more complicated things.

For example, you can put together 3 bricks of gold and 2 sticks in a certain formation to make a gold pickaxe.

You can then use the pickaxe to do things you couldn’t do before and get even more stuff then make more stuff, and the beat goes on.

Hanzicraft

That’s exactly how I think of hanzi. Rather than talking about “radicals” in the strictest sense of the word (this list), characters should be broken down into even smaller “items” that you run around and “pick up.” Then, once you’ve got them in your “inventory” you can start making hanzi out of them.

Here’s an example of the difference between my “adventure” method and the traditional thinking:

• Traditional thinking: 好 = 女 + 子
  Total parts (radicals) = 2
• Adventure method: 好 = 女 + 了 + 一
  Total items = 3

My adventure method immediately shows that 好 is actually 1 “thing” more complicated than the traditional view of it.

I’m interested in learning characters in order of complexity rather than by their radicals or number of strokes. I don’t care if a character has a million strokes as long as it’s made up of stuff I already know.

So just to summarize, the adventure method is about learning characters according to:

• Complexity (which I define as number of different “items”)
• Inventory (what different “items” do I already know)

So here’s how you would “build” 好 in the adventure method:

That’s kind of complicated, and it’s only the second half of saying “hello.” Why are we doing this on the first day of class?

The adventure idea is that you’d want to learn those three “items” that are in red boxes first. But that seems a little bit advanced to me. That’s like asking the students to start making and using the pickaxe before they’ve figured out anything about the sticks and gold.

Here’s how I would start:

Look what I can do with just one “item” 一 yī:

Tada! I’ve only learned one item (一) and I got 2 more hanzi characters out of it without even learning any new pieces. The characters aren’t more complex (according to my new system) if you’re just reusing “items” you’ve already got. The complexity rating could be thought of as “total number of different items needed to make this.” So even though 二 and 三 are 2 and 3 strokes, respectively, they’re still “level 1″ in complexity and “learnable” because I’ve got all the pieces in my inventory.

Now look what I can do when I go “pick up” a 人:

So now I’ve only “collected” 2 items (一 and 人), but already in my inventory I’ve got 7 hanzi (一，二，三，人，大，天). That’s my kind of game! 7 for the price of 2!

And that’s just the beginning because I can now use those new hanzi to build more stuff. 太 tài would be a logical next step.

So look at how complex 你好 nǐ hǎo really is:

Yikes!

No need to do that until you’ve got all 6 of the items leading up to it, and there are a bunch of other hanzi to “build” first along the way.

A quick word on the “mystery item:” It’s testament to the freshness of this idea that the little cover thing at the top of 尔 doesn’t have a name or it’s own unicode character (that I know of) even though it’s used again here:

I just used 冖 because that’s the closest thing I could find that was like that. It’s ok if the thing at the top of 欠 and 尔 doesn’t have it’s own name or meaning. Some items may be useless unless combined with other stuff. But I still prefer to think of each individual, reusable piece as it’s own thing so I can “build” any characters I need to out of it.

So there it is. That’s how I recommend learning hanzi characters, and I’ve never seen anything that does this (which certainly doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist). Some things come close, but not ever quite what I want.

But don’t forget, at the same time you’re learning hanzi (or probably better to do it first), you should use pinyin to get yourself speaking up a storm. Learning the hanzi can and should be it’s own separate adventure.

An Actual Game / App

I seriously think this would be a good game or at least an app. If someone would like to make it, go ahead! I hope I just get to try it.

If you want my help (in spite of my horrendous color choices in this article), I’d love to be a part of the project. (Oh don’t worry. I’ve kept a bunch of fun ideas for the game to myself in case I do get to be on the design team [wink].)

• Wanted: Chinese Sign Frequency List
• Pinyin Chart
• How Hard Is Chinese to Learn, Really?
• How to Find Chinese Medical Terms
• A Bit about Bù 不

The paperback is still available too, of course, but it ships from the USA so the eBook may be more realistic for expats.

SPECIAL NOTE FOR CHINESE LEARNERS: Because the Kindle conversion process is a little bit tricky (read: I don’t understand it at all), all hanzi in the book (don’t worry, there’s not that much and it’s not important) has been converted to images. I borrowed a friend’s Kindle to have a look at them and they look a little bit… well… like images of hanzi instead of the crisp, clear characters we’re used to seeing on our computer screens. Sorry about that. I’m too ignorant about all things Kindle to have figured out a better way to do it.

• The Pinyin Wall
• Stump the Chinese: Hard Hanzi
• Read Chinese (NFLC) – My Review
• Stump the Chinese: Kànglì 伉俪
• Chinese Hanzi Adventure Method

Recently, on the weibo-sphere, I saw a lost and found notice about a ring of keys. They used the word:

• suǒchí 锁匙 = key

I’ve been in China almost seven years and this was a first for me. I’ve talked about, lost, and copied many a key in my day, and I’ve only heard and seen:

• yàoshi 钥匙 = key

The disturbing thing is: I can’t deny that suǒchí 锁匙 is a real word for keys and it’s really in use. There it was, staring me in the face on the weibo.

But imagine I just arrived in China and saw this weibo post and wanted to know which word to use. How would I know? What’s the difference between these two words? Is it regional? Is it written / spoken? Formal / informal? Are there slight differences in connotations?

The dictionaries I have don’t give me the answers to those questions. None of my paper dictionaries even have suǒchí 锁匙 (although one has suǒyuè 锁钥!).

And to make things worse, I thought to myself, “Well at least I know ‘key’ on a piano / computer keyboard, etc. is jiàn 键.”

Then I see MDBG’s entry:

• jiàn 键 (door lock) key / key (on piano or keyboard)

Oh no! “Door lock key” is listed there too! But is it really used that way?

All my experience says that yàoshi 钥匙 is absolutely the most frequently used word. Signs for key copying places use it. People say it. So I’m not too worried about getting this one right. But still, I’d like to know what the difference is between these words. And is jiàn 键 really ever used to mean “door lock key”?

This seems to be the nature of Chinese: It’s rare to find a thing or concept that there’s only one Chinese word for. So we need the dictionaries to help us make sense of all these synonyms.

Any thoughts on keys or dictionaries, feel free to leave a comment.

• Label Your House
• MDBG Online Dictionary – My review
• HSK Vocabulary Levels Added to MDBG
• bié 别 vs. bú yào 不要
• Language Learning is Messy III: Learn What You Need

Someone want to make some money? Well you’re welcome to this idea if you can figure out how to do it and monetize it. (Maybe it’s already been done, although I doubt it.)

For years we’ve had lists of Chinese characters sorted by frequency. They are all fine and good if you want to learn something about those 3-4000 characters you’ll need to be able to read a Chinese newspaper.

But seriously folks. Who comes to China for their newspapers?

Much more useful (at least to me personally) would be a list of characters found on signs, storefronts, and billboards. Let’s call this genre “outdoor characters.” Even those who are not really interested in learning how to speak Chinese arrive in China and wonder about all the weird symbols they’re seeing. And that’s the point: we’re all seeing these characters all the time. They could be learned and reinforced much easier than the ones needed to read a newspaper or even a weibo.

I’ve wanted this list for a long time, and when a friend said the other day that he too would like it, I got to thinking: “Hey! Since that Pleco thing knows how to convert the real world into characters, why couldn’t we start to put something like this together?” (I have a dumb phone and have never had the honor of trying out the Pleco thing. But I would get a smart phone just for this project if it ever comes into existence).

We could submit photos of outside hanzi characters through a special app on our phone ($$$ people, here’s one way to get some) that would go into a big database and then somehow start putting together character frequency data. Seriously, I would go around taking pictures like these on my phone if it would be for the greater good:

I just went around and took random pictures for 5 minutes. But still, as you can see, already frequency patterns start to emerge:

• Red (3) = 超市 chāo shì = supermarket
• Green (2) = 禁 jìn = forbidden / prohibited
• Pink (2) = 停 tíng = to stop / to park
• Yellow (2) = 路 lù = road
• Black (2) = 店 diàn = shop

Isn’t that fun? And that’s just a lame little impromptu frequency list I’ve thrown together. What we really need is a whole bunch of people working on this together. Maybe even Pleco would like to have an opt in (that’s important) program where you can let them catalog the characters you’re seeing outside.

I already put together my own little list of top 10 characters for travelers to learn, but that’s based on usefulness rather than frequency.

Hanzi literacy doesn’t just have to be about newspapers and standardized tests. If someone wouldn’t mind just whipping up this little Chinese signs project for us, that would be great. Just leave the link in the comments section. Thanks so much. Hello? Anyone?

• The Pinyin Wall
• Wanted: Chinese-Learning Blog List
• Chinese Hanzi Adventure Method
• Top 10 Chinese Characters for Travelers in China to Know
• Numbers with Special Meanings

(zhōngwén yǔfǎ wéijī 中文语法维基)

It’s basically an online grammar textbook that will grow with time (although it’s already pretty extensive) and should eventually have answers to every grammar question we ever have. It’s headed up by John Pasden (who is also Academic Director and co-host of ChinesePod).

Background

In 2010, John and I (and my sister) sat on the roof of the ChinesePod building in Shanghai eating pizza, talking about the gaps in the materials for foreigners learning Chinese. My main beef was (and still is) the problems with all the dictionaries (as I mentioned here). John’s was grammar. He said he was working on something and I told him I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather have filling the grammar gap. And now he’s unveiled it!

Originally just for clients of John’s AllSet Learning consultancy, the wiki is now available to all us laowai-s who need grammar explanations (especially those of us who zìxué 自学 our way through the language).

How to Use the Grammar Wiki

If you’ve used Wikipedia, the Chinese Grammar Wiki will look very familiar to you. I’m not going to explain about all the wiki stuff (like editing) because I don’t have a clue about it myself. I’m going to talk about reading and learning from the wiki as if it were a textbook.

Step 1: Get yourself some pinyin.

There is no pinyin in the wiki! But don’t worry worry less: there are solutions. The solutions involve installing a plugin or little program for your mouse to popup with pinyin when you hover it over the hanzi. They’re actually not that bad. I’ve got some suggestions here.

I asked John why there’s no pinyin in the wiki and here’s what he said:

“It’s not that I don’t think it’s necessary; I would agree that pinyin and translations for everything is the way to go.  But…I’ve learned from extensive experience that adding pinyin and translations to everything is a TON OF WORK, and I was worried that adding that extra work would delay us too much, and the wiki might never launch.  That’s unacceptable!”

I see his point. When I was writing Chinese 24/7 (and faceless too), it was kind of a nightmare to type pinyin (with tones) and hanzi for everything.

Step 2: Pick a starting point.

I’ve come up with two “paths” you can take to browse through the wiki at the moment (the search function isn’t quite running as well as I’d like yet).

• Path 1: Table of Contents by Level. This isn’t quite as easy as I’d like it to be yet, but it’s pretty good. Go to the Grammar Points By Level page and pick a level you’d like to look at. It’s actually a separate table of contents for each level (I’d love to have the option of seeing everything in one, HUGE screen-full). If you go by level, you’ll have a more systematic progression through the articles (rather than wondering “how important is this to me at my level?”).
• Path 2: Index by Part of Speech. Go to the Parts of speech overview and read to your hearts content what it’s all about. Or you can just skip right to Parts of Speech category page. Once you get there, you just click you way through to articles that are about any of the sub categories. For example, to see all the articles filed under “Measure Words” you would click on the Measure words link and then choose an article from the next list you get. The only thing to keep in mind for this process is that some articles may be labeled as being in 2 or more categories (so you might start to see some repeats as you go).

Step 3: Read some articles.

I’ve only started scratching the surface with this wiki, but I plan to read every article eventually. I’ve already found out some great information that I never knew. And that’s the whole point. This is a way to fill in the “curious gaps” in my Chinese grammar knowledge. I’m excited to watch the wiki expand and grow. Thanks John and your team for all the hard work!

• Pinyin Dictionary for Microsoft Word
• “Learn Chinese” iGoogle Page Grand Unveiling
• New Song: Chinese Do Re Mi (Dou Rui Mi)
• MDBG Online Dictionary – Tutorial
• Chinese Hanzi Adventure Method

Since the last time I talked (asked) about this was in 2007, I thought an update was in order.

If you want to put your mouse over hanzi (like this: 汉字) and get pinyin and English, I only know of a few options (please feel free to add to this list).

Browser Plugins

These are little programs that run only inside your Internet browsers. They’re all free, but only work for web pages (i.e. not MS Word, etc.).

• Chrome: Zhongwen - I’m trying this right now and I think it’s mostly good.
• FireFox and Chrome: Perapera-kun - I haven’t tried the newest version yet but others have recommended it to me.

Programs

These are programs that run in your computer’s “system tray” (down near the clock in the lower right) and can be used for any Chinese text on your whole computer including web pages, MS Word, Excel, Notepad, etc.. I only know of one right now.

For Windows

• MDBG Chinese Reader - I use this all the time and really like it. I haven’t tried the newest version, but there is now a free version (which I’ve also not tried), which is cool. It takes a really long time to start the program. But once you’ve got it loaded, you can turn it on and off without closing it.
• Lingoes – Recommended by Zhangyanglu and Simake

For Mac

• XiaoCiDian 小词典 – Recommended by Rob

For Phones and Mobile Devices

• Pleco – Recommended by Alastair and Aaron

Please feel free to leave comments and recommendations and I’ll add them into the main body of the article as they come in.

• A Facelift for the Blog
• Field Notes
• The Future for Chinese/English Dictionaries
• Why Is Nǎlǐ 哪里 Written Wrong?
• Gaps in Current Chinese Teaching Materials and Methods

• mù yǒu 木有 = don’t have [wood have]

That mù is actually a purposeful mispronunciation of méi (as in méi yǒu 没有).

My students have cited two sources for this slang way of saying “don’t have”:

• A cartoon called “Mcdull” (mài dōu 麦兜 in Chinese)
• A TV advertisement where someone speaks in “non-standard” Mandarin

Apparently, up north somewhere (Shandong?) the pronunciation of 没有 sounds like “mù yǒu” in their dialect. So, to imitate that dialectal, “non-standard” way of pronouncing the characters 没有, Internet users have chosen to use the characters 木有 to remind people to imagine it being said as “mù yǒu” instead of “méi yǒu.”

I’ve seen stuff on the weibo (you need a sina or weibo account to view) to the effect of:

• yǒu mù yǒu shéi zhīdào… 有木有谁知道。。。 = Does anyone know…

It has also, as always, seeped into spoken Chinese. The other day I was asking some of my drumline students if they had seen something or another. One boy replied that he hadn’t seen it. But he said “mù yǒu” instead of “méi yǒu.” Everyone around us laughed approvingly.

• New Internet Slang: Gěilì 给力
• Learning Mandarin in Cantonese Land
• Keys: How Many Words Do We Need?
• Cognate Coincidences
• Hanzification of Olympic Names