I’ve totally neglected my study of Chinese since I came back to Singapore from Beijing. Instead, I’ve put my spare time and cash into martial arts, and don’t regret it. However, things have got to change: I see more clearly now that even in English-speaking Singapore (maybe even especially here) I need to dramatically improve my Chinese in order to move my career in the directions I want to go.
Last week I signed up with a school, and the first class was tonight. Yesterday, I took the textbook they’d given me down to Arab Street, and spent a while at Cafe Le Caire trying to prepare. Aiyoh… Now the decision my class at the Diquncun school in Beijing collectively took – to focus on the spoken language, and leave the characters for another time – is coming back to bite me. It took me a long time to translate just a few sentences from the Chinese. Looking up the meaning of an unknown character is much harder and more time-consuming than the other way around!
In fact, I basically can’t do it without electronic help. My new Nokia 6708 is as useful as I expected it to be, ie pretty useful but its dictionary function doesn’t have Hanyu Pinyin, so it’s only a small help if I want to learn the word, rather than just find out the meaning.
That means, right now, in order to make fast progress, I need my computer – the touchpad, stylus and software (Chinese Plus and Pen Plus) that I bought in January are amazingly useful. I just have to write a character, and it’s pronounced out loud, I see the pinyin, and all sorts of other handy features. The sad thing is that I used to take my computer to Lush or Sculpting in Time in Wudaokou, and get on with computer-aided study in laid-back, networked surroundings with lots of other foreign learners around, where I was always sure of meeting someone I knew. There simply isn’t anywhere like it in Singapore, and I miss it badly.
Speaking of my Beijing hangouts, the IHT had an article last weekend about the “New Left” movement of intelligentsia emerging in China. The article is extremely interesting, but it was the accompanying picture (which I don’t think is online any more) that first grabbed my attention. The interview was held in Danna’s favourite, the Thinker’s Cafe – which is attached to the O2 bookshop; the photo of Wang Hui was taken in the bookshop itself, facing the shelves where the English books are kept (I think), and the photographer must have been standing in the doorway, with his back to the Lush entrance. Sigh… the happy times I had there…
Suck it up butter cup. I know from Japanese the longer you put off learning to write the harder it will be, that is why some people like Russell never learn the characters.
I was the only person in my class at Tsinghua who bothered to write in 繁体字. That’s the wrong characters but so is 漢字. I still read things in Japanese even though I know they are in Chinese. 中国人 I read as chugokujin instead of zhonggouren, or at least I did yesterday…
I haven’t studied either languages since I came back to Canada if it makes you feel better, but I’ll probably look into night classes for one or both once things are better…
I actually bought my first Chinese character dictionary ever while studying at the Korean school and although slow I got a lot quicker at looking up unknown characters. Relying on technology has become such a problem in Japan that they have a word for it:
ワープロ馬鹿
That is a person who’s Kanji (Chinese Character) writing ability has suffered from overreliance on computer conversion either on their PC or cell phone.
This happened to me while I was in Japan too. Even though I don’t know thousands and have never taken the literacy test, I can recognize them better than I could write them, so in China I forced myself to be old school, write everything by hand…
It is my ability to type in Chinese that seemed to impress some people, all you have to do is know the Pinyin and then be able to recognize the character. My computer is too Chinese, Firefox in particular seems to think I’m a native or something.
My word, you’re grumpy these days! Yes, I can type in pinyin and get the Hanzi on my laptop too, although it isn’t as easy or intuitive as it is on a Mac. The great thing about the Penplus tools is that it’s pressure pad and stylus based, so I am actually writing and getting used to the stroke order, but it is all computer input. My handwriting is getting better too, so the recognition software is finding it easier to work out what character I’m writing.
I used to be able to use a dictionary to look up characters based on the number of strokes, but sort of lost the habit; I’ll have to get back into it.
How did your interview go, by the way?
Bye Bye Talk Talk China, Hello Sinocidal
I loved Talk Talk China (TTC) and I have missed it since it shut down a few weeks ago. I did not always agree with it, of course. But I nearly always came away from it having learned something more