Third Semester at Shi Da

This is now my third semester studying Mandarin at National Taiwan Normal University (Shi Da.)

After two semesters, I can’t say I’ve learned too much Chinese, in terms of what I wanted to learn, namely speaking and listening. I know that my reading has improved quite a bit, but my speaking ability has pretty much remained the same. Writing is still pretty tough for me, but I never saw that as a priority.

Learning Chinese is time consuming and frustrating. Going to class has been pretty dull, and I’m sure that I could learn much more by myself. The teaching standard has not been particularly good, although in fairness, my needs don’t really match the majority of the Shi Da student population. Unfortunately, I have to attend class in order to stay in the country. I signed up for an easier class this semester in following the ‘Shi Da book’ or Practical Audio Visual Chinese. This book goes at a very slow pace for me, but at least now, I won’t be struggling to learn the abundance of words.

ProVoc is still my preferred means of learning Chinese, although I have also developed some conventional flashcards, although I don’t use them regularly enough. I feel with just two sessions of ten minutes (or less) a day, I can review/relearn around 100 words, which is great. This constant repetition is the only way to learn a language, I believe.

June Rules and Goals

Well, I decided to write out my goals for June! I like to set rules and goals – essentially, the rules are to improve myself, whilst the goals are there to keep me motivated and to have something to work towards. Goal setting is very important after all. This is likely to be a long post. As mentioned in my previous post, I broke many of my rules for last month, which was annoying. Again, these rules and goals pretty much correspond to the five threads in which I’m concentrating my resources. Any more, I believe, is to spread myself too thinly and will lead to a loss of focus.

Rule 1. Wake up before 6.30 am daily, and wake up once a week effortlessly and bursting with energy.

With Dragon Boat finishing next weekend, I’m worried about how my sleep pattern will take it. I have a morning 10am class which should help me to some extent, but I still want to wake up before 6.30, and probably even earlier. Taiwan is getting hellishly hot now, and the mornings are just so much more comfortable. Steve Pavlina made a recent post which spoke about how to create daily habits, which seemed timely. It’s the discipline to sleep early that I’ve been having the most trouble with. It’s hard to make myself sleep early when Taiwan is such a late sleeping culture. As with the programming, I want to create the situation where it’s more appealing to wake up early than to lie in.

Even though I failed last month, there’s no point in changing the goal to something like ‘wake up early just six days a week’ in order to build confidence. I don’t think that really works, especially for sleep, and I did come pretty close to succeeding. So I’ll keep that goal the same, and additionally I want a goal to wake up effortlessly once a week, with a view to increasing the number of days over time. In order to do this, I’ll need to sleep early once a week, and hopefully that day/morning will be so pleasurable in contrast to zombie like, I’ll choose to continue.

I have enjoyed the Dragon Boat practice, so I’m going to run every morning to wake myself up. It will need to be early due to the disgustingly hot weather here.

Rule 2. Surfing the Internet can only be done while standing up

The Internet restriction is something that could warrant a whole article (I’ll probably give a humorous Toastmasters speech about it in the future). Indeed, fairly recently Paul Graham wrote an awesome essay about it. It’s a real problem for many people, so I shouldn’t feel too bad. In addition, I guess I could see it as a good thing that I’m so curious about knowledge (albeit useless knowledge.) Still, it’s something that must be stopped. After last month, I realised that the days I’ve spent without the Internet have been better than the days with it. That’s worth keeping in mind.

A similar restriction to last month is not only slightly inconvenient (since I have to go down to the library), it’s not a realistic option this month. Now I’ve finished the book and will start to write my own programs, I’ll need the Internet as a reference, and so this looks like I’ll be opening a can of worms.

Since I couldn’t think of a clear cut solution, I decided to brainstorm some ideas. Many ideas which sounded good have failed me in the past, so if necessary, I may have to employ as many as I can simultaneously.

To go for an outright ban sort of builds resentment and frustration and isn’t the best route to motivation, as last month proved. The most ingenious plan I’ve thought of thus far is to stand up while I surf. Many people have advocated a chairless office environment, and it builds energy levels, though personally I can’t imagine coding for long periods of time standing up. In order to stop myself falling into that glazed over trance where I browse endlessly, standing up seems like a good way to go.

Graham’s solution (to use a separate computer) seems like it could work, but I only have one computer! In a way, keeping the Internet out of my home, and using the university Internet has been a similar idea, and to be fair, it did work. But as I mentioned earlier, I can’t keep doing that. A similar solution is that I already have a separate user account on my computer for programming, and when I’m switched, I’m pretty reluctant to waste time; in fact, after I switch, I start work pretty much right away. So allowing myself to use that account for Internet and freely too, is another option.

However, since I do manage to work in that account and pretty well too, I don’t want to ‘contaminate’ it with my bad habits.

I think the common idea is to build a different sort of state where you become very aware of your Internet use. Standing up seems the most obvious way to provide this. I want to keep my rule simple, so that’s the final goal I decided on. I feel I’m a grown man, and should be able to use my own self discipline. But if I can’t do it, then treating myself like a child is the way to go.

The other important factor I discovered was that use of the Internet comes when you’re bored. There’s no excuse for boredom in today’s world, and the solution to this is to plan your day beforehand – also an important exercise.

In summary, I’ll keep it simple, as per the rule above. If my plan doesn’t work (i.e. I follow the rules, but still waste time), there’s no point to adhering to it. I will reassess the situation next Sunday if my plan has failed me. This is an interesting solution. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works!

Rule 3. 25 Words in ProVoc daily

I think that I can continue doing ProVoc every day, and that I’m also going to listen to some audio programs while I do it, so this should be a nice morning ‘mental conditioning’ exercise. I wasn’t going to put this down as a rule, seeing as it was pretty easy to keep up, but I could do with a cheap win.

As for the goals…

Star Goal. Program 40 hours this month, with milestones.

The priority is again the programming, and I had trouble keeping up with it last month (I did only 30 hours.) Still, that’s a nice initial target to improve upon. I’m going to try to do 40 hours this month, as opposed to the previous 50. The idea of this is a sort of reverse psychology – I’m going to set a target that I know I can hit, and continue to improve upon that each month in the future. And of course, I won’t stop myself should I choose to work more than 40! This comes from an idea from The Now Habit by Neil Fiore. The ideal is to create the situation where I can’t wait to get back behind the computer and work on my projects. In other words, I need to be in the state where I want to work, more than anything. If that situation never arrives, I can’t see that I can continue this sort of work for the months (or years) that I’ll need to to make a success of myself.

Furthermore, I’ll set a bunch of light milestones of 10 hours of programming a week to work up to the 40 hours, which should stop what happened last month, where I set myself up to do marathon sessions towards the end of the month! It’s a habit I picked up from school! June starts nicely on the Sunday, which is nice for me. Since I’ve finished the Hillegass book, I’ll often need to do planning on paper, outside of the computer. That’s okay, it still counts. Just as an aside, I don’t feel like I’m all that comfortable in Objective-C yet, despite finishing the book. I might choose to work on some tutorials e.g. those on www.cocoadevcentral.com, but I’m not sure if I can work it into my schedule.

Goal 2. Be ready to deliver C8, C9, C10 speeches

Although my progress has been very quick compared to others here, I procrastinate a lot on my Toastmasters speeches. I’m not sure that I’ll have the speech slots to deliver my speeches this month, which is a disappointment. I’m not setting a particularly ambitious goal here, but as the scouts say, be prepared. I’d like to prepare these speeches this month so that I’m ready to deliver them if someone calls me.

Well, I think this is a better plan than last month. It’s obviously not perfect, but I’ll see how it goes!

May Goals: Summary

Just a quick summary of how things in May went. Basically, I’ve failed on several fronts, but I can’t allow myself to dwell on it all too much. I have to pick myself up for next month after all!

I had three goals this month. The first was to wake up before 6.30am every day. I failed on four days, all on the weekends. This is a disappointing result, because I didn’t pay enough attention to my sleep needs. On the plus side, waking up is definitely a little easier than before this month. My energy levels haven’t been that great. I’ve slept a lot in the morning. So, I’ll try to continue this for next month.

The second was not to use the Internet in the apartment. This went great until one day last week, and then in the last three days I grew frustrated and turned it on again. As soon as I did that, my productivity fell apart, and it was easy to see how much of a time sink the Internet is. Ultimately, being without the Internet is much better for my life than having it, and the obvious decision is to continue with the restrictions, although I will almost certainly revise them.

The Provoc is the only goal that I managed to complete. I’m forgetting words very quickly, but with the system in place, I know very clearly that some of the words are sticking. It might not be the best method for incorporating the words I’ve learned into my everyday conversation, but as I remember the word writing, I’m also remembering the English definitions, that’s for sure. It’s doesn’t take too much effort, but being able to do that tiny little bit of Chinese every day is something positive to take from a month in which I failed many of my goals.

The Big F***g Goal was to complete 50 hours of programming. This was definitely possible, but I left myself a mountain to climb in the last week. As I closed in on 35 hours, I completed the Hillegass book on Cocoa at the same time, and didn’t really have any clear goals after that. In contrast to being able to follow the tutorials for an hour at a time, I procrastinated because I didn’t know what I ought to have been doing. I never managed to set up a clear goal, so I finished only on 35 hours. It’s a lot fewer than I’d hoped, but finishing the book is a decent start and should leave me with a decent foundation for continuing learning Cocoa development. So I’m not as upset as I might have been.

In conclusion, setting the goals for May was definitely a good exercise, even though I didn’t manage to hit them. Just writing out my summary makes me feel less annoyed about not completing them for some reason, but the Provoc alone was something I might not have done at all had I committed it as a goal. I’m not sure if I’ll publish out my goals for June after this public failure, but after I revise my goals, I should still be able to get much benefit from the exercise. I’m tending towards publishing it, because I think it will help me to have to account for my actions. I want to look forward to writing a more positive post in June

May Goals: Day 15 Update

Just a quick update to recap on my goals for May.

I guess the sleeping is going okay. Apart from one day when I was ill, I did manage to wake up before 6.30am every day. The day I missed bugs me, but I can’t be too harsh. I think I’m in a good position to establish this as a habit. Even so, I still haven’t been getting enough sleep, and I have a tendency to nap. I haven’t had any trouble sleeping at night though, which suggests that I’m not sleeping too much; indeed, it’s likely the opposite.

Cutting off the Internet at home has done a lot for my productivity, although it has made coming out to the library an explosion of information. I’ll have to cut down on my feeds. There have been times where I wish that I had the ability to email at home, especially now I’m starting to look for jobs, but I think that on the whole it was a good decision for me. I would recommend doing this if you are as addicted to the net as I am.

One of the interesting things I found was that I had this urge to go on the Internet, yet all my reasons for wanting to do so couldn’t be justified. It’s funny how vacuous and superficial a lot of the things I look up are, but it hasn’t stopped me from looking them up later when I’ve had the chance. After May is over, I’ll need to reconsider this goal, so I’ll write more about it later. Sadly, in place of the Internet, I’ve been watching a lot more TV for some reason (I barely watched any of it before.) I’ll try to cut this out for the rest of the month.

Chinese study has tailed off a little in the past week, as we’ve come to the end of our book, and we have little aim. I still believe that going to class isn’t really the most effective use of my time. I have been keeping up the Provoc sessions daily, which is helping me retain the words I’ve learned so far. It looks like I’ll be able to keep this up too.

So far so good, I suppose, and I should be able to continue my progress into June! The Programming deserves its own post, so I’ll do that a bit later, as it was really the priority for me this month.

More on Chinese Speeches

I’ve been advised by many to join a Chinese Toastmasters club to improve my Mandarin. Going back to Spring Convention, my inability to understand any of the speech at all really seemed to bother me. I asked a friend about it, and she told me that the words used in Mandarin speeches typically use vocabulary out of the reach of normal people in Taiwan.

It’s a very interesting topic area for me, concerning culture. If I were to use English words in my speech that non native speakers would be unfamiliar with, it would be my failure as a speaker to adapt my words to my audience. The same would apply to native speakers for that matter. In any case, English culture generally frowns upon over complication of language and jargon. Indeed, the word jargon has rather negative connotations, if my understanding is correct. Just look at the frequent parodies of workplace jargon in Dilbert, for example.

These same rules don’t seem to apply so much in Mandarin speeches, according to my friend. There’s a sort of language elitism (for want of a better term to describe it), that sort of entails that giving a speech is an opportunity to show your mastery of the language. And furthermore, a speech with more complex language is deemed to be better in some sense – to be artistically superior? Maybe this is also true in English to a degree, but on the whole, the message and the delivery of the speech is more important.

I’m unable to comment first hand due to being unable to understand the speech at the time, but for me, this mirrors the intellectual competitiveness that seems to play a big role in East Asian culture. And the loss of face means that no-one would freely admit to not understanding the speech fully. This is a situation that I can’t ever imagine happening in an English speech contest. And personally, it makes me a little uncomfortable to be in such a culture in which everyone is trying to outdo their peers; especially on such a superficial level.

May Goals

One of the things about a blog is that it allows you to display some of yourself for others to see. In this case, I’m going to use this to my benefit, and write down some of my commitments for May so that I’m at least accountable for my actions, even though no-one reads this blog (!)

So, I’m going to set myself the following rules for May. I think the most important thing is sleep… and it’s probably going to be the hardest.

1. Wake up before 6.30 am every day. This will be difficult, especially for me. The Dragon Boat will help commit me during the week, but the weekends are a little dangerous. I’ll need to sleep very early on Friday night if I am to achieve this.
2. No Internet at home. I’m a little uncomfortable with this, but I have found that going cold turkey and cutting off the internet helps me focus a lot better. There is the danger that with the extra time, I’ll sleep, so again, I have to be careful. Internet addiction is sucking an awful lot of my free time.
3. Review 25 words in ProVoc every day. This is a modest goal. 25 words takes me around 25 minutes, or so. I think this is really important to maintain my Chinese level.

These three rules account for two of the threads, Sleep and Chinese. I feel my Toastmasters thing is going nicely, although I procrastinate a little too much in writing my speech. So I’ll just keep going there.

My main goal for May? Program for 50 hours. This is a lot for me, and I feel I’ll have made a significant step should I manage this. I’ll write some progress reports at the 10 day and 20 day points in the month, as well as a summary at the end.

Chinese Learning

I guess I should be pleased with the progress I’ve made in Chinese. After all, I’ve learned to write a lot of words in quite a short space of time. However, as a former language teacher, albeit to kids, I can’t help but feel like lessons should provide so much more. I hate to gripe (nah, just kidding, I love it), but everyone has simply told me that this is a traditional Taiwanese/Asian style of teaching.

We simply aren’t given enough opportunities to speak Chinese in class, and with the class level being pretty good on the whole, it seems a waste. Instead, we’re being fed vocabulary word by word, with an explanation where the English translation should suffice. Couple that with around one third of class time being wasted on copious testing, and I know that I could make better use of my time with an hour on ProVoc.

I feel any real progress has been down to this program, the book, which does provide a nice structure to follow, and a nice (if dry) vocabulary list. For my speaking needs, I can only rely on Language Exchange, which is really fun, but also time consuming. In an ideal world, I’d like to have more open discussion, perhaps just in pairs, doing brainstorming and presentations (e.g. the three worst things about Taiwan), and even a debate or cool games. I know that our Chinese is good enough. It’s funny that I never really liked much of this as a kid – maybe Toastmasters is contributing to this! But with so many people in the classroom, a good teacher should really make use of that, and give something that we can’t necessarily get from Language Exchange. It’s not about myself talking either, my Chinese is worse than other students, and I know I could learn a lot from them.

Hell, I’d even be satisfied with making sentences using the vocab words. As it stands, our teacher asks a very closed question, and we respond in turn. There’s no real excitement or chance to be creative. And yeah, the rest of the time is just tests, in which I struggle. I think it’s just an easy way to measure progress, but any real linguist knows that language is more than tests.

Maybe I’m just thinking in terms of my own needs, but I’m still having to put in a good hour and a half study every day just to learn the words, and going to class doesn’t provide me with the speaking experience I need to progress. I’m sure this won’t be the end of my debate, as I consider whether to continue at Shi Da, move to Tai Da, whose study program I’ve heard good things about, or just go back to teaching English and study in my own time.

My Method of Madness for Learning Chinese

I underestimated the difficulty of reading Chinese characters, and for some reason, it takes me a few seconds, maybe three, to read one of the characters that I may have learned. I usually try to split up the Chinese character into a bunch of separate characters, turning it into a story or strong theme that only really makes sense in my own head. I’ll try to look for an example…

For example, the Chinese character 尖 is made of 小 and 大 – representing something that is sharp/pointed, i.e. small on top, and big(wider) on the bottom. This is a traditional example that teachers like to use, because it effortlessly highlights the beauty, simplicity and elegance of Chinese characters. Similarly, the character for peace is 安 which is made up of a roof/house 宀 over a woman 女. Unfortunately, these particular characters are simple enough that I knew them already. The bastard characters in Chinese that we’re learning now, particularly in Taiwan where they use traditional characters, are an unforgiving bunch.

Now for my own example. 摩 is the character for ‘rub’, mó, most commonly met in 摩托車 mótuōchē or motorcycle.. (On a side point, mótuō is very close to the English motor, which makes it easy to remember). Anyway, how I remember this word is that when you’re in your house 广, you will have a pretend motorcycle, made up of two pieces of wood 木. You hold these two pieces of wood in your hand – 手.

Unfortunately, 广 is actually the Chinese radical for cliff, which may prove to confuse me in the future. I’m sort of using my own definitions for the Chinese radicals at the moment. With any luck, I’ll be able to remember the word itself instead of the story by then. This method makes it a lot easier for me to remember writing characters. When it comes to reading characters, the method works in the other direction.

It works eventually, but working through this whole thing in my head takes a couple of seconds at least, and I often can’t manage to unravel it all in time. I look pretty stupid in class. I haven’t been using ProVoc that often for reading, so I’ll need to practice reading characters too.

ProVoc – Perfection with Language Learning?

ProVoc is one of those Mac applications, like Quicksilver, OmniOutliner and TextMate that makes me want to cry like a girl every time I use it. It’s using these applications that make me feel strangely privileged or lucky perhaps, to be a Mac user. I’m trying not to sound elitist, but it is difficult to imagine such a program on a Windows system. If only Apple would sort out their hardware - I’m not sure how much longer my poor MacBook’s battery will last…

Anyway, ProVoc is really the primary tool I’m using at the moment for learning Chinese. For 聽寫 tests, which we have usually around twice a week, we have to learn a lot of words in a short period of time. I suck at learning to write words; I confuse similar looking words very easily. Provoc is like having someone sitting right next to you, continually testing you, asking you how to write a certain word, but it’s even better than that.  The algorithm is nicely designed in that it builds up slowly from just a couple of words, and then it won’t add new words until you have learned the previous ones.

The similar program Genius has a similar algorithm, but ProVoc is much better featured. As a Mac user, I’m probably a sucker for eye candy. And if you like that sort of thing, ProVoc’s testing mode has a truly beautiful Quartz backdrop. It looks stunning.

I’m having a little trouble getting the program to ignore the diacritical marks I have on my pinyin. Thus I can’t get the program to accept my typed pinyin as correct unless I also type in the tones. It’s a little slow – I usually sound out the word in my head, and mark my answer as correct.

This program has been the main reason I’ve been able to learn the characters I’ve learned so far. Writing out new words continuously has never worked for me, neither as an adult or as a child. I think this form of ‘teaching’ Chinese words is surely outmoded, yet many teachers still insist upon it. For me, it’s just a waste of time for me to do this continual writing, and it’s pretty much the main reason why I grew up despising Chinese. It’s just a completely unstimulating form of learning, and completely emotionless. I believe, and there have been some studies to show this I think, that emotion and at least creativity is necessary to pick up language, as well as providing a decent context.

I think the advantage of ProVoc will come in time, when my database of words is built up a lot more. ProVoc has a feature that rates the difficulty of words, so you can filter your tests to only include those words you have difficulty with. There are also some additional features, that I’ll just briefly describe here. As well as the customised tests you can set for yourself, you can also colour label your words, and also make voice recordings for each word within the program. Using this feature myself only goes to remind me how awful my Chinese accent is though… *sigh*

I think ProVoc is better for other languages than Chinese, simply because Chinese input is a little awkward. There are three categories, Chinese, Pin Yin, and the English, which shows as a comment, which makes testing a bit weird. I can’t wait to use it with French!

The best part of all, and the thing that I still have trouble believing, is that this program is free. It boggles the mind, and makes me think there might be a God after all. He probably made this program, after all.

You need a Mac to use ProVoc. Get it free, here.