Learning Chinese SUPPORT THREAD

Several amateurs are trying to come to grips with this difficult language. Let's talk about our experiences of learning it, and perhaps teaching it? Any Chinese teachers out there?

I'll re-post this from another thread (slightly edited) to get the ball rolling and hope that there are others out there wiling to share their experiences and insight. I find this language fascinating, especially the history of its development.

When my daughter was six, she began attending a frothy, fun Chinese class for children that met once a week for an hour. They played games, learned songs, etc. Nice exposure. We stumbled on a GREAT tutor when she was in 5th grade. In 6th grade, she began the language program offered at the local middle school and kept working with the tutor. Next year, at the high school, she will enter the Honors program and begin with Honors Chinese II (she's fairly conversational and can read and write about 350 or so characters, which is terrific, but wouldn't even qualify for basic literacy in China). She's a good student and is motivated, but the key here is the steady one-on-one with the GREAT tutor.

I've just begun my studies with the tutor in anticipation of our third visit to the mainland in the next couple of years. Previously, I studied on my own a bit with the Pimsleur Language series, which was enough to grab onto some basic phrases for travel. I'm especially good at saying "I know a little Mandarin, but I don't speak it well," as if THAT needed explaining.

Of course, The Pimsleur series is strictly for speaking--no learning characters and no pin yin, both of which the tutor sees as mandatory. But right now, for me, it's all about the sounds, especially the tones.

Thealizabet, thank you for getting this rolling.

Why is the tutor so good? What is it about his/her teaching method that you find most useful/inspiring/important?

Having a good teacher is soooo vital.

I'm also interested in learning more about the Pimsleur series. Can you tell us more about that?

(Don't be shy about the herring, btw, just grab away)
:)

Here's a US Foreign Service Standard Chinese course that fell into the public domain, text on PDF and tapes as MP3 files. I found it useful for getting familiar with basic pronunciation without having to splurge on Pimsleur:

http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Chinese

Why hello there.

I am BY NO MEANS amazing at Chinese, but I do alright and have tutored introductory college Chinese, know the Pimsleur system fairly well, and may have something to contribute.

I like Pimsleur courses. They are all set up identically for each language (and many are covered), interactive in the sense that the listener is periodically called upon to create phrases in the target language from previous material, and employ what I believe is called "graduated interval recall". This is important because if material is reviewed too often, it never passes from our short-term to long-term memory and if reviewed too seldom, we simply forget it.

Graduated interval recall reviews new material at longer and longer intervals, training your brain to hold on to it.

This is really cool, though I wouldn't recommend Pimsleur by itself for anyone who was serious about learning Chinese because, as thealizabet mentioned, it only teaches conversation. It can be very useful, however, as a supplement to independent study from a good textbook.

Alsoly, I have used a computer flashcard program that is a good resource for study in any language, though particularly Japanese and Chinese. The program is called iFlash and unfortunately, last I checked it was only available on MACs. It has a graduated interval recall function whereby words show up more and more seldom as you keep getting them right (which also means you get different words each day instead of plowing through them all every day). The reason this program is awesome for Chinese in particular is that you can create more than two sides per flashcard. This way you can set the first face as the Hanzi or Chinese character. Then the second side can be the pinyin pronunciation, and the last side holds the English translation.

You can make your own sets of cards or download other peoples' and the program has a sound recording capability as well, which is extremely useful for tonal languages. When I was tutoring, I made a set of cards for each unit with the pronunciation attached to each card so that students could work on more than one skill at once.

Another excellent program (which I think does NOT include more than two sides per card) is Viaverbi.

Well, it seems that I've gone on. So let's leave it at that.

Sam

First, welcome to both darsu and Samjoseph and thanks for some excellent information!

Darsu, that site is terrific. I played around on it this afternoon. Samjoseph, I have a Mac and am going to look for iFlash (and Viaverbi) as soon as I finish up here. And you're right, Pimsleur is limiting when used alone, but great when supplemented by texts and good tutoring. I can listen to it in my car to reinforce what I'm learning with aforementioned great tutor.

As to Murr's question about what makes a good tutor, I suspect Samjoseph is a good example. He or she is someone who is knowledgeable about the best available teaching aids, methods and curriculums. My tutor also, (and here it sounds like Samjosephs is the same), has taught quite a bit, is fluent in other languages and is passionate about languages and cultures. Sitting down with her feels like engaging in a larger conversation about the world. Does that make sense?

I would be interested in hearing more from both of you about your own experiences in learning this language. My daughter is looking for fluency and is considering an immersion program some summer before she goes to college. Me? Well, I'd love to walk the streets and engage in decent conversation and I wouldn't mind being able to read some of the work of the classic poets. (ETA that I've been following translation thread with great interest.)

A final question: Have either of you used the Rosetta Stone? Opinions?

Not much to relate, alas, and I won't be of any help to your daughter. I started self-studying about three years ago with the primary goal of learning to read and perhaps write on the side. Progress has been very sporadic due to various reasons—priority is low, motivation comes and goes...

Understood, darsu. This is my second attempt to get somewhere with this. Having an exuberant young person around helps. That you've accomplished anything on your own... well, my hat's off to ya.

Murr!!! I was trying to stay off the internet and then you had to go and create this thread! I can't ever resist babbling idiotically about language study!

>5 Samjoseph:

Some other flashcard programs of that sort include Anki and Mnemosyne, which are both free and run on Windows as well. I've heard good things about both - these are consistently recommended to me - but of the two, I have only tested out Anki. When I last used it (summer 2009), it was a little glitchy for me but worked well for my purposes at the time... however, I'm much too lazy to review consistently, so it didn't work out. Oh well. Perhaps I should try again in the new year, considering how much vocabulary I've forgotten lately!

>rosetta stone

I do not like Rosetta Stone. That said, I disliked Rosetta Stone SO MUCH that I actually deleted it from my computer half an hour after I started using it, so I don't exactly have a lot of RS experience under my belt here. I used Level 1 for Arabic (probably not a lot of difference between languages at the basic levels), and I just felt like I could have learned much more by using that half hour on independent textbook study instead. That said, I am aiming for fluency with Chinese and - insha'allah - Arabic, and most of the people I know who also dislike Rosetta Stone are aiming for fluency as well. Perhaps RS would work well in preparation for travel or as review?

It is sooooooooo boring though, I have to warn you...

Here are some random links. Maybe they'll be of use to someone? Who knows!

http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/Itool/type_pinyin_with_tones.htm
Microsoft Word wèi shénme bù xǐhuān pīnyīn...?
Incidentally, can someone weigh in on sheme vs shenme? I almost always say sheme, influenced by Taiwanese relatives and teachers, which is perfectly fine, but when it comes to writing pinyin, I'm never quite sure whether it is appropriate to delete that stupid n. Pinyin actually really confuses me. I rarely use it - in fact, I learned with Zhuyin Fuhao - so I'm not sure how it's supposed to be written. For example, how am I supposed to chunk it? Does it go by word or by phrase or what? And also, if I'm writing something with a changed tone, do I write it in the original (ni3hao3) or the way you pronounce it (ni2hao3)? On and on... mysteries of life.

http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/ime.html
If your computer is a piece of crap like mine and refuses to install the goddamn Chinese font even after all your backbreaking and heroic effort - well, this one's for you.

http://zhongwen.com/gudian.htm
Classical literature made easy! Original text, but with translation AND definitions already found. Don't take the translations at face value as all writing is very subjective... not that I need to warn you all, of course; you all read the Translations thread. Not exhaustive by any means, but a good place to start.

http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/converter-simptrad.html
Simplified-traditional converter. Speaks for itself.

http://www.popupchinese.com/tools/newsinchinese
I guess this is cute. Mouse over the characters.

http://www.learnchineseeveryday.com/
I bookmarked this site for a friend of mine who has just started learning Mandarin. I could care less about most of it, BUT - this is the good part! - in the character-a-day section, it includes a little animation to let you see HOW the character is written, that is, what lines you should draw first. I can hear you already... "Who even cares what order the strokes are written in as long as I write it correctly??" Well, you can do whatever the hell you want, but when you're called upon to demonstrate your best calligraphy in front of the resurrected emperor on pain of death, I'll be there watching! Also, sometimes it just looks better when you write it the "right" way. Truth. Check it out:

http://www.learnchineseeveryday.com/2009/11/26/%E5%BF%83/

It would be more useful just to learn the "guidelines" for stroke order and keep them in mind, but I'm a sucker for pretty animations.

Excellent resources everybody! Thank you! I wish this kind of stuff had been around 12 years ago when I started learning Chinese. It would have made my life a lot easier.

I learnt Chinese on a government grant program at Dan Kang University in Taiwan in 1998. It was a very negative experience, I'm sorry to report. The teaching was inept, both in terms of practical methodology and teaching principles. I had been a EFL teacher for 8 years (with a Dip) before I started studying Chinese, so I was pretty well up on language teaching methodologies. Perhaps that was the trouble, I couldn't help judging the teaching while I was learning. I was appalled. Every 'mistake' in the teaching book was was made again and again. I have to say I really learned Chinese in spite of the teachers, and due to the fact that I was immersed in the language and HAD to learn in order to survive.

I am quite convinced that all my teachers did not really understand that the students couldn't already speak Chinese, I mean everyone knows Chinese right?
One of my teachers was totally fixated on teaching the order of strokes. She said it was very very important. Meanwhile, I couldn't even order coffee in Chinese. Disaster. I was told by another teacher to go home and read the dictionary, when I couldn't even write my name in Chinese. I shed many, many tears in that program. sigh.

I believe things are better now that CFL is really taking off. Several of my young Taiwanese friends and former students have qualified as Chinese teachers, and I believe this generation of teachers will do a better job. What I have learned, though, is that there needs to be an approach to teaching and learning Chinese which bypasses the writing system. For many adults learning C late in life, the literacy angle is simply too complicated. If this could be bypassed, and a focus given to oral skills only, I think this would help to motivate learners and make the language more accessible to people who just want to be able to converse.

Thoughts anyone?

Amaranthic, I'm going to post those links into le cool links thread, to see if we can open this up a bit. Thanks all for your contributions.

I feel like I should be standing up for Old Tradition as some sort of a foil, but I actually agree with you - why not bypass the literacy component? As you may have picked up from my last post, I have strong feelings about stroke order and pronunciation and knowing multiple writing systems and all that stuff. But it's more aspirational than prescriptive; in the context of language learning, I don't think any of this is ultimately horribly important. How many native speakers of Mandarin can write and read? How many know stroke order? Hell, how many pronounce it "correctly" as according to textbooks marketed at us yang guizi? As long as the student is fine with what she has achieved - whether that be speaking only, or writing only (I've met these!), or advanced proficiency with seal script - what does it matter?

I think I'm missing your point. I agree that the Chinese learning situation in 1998 must have been pretty bad, from what I've heard. And it still isn't very good (but that's a rant for another paragraph). But I really do think that more and more Americans of all ages are showing interest in learning Mandarin, and thus there are now more and more classes tailored for these Americans, some of which do focus exclusively on oral skills. Now seal script, on the other hand - I'm still looking.

I do wish that academic institutions would be more accepting of students who learn conversational Mandarin but do not desire literacy, though. (Which I suspect may be closer to your point that I missed.) I can generally carry my own in conversation, but don't ask me to write any grant applications in Mandarin!

While I don't disagree with the idea of learning Chinese without the element of literacy, I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone whose sights were set higher than basic communication. This is because of the mutual reinforcement that the oral and written components of language give each other.

Adults who learn a foreign language do it by learning grammar and vocabulary and for me (and I would expect it to be the same for the majority of people), teaming up your visual and aural memory skills facilitates the process.

Of course this still leaves the option of ditching characters in favor of pinyin, which I think a lot of people probably do. My only issue with that (aside from Chinese characters being a pretty cool and artistic system) is that while characters make Chinese much harder in early study, the make it much easier later.

Because hanzi act kind of like visual morphemes, you can often decode Chinese you don't really know if you have a solid character base. Then again, this is much less important (though still plenty helpful, I think) if conversation is your aim.

I touched on this point earlier in reference to the only thing that bothers me about Pimsleur courses. For several of them, I found that my ability to remember the phrases I was learning was enhanced just by seeing the words in writing once, because it then had a visual as well as a verbal anchor in my brain.

Comments? Concerns? Blasphemous Retorts?

Also, in response to Teresa, I have never used the Rosetta Stone series. I agree with Amaranthic, though, that a person with a good idea of how they personally do well learning languages is probably better off with self-directed study. Finding your personal style is of course a huge part of language learning (well, all learning, really).

I know there are a lot of effective summer immersion programs for Chinese in the states. I have heard and seen good things about he Middlebury College program. A friend of mine made pretty amazing progress in his Japanese study there, and I think they have strong programs for a number of languages. I haven't looked into it, but I'm sure it's not cheap.

http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/ls/

Alsoly, the US State Department offers an interesting program for the intensive study of "critical languages". The department has a list of politically important languages in which college students and graduates can receive training for free abroad. There is no future obligation, but the idea is that trainees will eventually do some work for the State Department.

I have kept meaning to do this but my schedule keeps not lining up with the summer programs.

Check it out: http://www.clscholarship.org/

Wahoo and goodnight.

Sam

I accidentally set fire to some vodka in an oiled skillet a few minutes ago, so I'm just trying to relax and wait until it extinguishes itself, and what better way to relax than to read y'alls lovely posts?

I agree with you that, in theory, "the oral and written components of language give each other" "mutual reinforcement," but I question how effective that reinforcement is in regards to Mandarin. It's true that the make-up of a character often gives you a clue as to its pronunciation, but it's hardly foolproof, especially if you're a beginner and especially if you're still learning the simplified set. When you see the English word "forest," you can guess as to the pronunciation right off - far-est or fore-est being the most likely choices, both close enough. But what do you do with Mandarin 林? If you have no way of intuitively linking character and pronunciation beyond some bizarre-o string of Heisig-esque crack stories ("the tops of the two mu4s look kind of like English L's... and that line on the left kind of looks like a second tone... so it must be lin2!"), how much reinforcement are you really gaining by taking a gander at the writing?

Linking meaning and character is a little easier; in the aforementioned case, it's just a couple of trees, and that does make a forest. But again, not always foolproof. English spelling can be whack, but I think Chinese characters are even harder.

When I learn a new word in Chinese, I actually do learn it more easily when I see the character as well, but that's mostly a product of long experience. And although I do learn the pronunciation more easily with a glance at the written component, I certainly forget the written character far more quickly than I do the pronunciation. Would it be more efficient to simply focus on learning the pronunciation alone rather than the pronunciation and the character before forgetting the character? I don't know, but sometimes I wonder...

I'm also curious about your use of the term "basic communication" in your first paragraph. I agree with you that knowing how to write and read is useful if you want to, well, write and read. ;) But the insertion of the adjective "basic" leads me to think that you're also suggesting that literacy would be a great boon even for students of Chinese whose goal is merely "advanced" communication - that is, conversational fluency, skill in formal/academic speech (presenting a paper vs buying street food), TV/radio comprehension, and so on. I agree that reading lots of newspapers will certainly help you decipher the news on the telly, but I don't think it's necessary at all. Watching lots of news on the telly will help you to learn how to decipher the news on the telly just as well.

Well, not only is this post getting long and tangential, but also my vodka has finally stopped burning (what a waste!), so I guess I can go back to freestyling risotto now. Wan3an1 - next time I check LT I'll be in Jiu4jin1shan1 (San Francisco)!

Annette

PS >Sam: I am so impressed with your grasp on Korean and Japanese, judging from your profile. I'm wrestling hard with Mandarin alone - can't imagine taking on the Big Three all at once!

Amar, (ooo nice nickname!), what are you doing frying vodka? In my experience it's much better boiled.

Sam, I have to disagree violently and vehemently, blasphemously and concernedly with you, for the same reasons that Amar has.

Adults who learn a foreign language do it by learning grammar and vocabulary and for me (and I would expect it to be the same for the majority of people), teaming up your visual and aural memory skills facilitates the process.
While it may be true for weird language nerds like (y)ourself that the writing and the pronunciation reinforce each other, I don't think it's like that for everyone, and I don't think it's like that AT ALL for Chinese. On the contrary, I believe that the amount of effort required to memorise and understand the characters actually works against any attempts to learn how to converse - for average adults, that is, who lack time, memory capacity and flexibility, and have only intermittent motivation. The cognitive load is simply too much for beginners or those who only want to reach some kind of intermediate plateau in conversation.

I know I would have learnt a lot more, with a lot less tears and sweat if I had had a teacher who was only teaching me pronunciation and speaking/listening skills.

Pinyin is, I think, the solution, except it has some very bizarre elements (I do not for the life of me understand why /k/ represents /dzh/) and I wish they would sort out some kind of standard for writing the tones, and as Amar says, how do you chunk it?

Anyway, I'm rambling too. There was no real point to my post in >11 tomcatMurr: except to answer Thealizbet in >6 theaelizabet:, to share my learning experience, and to offload some of the trauma of learning Chinese with some free therapy.

Very interesting everyone. Excellent links. Thanks. Re: Rosetta Stone--I've played around with a friend's Spanish version and my sense of it was that it's too easy to "game the system." You can progress without really learning anything.

As to the learning of characters, I think our tutor would come down on the same side as Sam. I'm going to show her this thread when she comes by tomorrow evening and see if she wants to weigh in.

It's past my bedtime and brain isn't working very well, but I'm so excited to read all these posts! So many tools and toys, very interesting. Wish I'd had them 37 years ago when I started to study Chinese, making hand-made flashcards and falling asleep in the language lab with headset on, memorizing inane dialogs...
I am a dinosaur!

That's interesting to hear. I suppose that there are a lot of things we gradually learn about hanzi through the course of our studies. Eventually we start to recognize trends and understand the bases and radicals and how they fit together and for the majority of learners (I would assume), this knowledge comes later than would be ideal. After all, we need the most help in the beginning when its all new and bizarre. I was lucky to have studied a lot (and learned a little) Japanese before ever studying Chinese so a lot of that was already done.

I'm always impressed to meet someone who learned a foreign language without learning much of the writing system. I almost feel like its a crutch of mine that I have a really hard time doing one without the other, but at the same time reading and writing is a big part of the fun for me.

As regards my "basic communication" comment, I meant to say that the more comprehensively you intend to lean Chinese, even if your goal is advanced conversational proficiency without reading and writing, in my experience (which I admit may not represent the norm) the characters help more and more as I advance. In short (I do go on sometimes, don't I?) improving my reading and writings skills improves my speaking ability. But then, I am a pretty visual learner, and I guess that kind of orientation divides a lot of students.

The other big factor which might make my experience not very widely applicable is my previously referenced "language nerdiness" ;) , to which I must admit. I have a good time studying hanzi and practicing writing and composition.

And now, to dinner...

Sam

Sam, this group is specially designed by one language nerd for all those others out there.

Vive les Nerds de la Langue!

My brain shut down somewhere in the midlands - I spent the entire flight staring dazedly at the lustrous, wavy hair of the attractive Australian penned in to my right, which, it turns out, is a great way to deflect sexual interest - so excuse me as I take a time-out from our discussion to whine:

CHARACTERS ARE HARD!!

Between disturbed sleep and trying to convince myself that I don't actually have to piss (I have an irrational fear that I will birth a baby down an airplane toilet, despite the fact that I am not pregnant) (I feel like that observation is something that wouldn't have made it past my mental filter were I less exhausted), I amused myself by reading excerpts from a Mandarin textbook and trying to memorize how to write all those darn words. Yesterday I mentioned that learning characters feels somewhat easier for me now than when I was a beginner because I can now recognize radicals and parts and extrapolate from there. Well, I don't know what crack I was on when I said that, because while I can certainly recognize characters with that method, reconstruction is another story altogether.

How to Memorize Chinese Like Annette
(The Airplane Method)

1. Place a piece of paper on the flimsy airplane tray in front of your cramped seat and then place a pencil in your limp hand.

2. Lie/hunch over your tray in such a way that your ear is pressed against the plastic and your eyes are directed towards your attractive Australian neighbor.

3. Memorize the sound your pencil makes as you scratch out your last will and testament in Mandarin.

Incidentally, my earliest character-memorizing memory involves this method, though not on a plane. To this day I can recognize the sound of the character wo3 in my nightmares.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Amaranthic, can you please change my litter tray.

I mentioned the character discussion tonight to Great Tutor and she said hahahahahahahahahahahahah! Seems she's heard this all before. As I thought, she came down on the side of learning characters, but wasn't particularly dogmatic about it. She said largely what has been said here previously: character knowledge greatly helps those who need a visual with which to root themselves, others not; some people only want to progress so far and so not having character won't kill them; and so on. However, she felt most anyone wanting to go beyond tourist-level conversation would be best served by character work. She said it helps down the line with grammar and such; makes it easier to understand, I think she said? Anyway, I downloaded the better part of the thread and gave it to her. I'll let you know if she has anything to add.

Amaranthic, me like you :)

Thanks, makes me feel loved! :)

Q: To those of you who have been or lived recently in Beijing-Harbin-Taipei (I'm looking at you, Murr), what do you think about the cost of living? I remember food and household items as being gloriously inexpensive, but good clothing/luxury items as above US price. What I'm really asking about though is living expenses as I have never looked into those before. Do any of you have a "feel" for how expensive something like an average month's rent should be?

Amar, I will reply with details in a PM.

Thea, it doesn't surprise me that your tutor would say that. No disrespect, but it's in her interests to maintain that characters are necessary. And it's hard for Chinese people to imagine their language divorced from its characters.

I would regard my Chinese as quite more than tourist level, but I still can't read and can't be bothered to learn and don't think it would help me to. Chinese grammar is really terribly simple, as you know, and it's my belief (dare I say professional opinion?) that learning the writing system would not help with the grammar. The visual-root-to-help-learning argument I can see, but I think pinyin would help more here.

Murr, our tutor is pretty much a whatever-works-for-you kind of gal. We'll see how I manage, in any case. Right now, I'm game for anything. For my daughter, who is motivated and whose mind is a tad more nimble, character work makes more sense, as she is determined to be as fluent as possible. Plus, she's required to learn them at school.

Which brings up an interesting question regarding the teaching of Chinese in U.S. schools. Will school systems begin to question how the language is taught and adjust their curriculums, accordingly? I know that many other kids in my daughter's class struggle with the language, especially with the character work. Given your professional opinion (and here I don't think you're alone), they're asking for failure, it would seem.

There's a rush right now, to add Chinese to school curriculums. It's being done in a reactionary way, much as Japanese was added in the 80s. And I'll bet no one is really thinking through the character/pinyin question.

I bet you're absolutely right.

i'd really hoped our son would do grad school work in Japan. His undergrad school, Macalester, has a well established set of links to schools there, he very much enjoyed Japanese as his required language. But they probably aren't many programs that specialize in African-American literature coupled w/ mfa work in poetry in Japan.

I think one reason Patty liked taking Chinese was just the attractiveness of the characters. We have some framed calligraphy that was done by students of my great aunt who was among the first wave of teacher/missionaries after the Boxer rebellion, and eventually we had friends translate the pages. They were very well known poems traditionally used for calligraphy exercises.

Bob, I'd love to see that calligraphy. I'll bet it's beautiful. The characters as art? Now that's a different subject!

Murr - thank you. Take your time. :)

I always wish I could read calligraphy. For the most part, the prettier it is, the less I understand it.

I'm happy that more and more Americans are being exposed to Chinese language and culture, but it's sad how little exposure that often entails. Foreign language has never been a priority in the American imagination and most language classes are badly taught already; as Chinese is such a recent, rushed introduction, I suppose it's to be expected that the teaching of Mandarin would be even more mangled. I agree that educators don't seem to be thinking much about the characters/pinyin quandary. Another problem is that good textbooks, particularly at higher levels, are few and far between. This isn't so much a problem if you have a good teacher (already stretching) or tutor, but for those who self-study it must be a nightmare. The textbook I am making my way through right now is already pretty well-done in terms of structure and content, but there are SO many typos, and if I weren't studying "below my level" so to speak, I'm sure I would absorb a lot of incorrect information.

Another problem in teaching Chinese that I have been worrying in my head for the last few days is the question of connotation. I feel as if a lot of Mandarin writing in particular is very ambiguous to the language learner but seems to be perfectly clear to the native speaker, who, after all, is acclimated to the infamous East-Asian subtlety. Teaching some sense of culture along with language has always been a concern to educators but it seems to me that this would be even more a problem with Chinese, Japanese, etc, especially at the higher levels and anything involving literature.

From the NYT online: "Will Americans Really Learn Chinese?"

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/will-americans-really-learn-ch...

So the other day I was talking to this Chinese-American friend of mine. She has lived in the US all her life and has never been to China/Taiwan, but because both her parents are Chinese immigrants, she speaks Mandarin at home with the family. So she's effectively bilingual but hasn't had much exposure to the language outside of mom and dad, a few ABC friends, the internet, etc.

Anyway, we were chatting along in Chinglish, no problems at all, when suddenly she used a term I had never heard before, "ri4 ru4 rou4."

I was very confused, but she assured me that it was an actual term, one that she had seen many times before, "such as in the phrase, ri4 ru4 rou4 ta1 ma1 de."

!!!!!!!!!!

日入肉他妈的 (her phrase)

is meant to be 肏他妈的; many older fonts do not include the vulgarity 肏 and so people would write 日入肉 instead, sometimes with the 日 rendered in dotted lines; the 日 represents the fact that there is a top half and a bottom half to the character, the upper half being 入 and the lower half 肉.

Some of you may be more familiar with 操他妈的 which is the common spelling nowadays - I guess people got sick of typing out 日入肉 and just went for a homonym in 操 instead.

This is why you should pick up your swear-words from actual conversation if at all possible. Best Chinese-related moment of my week!! Although my friend was quick to remind me of the time I tried to swear out some creepy stalker-y Chinese dude in Mandarin, but I had learned all MY swears from capital-L Literature and forgot to de-censor the obscenities... oops.

I've come across something similar, ci1ao4 instead of cao4. I guess it's like saying 's-h-1-t'.

Anyway I am on this thread to ask a question about measure words. I recently learnt (from watching a subtitled film) that the measure word for soul is duo3, ie the same as the measure word for flower, ear and cumulus cloud. This is exactly why I love measure words.

What I am wondering is whether there are any resources available on the web where you can find out what the measure word is for a given noun. I've never really understood why they don't tell you in dictionaries. But the only way I know to find out is to ask for each individual noun...

Wandering_star:

sorry to keep you waiting for so long to respond. I've been digging around a bit and I found this:

http://chinesenotes.com/ref_measure_words.htm

I hope it's helpful.

Thank you so much for tracking that down!

Always late to the party, but just had my first lesson in Mandarin, with portions of the class devoted to a few vocabulary words, to beginning to work on tones (much to the amusement of a six year old chinese girl who peaked in while on her break from lessons next door), beginning to learn basic strokes - so much to learn! Thank you all for the resources. I'll come by now and then and see if anyone is about here.

Good luck A_musing! Our thoughts are with you.

Incidentally, for anyone with a smart phone, I highly recommend the Pleco app - even the free dictionaries are very useful (and accessible when you're not connected to the internet), but I liked it so much I donated a little bit to them by buying the flashcard app, which is a great way of testing yourself.