問我anything with tysond

[Yadang]

 

I like SRS because it's a pretty efficient way to do revision (not learning which is a big mistake many people make).

 

Hmmm - I do agree about this in terms of learning single words, but would you also say this about sentences? Lately I've been using the cram function on Anki to drill sentences into my brain, then dumping them into my SRS deck. Bad idea, you think?

Which brings me to my next question...

 

 

Actually most of my approach is following what Khatzumoto laid out in All Japanese All the Time.  Immersion + Heisig + SRS / MCDs.  And to that I add a 1:1 Teacher.   So "Immersion + Heisig + SRS/MCDs + 1:1 Teacher".

 

I make MCDs - "massive/micro context cloze deletion" - meaning you put a sentence/paragraph of text on a card (the context) and delete one character/word (the deletion).  Then doing SRS is a matter of playing fill the blank.

I think I remember you saying a while ago somewhere that you prefer MCD's to memorizing the whole sentence. I think you said you used to drill whole sentences, but you only do MCDs now. Why is this? What are the advantages/disadvantages of MCD's over memorizing sentences?

I know that on the AJATT site, he talked about how you can focus on only one thing at a time, so it makes things less overwhelming, and yet you still get context. However, I used to believe mistakenly that AJATT, before MCDs was all about memorizing sentences...Then I found out it was only getting used to them. I can see why MCDs are better than just getting used to sentences (active input vs passive), and I can see why they can be better for learning about things (like news, perhaps) that you want to learn to understand but not use actively, and not used in the way news is presented... But I can't see why it would be better for learning new words and things that you actively want to be able to say, unless you already have the grammar backing for what you are currently learning and you just need to drill vocab in a context-rich environment (and so you can just do substitution of vocab words on the grammar you've already internalized when you want to talk), or if you want to build up to memorizing sentences but want to get used to the grammar/new words before you memorize the sentence so that by the time you start drilling, you already have a good idea of how the sentence goes in the first place and there aren't any new words/grammar formations to surprise you. This way you can work yourself up to learning a sentence in a kind of sudo i+1 way for a sentences that has i+much more than 1.

So why do you enjoy MCDs? 

 

 

The other thing that's made a big difference has been the Chinesepod Intermediate, Upper Intermediate and Advanced lessons.

Ah. Any sense as to how close Chinesepod is to "real Chinese". I've been wondering this for a while. I know that they say it's real Chinese off the street as it's spoken, but I still am a bit weary (especially because I live in Taiwan, I don't want to actively learn Mainland slang and have people not know what I'm talking about). It might seem weird, but lately I've been getting freaked out by anything learner-targeted...

 

[tysond]

"Constant criticism for not having children.  The low value of human life."

 

i think these two things go together in a way, because there are so many people the one thing that is cheap is life. I am one of the "chosen not to have children" clan and even in UK it can be seen as weird choice. i have been called selfish, my response is i think you are selfish for wanting without regard to the future of the planet.

 

 

When I was seventeen, I was given the opportunity to apply for a place at a summer science camp.  There was an interview process and one of the questions I was asked was -- What do you think the biggest challenge is for the future?  My answer was simple - overpopulation.  I felt that if we could find a way to limit the population of the planet we would have time and resources to find solutions for many of our other problems.  I do not necessarily mean limit by force, but limitation by preference and by cultural norms would be most desirable.  (actually due to rising standards of living and education, this is coming true).

 

I still feel this way more than twenty years later.  Chinese people frequently ask me why I (nearly 40 years old) and my wife (already 35) don't have children.  I tell people that if we feel, at some point, we wish to raise children, we will adopt.  Sure, I would love my own children.  I would also love any other child of humanity if I had the responsibility of raising them.  My siblings already have children so if I think (and I don't) that my genetics is so amazing, they are basically already passed on to the pool of humanity.  But I actually think that we are all quite similar in our abilities and potential and that actually it's culture, education and attitude are the most important things to unlock the potential of humanity.  

 

That's why it disappoints me, that in a society that has somehow accepted an actual legal limit on the number of children, there is not a corresponding feeling that other people's children, other people's lives as just as valuable as those you are closely related to.  It disappoints me that when I recently encountered a man collapsed on the side of the road, unconscious, head bleeding, that I was the only one, of many people who passed by, who called an ambulance.  If you are willing to accept that you can only have 1 or maybe 2 children for the good of society, I think you should also accept that you should look after other people who are also part of that society.  Our genetics is not so different that you should ignore a man bleeding.

 

I know in China there are factors around money and legal liability and ability to pay.  That's why I called for help, because I felt that worst case, I can probably afford to pay, even if it's expensive.  Actually some of the poorest members of Chinese society rallied to my side to ensure I was not unfairly blamed.   But it makes me quite sad that apparently even rich people (car after car that drove past) don't seem to be able to feel they should risk their money to help others.

 

So I feel it's a bit sad when last week a taxi driver called me 离奇 for suggesting that since my wife and I are older, if we don't end up having our own child, we could consider adopting and raising a child that other people were not able to raise.  @Shelly I am even sadder that this is seen as a weird choice in the UK.  I can only say that when I was around 15 one of my group of friends was adopted, and the only thing all of us cared about was making her feel comfortable that her parents truly loved her, and we truly accepted her as their daughter.

[Lu]

I am one of the "chosen not to have children" clan and even in UK it can be seen as weird choice. i have been called selfish, my response is i think you are selfish for wanting without regard to the future of the planet.

Even apart from all the other problems with that line of criticism: selfish people won't exactly make the best parents, so if a selfish person announces they don't want children, isn't that a choice to fully support instead of something to be criticised? Some people are weird.

[Shelley]

@tysond I agree with all you have said in your post #22. I have always been a firm believer that overpopulation is actually the biggest problem this world faces. If there were less people then there would be resources enough to go round.

 

As you say it needs to be  change in the thinking of people and people wanting to change. As a woman the criticisms is even worse, my female friends can't understand why I don't have kids. In fact they look down at me as if I am not a complete woman.

 

I went to a family reunion some years ago and my partners sister in law greeted us with" hello how are,  what have you been doing with yourself these past few years? I have had these 3 kids" as she pushed them at me. I took a deep breath and said oh running a successful business, learning new things and enjoying myself. " Yes she said but what have you got to show for it?" at this point I smiled at her and said "Peace with myself that I am doing what I think is right" and then turned away and politely avoided talking to her for the rest of the evening.

 

It might seem trite and trivial but I have always said what this planet needs is less people and more trees.

 

i am now in my fifties and still believe and never regreted the decision I took. I do however have lots of cats

[tysond]

Hmmm - I do agree about this in terms of learning single words, but would you also say this about sentences? Lately I've been using the cram function on Anki to drill sentences into my brain, then dumping them into my SRS deck. Bad idea, you think?

 

 

First of all - I'm doing a 问我anything, but I am not an expert.  I am just a learner.  I am using learning Chinese to try to learn about learning.  This means I'm trying techniques that may be successful or not.  People on Chinese Forums are way more advanced than me and don't necessarily agree with my ideas.  That's fine - I'm trying to learn in my situation, with my time constraints and my preferences.  After reading all the advice from so many people, I think the most important thing when learning Chinese is to have a technique that you keep following - persistence is most important, efficiency is great if you don't continuously apply it, it doesn't matter so much. In other words, the most effective technique is the one you keep doing.

 

So that said, I feel like one of the missing functions of Anki is a kind of "learn mode" where you can drill and drill and drill new things into your brain.  I usually just use tools like WorkAudioBook or just plain old podcast repeats, or real life experience, watching media, or even studying a textbook with my teacher first to drill and learn.  I find that if I try to use Anki's default settings to do this kind of drilling it's not really so great.  I think you need to study a word or grammar point for a while before you understand it.  The word you keep hearing in the TV show you enjoy is easiest to learn.   Anki is a tool to memorize what you already learned so you don't forget.

 

Khatzumoto changed his advice at one point.  The way he originally learning Japanese was 1. Loads of immersion 2. Use Heisig to learn Kanji, 3. Use SRS to memorize Kanji. 4. Memorize 10,000 sentences.  He then recommended that better than just memorizing 10,000 sentences was to use Massive/Micro Cloze Deletions.  I think there is still plenty of value in memorizing sentences.  The MCD concept is to use sentences/paragraphs/dialogs as context to prompt you to fill in one word, one character.  I find that over time I still end up memorizing the sentences, although this is a side effect rather than an explicit goal.

 

Let's take an example sentence from Zhongwen Red:   http://www.zhongwenred.com/R103.html

 

购物中心 在 夜总会左边  

The shopping center is to the left of the night club. 

Gòuwùzhōngxīn zài yèzǒnghuì zuǒbiɑn. 

 

In this MCD I clozed 夜总会,  I already knew how to describe "to the left of".  Useful to keep it around..

If I was a beginner I would have clozed 左边 and left the other words alone.  Over time I think I would have absorbed the vocabulary for shopping center and nightclub.

 

The word 夜总会 was useful - I actually already used it to direct taxi drivers to the West Gate of Chaoyang park, as we wanted to go to the restaurants near the nightclubs on this street.

I wanted memorize it.

 

I would agree that you should be aiming for sentences that are i+1 -- you mostly understand the sentence, and then you want to learn one piece of it (the +1).

Actually I try to select sentences with i+1 and i+2.  The thing I want to learn is i+1.  But there are other words that are unknown -- no problem I get exposure to those but I don't need to answer questions about them right now.  Later on I might decide to learn them, then I will cloze them too.  The i+2 stuff is just vocabulary - it's not hard to understand, just something that I'm not yet ready to memorize.  This is actually the nice thing about MCDs.  You are exposed to more than you can understand.  But you just have to answer what you have already learned.

 

So the answer the question - yes well constructed MCDs are basically drilling for context you mostly understand, asking you to supply one piece that is within your understanding.  It might be a noun, a verb, a piece of grammar.  It's best to be kind of skillful in selecting the sentence/paragraph that best exhibits that "one piece" that you want to learn.  The only issue I have found is that sometime I have selected something that is not so common (in media, in HSK etc), and not something I actually use in real life.  For example, early on I thought it would be cool to learn catch phrases from movies like Robocop or Star Wars, but actually these words were not so often used in real life at an early level (May the Force Be With You).  But later on they are not so uncommon so it's not a waste of time in the long run.  Now I try to triage words I learn to make sure they are either common, using SUBTLEX frequence to see if they are common in subtitles or use HSK lists to see if they are considered important for HSK.  

 

 

 

I would agree that you need to basically understand the sentence -- in the good MCDs there should be one bit that you didn't understand.  

[li3wei1]

. i have been called selfish

 

I could never get my head around this one. What on earth is selfish about not having kids? This is on a par with 'love is hate, freedom is slavery' and calling people who kill themselves for their cause 'cowards' and other people who experience sudden death as a result 'heroes'.

 

So passing up all the benefits society gives you for having kids (tax benefits, payments, paid leave, it varies from country to country), and not taking up lots of room on buses/subways, not bringing scream machines onto every long-distance plane you take, and not supporting a whole industry of inane music and television content, is selfish?

[Meng Lelan]

If you are willing to accept that you can only have 1 or maybe 2 children for the good of society, I think you should also accept that you should look after other people who are also part of that society. 

 

 

 

This had me thinking of the Yueyue incident a few years ago in Guangzhou.

[Shelley]

I think they call me selfish because i have decided to live my life for me and not for children, still doesn't make a whole lot of sense, maybe they are secretly envious I don't know.

[tysond]

Ah. Any sense as to how close Chinesepod is to "real Chinese". I've been wondering this for a while. I know that they say it's real Chinese off the street as it's spoken, but I still am a bit weary (especially because I live in Taiwan, I don't want to actively learn Mainland slang and have people not know what I'm talking about). It might seem weird, but lately I've been getting freaked out by anything learner-targeted...

 

 

I think if you really want to hear "real Chinese" then you have to go on the streets of China, or for TV shows and other media, programs that are for native speakers by native speakers. 

If you are actually looking to speak as a Taiwanese Chinese speaker, then it's the streets of Taipei, the TV shows of Taiwan.  I have not lived a single day in Taiwan, but I have the Glossika kit for Business Chinese and it's clearly very Taiwan oriented.  For me I feel it's no issue - my colleagues are a mix of Shanghainese, Taiwanese, Beijineren, many random cities in China.  I feel like I need to learn the mainland, standardized pronunciation, the more strong Beijing style pronunciation, but also understand many other pronunciations.

 

Chinesepod delivers learner materials, where the accents are standard 普通话 and the vocabulary is limited to the level.   That's the product.  That's why it has levels and transcripts and vocabulary lists.  However, lately the upper intermediate and advanced lessons are delivered by native speakers -- which is actually quite good.  Jenny Zhu is the main host these days, and is from Shanghai but she has over the years altered her accent to be quite standard.  I find the other presenters and voice actors to be pretty authentic and standard in pronunciation, but I am not an expert.   They certainly do not try to imitate regional accents (e.g. Beijing taxis) or other difficult to understand accents that you will hear in daily life -- it's the usual super standard stuff, and they will discuss if there is a more northern or southern experssion.  But they will not discuss whether it's a Taiwan expression. 

 

I have not subscribed but I've listened to the free lessons from Popup Chinese.  Their recorded dialogs are much more colloquial.  To the point of being weird (regarding topics) or super fast and blurred in their dialog.  It felt like they were trying to deliver real spoken Chinese, warts and all, while ChinesePod delivers standard Chinese.  I am tempted to at some point study Popup Chinese as I think it's very useful for real world listening practice.

[Mr John]

Hey Tysond,

 

By my own standards I'm still a beginner, but I really like listening to the advanced lessons from Popup Chinese. Especially the one's where a few people are just discussing a topic - rather than the usual dialogue plus explanation. The only downer is that there aren't enough of them.

 

Seeing as you mentioned that you're interested in travelling, I thought I'd ask you a question on that topic. I noticed that the places you've mentioned visiting in China so far have generally been bigger, more developed cities. So, I was wondering, what's your take on the whole seeing the "Real China" idea?

[tysond]

I noticed that the places you've mentioned visiting in China so far have generally been bigger, more developed cities. So, I was wondering, what's your take on the whole seeing the "Real China" idea?

 

 

 

Certainly sometimes I go to big cities, it's easier to travel when there's a work trip required and you can do some sight-seeing over the weekend.  Plus high speed trains make travel quite simple between big cities.  But I've also gone to smaller places

 

In Yunnan I went to Lijiang and Shangri-La.  Shangri-La is not a big city by anyone's reckoning.  And I spent quite a bit of time on the road - Tiger Leaping Gorge, Jade Dragon Mountain, etc.

In Xinjiang I went to places like Kashgar, Turpan, etc.  Much more interesting the Wulumuqi.  

After Xiamen I went into Fujian province and stayed overnight in a Tulou.      From Guangzhou I went to Kaiping and looked at the Diaolou.  

 

I think one has to be careful with a phrase like "Real China".  Real China can be easily found outside the fourth ring road of Beijing - everyday people trying to survive, running shops, living in cheaper high rise apartments, taking pleasure in eating fruit or roasted nuts.  Treating their family to a meal in a restaurant.   Eating noodles at lunch.  Buying youtiao on the way to work.

 

It can be found in the hutongs, men going out with their buddies eating roast lamb and drinking baijiu.  Games of chinese chess played on the street or cards played in the back of a taxi by drivers taking a break.   People shopping on street market and riding home.  

 

And even in a shiny office area in the CBD - squeezing one extra person in a crowded elevator, people carrying a thermos full of tea, crowded food courts full of food from all over China, bones left on the tables after a meal, ordering too many dishes in a fancy restaurant, pushing food onto other people's plates - this is Real China too.

 

I'd say the only thing that doesn't count as Real China is Manufactured Tourism China.  Tourist sites that have been turned into caricatures, with new buildings or towns added purely for shopping, or endless rows of shops selling rubbish simply because there's a lot of foot traffic (Lijiang i'm looking at you, but also to a degree Nanluoguxiang in Beijing).  I don't like this.  But a nightclub is Guangdong is as valid to me as a temple in Chengde.  

 

My feeling is that if you have a notion of "Real China" that is quite specifically doing Tai-chi in silk pyjamas, or learning Wu-shu on a mountain, I would call that Your Expectations of Your Chinese Experience.  Only Chinese people get to decide what is Real China, and I kind of feel almost anything they are doing is intrinsically "really chinese".  Even when they eat at KFC you should see how Chinese the whole thing is.   Rural China, City China, Southern China, Tibetan China, Mongolian China, Uigher China, Mountainous China, Coastal China, Desert China, Forest China... pick your China, it's big enough to defy one piece being called the "Real".

[Shelley]

Well said tysond. If i could give you more than one green point I would, I think this basic idea would be true of any country in the world.

[xuexiansheng]

@ tysond

 

Great 问我anything, thanks for being so frank and so personal. It is fascinating to read someone's experience studying and living in China.

 

I'm in total agreement with you on the no-kids decision. And I love your thoughts on 'real China', I've felt the same way, but was unable to express it so well.

 

@Shelley

 

Here, here! More points for tysond! 

[AdamD]

Excellent thread, and great answers from tysond.

 

Re the selfish thing: It strikes me that not having a child is the default position. It's not in any way selfish, it's just not having a child. If anyone's selfish, it's the complete stranger who bags us out (yes, I'm one too) for choosing to not have kids. How's it their business? (A recent Australian prime minister was attacked for being 'deliberately barren' by a senator. He implied she was a bad person for deciding to not have children.)

 

The most entertaining child-related conversation I have with Chinese and Korean people is this:

 

"Do you have children?
"No."
"Ah, not yet."

 

In this specific instance, I don't think it's passive-aggressive, I think they just make a basic assumption that everyone intends to have kids.

[Shelley]

I agree that little conversation has no malice, as you say for the person who says "Ah, not yet" it is just the way things are and should be, and in the past when child mortality was high and the only thing you had to look forward to in your old age was being cared for by hoard of kids and grand kids, it is not an unreasonable way of thinking.

 

But in this day and age this is not always the only way, there are less early deaths and people have learnt to save for a pension and/or there is a social security network. And we just can't go on increasing the world population ad infinitum, logic dictates that at some point the system will collapse and things will become very bad for all.

 

Not only do less kids die early, people are living longer and this brings problems associated with an older population.

 

I am not saying no one should have babies ( we need some growth) but certainly quite a lot of us should not have kids.

 

I am glad to see that tysond has earned quite a few green points for his answers and one post has topped the popular post list for week or so now.