Comment by tralarpa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tralarpa | Hacker News Reader

Just a word of warning to all HN readers who plan to follow the author's method. It is a quite painful way to learn a language, especially Chinese. I have learned a language (not Chinese) in this way, but I doubt that it is more efficient than following a decent language course (which are, unfortunately, very rare for Chinese. That could explain why the author did what he did).

First of all: Don't start reading a real book from a too low level. It's absolutely fantastic that the author has the energy and perseverance to attack a real book, but it can quickly end in frustration for most people. The author says he passed HSK4. Let's assume that his Chinese was actually a little bit better than HSK4 which would correspond to a vocabulary of around 1800 words. This sounds a lot but it's actually...nothing. I can only assume that his real level was significantly higher than HSK4, otherwise he would have seen many more than 5-10 new words per page (20 or 30 per page would be more realistic for the first 50 pages in my opinion).

Second, in my experience, even if you know all words of a Chinese text, you are still very far from understanding it. The grammar is a bitch. What will probably happen is that you will stare at what you assume is a sentence and wonder whether you accidentally got some old edition where the characters are printed from right to left or vertically. It's a pity that the author has solely focused on vocabulary acquisition in his article. That could give readers who only know Indo-European languages the impression that Chinese is somehow like Spanish (or even Farsi) where the sentence structure is similar enough to English and where just knowing the words can be already enough to enjoy a book.

(Edit: language)

I agree with your sentiment. I do prefer studying from books, but really try to just take a multifaceted approach: speak everyday, watch movies/tv, read native materials/bed/etc, also use chinese language study books.

I was curious though, when you said Chinese grammar was tough, what specifically did you think was tough? I always sell Chinese grammar as being super simple. It’s the easiest grammar of any language I’ve ever studied so far. I understand how depending on what language you come from other languages can be easier or harder of course. (E.g. Koreans can learn japanese easier than Americans, etc.)

> I understand how depending on what language you come from other languages can be easier or harder of course

Definitely. For me (native speaker of an Indo-European language), learning Chinese is like learning a functional programming language when you only know C. Give me a subject, a verb, and some objects and I can build you a more or less natural sounding sentence in five different European languages (two of them I have never used in an oral conversation). When I tried the same in Chinese, I would first have to consult my grammar book to see what specific pattern to use, decide whether it would be more natural to have a topic in front of the sentence, check the previous sentence to see whether I need the subject at all or whether I can just attach the verb to the previous sentence, and then finally add a couple of "le" here and there :) and still have a result that is wrong because "that's not how you say it".

> decide whether it would be more natural to have a topic in front of the sentence

A grammar book can't tell you this, because it's a style choice. All the grammar book will tell you is how to do it. For what it's worth, topic fronting is a standard feature of English too.

> and then finally add a couple of "le" here and there

Yeah... I feel your pain there.

That makes sense. I probably overlooked the difference between grammatically correct and sounding natural. Chinese (and Japanese) have such a different cultural background that I also find the "natural way" to speak is quite different than English for example. The natural way to speak takes many many years. I've only ever seriously studied East Asian languages so have been able to build on top of each other to some degree. I just assumed this would be an issue in all languages, though now I could see how learning Spanish for example, is likely far less "eccentric" for a native English speaker than something like Chinese/Japanese.

Thanks for your response!

Chinese really needs rote memorization. There is no way around it.

I've often heard successful learners would learn by rote memorization first, up to a very high level of characters, and only then start picking up grammar and the rest from reading or conversations.

I've definitely experienced reading a sentence, knowing all or almost all the words in it, and still not being able to assemble the meaning of the sentence due to an unfamiliar grammar structure. Many times.

I think the best way to tackle this is to just try and try again: read the sentence a second time, read the next sentence and see if you can understand the previous sentence with the added context, or just be content with an incomplete understanding; maybe that grammar usage will be easier to understand the next time you see it. Another good way is to read textbooks. Textbooks are great for grammar (although spaced repetition tends to work better for vocabulary).

Interesting piece of information about textbooks. I haven't tried that.

Concerning your tool, how well does the word segmentation of jieba work in your experience? I tried a few, but at the end I always returned to http://mandarinspot.com/annotate

(Edit: because I can add whitespaces to segment words manually if I see that the output doesn't make sense)

Not only that, but Chinese reading has very little to do with speaking. The vocabulary and even grammar are way too different unless you are reading a kid’s book. If your goal is speaking and listening, you have tk practice that separately.

And Chinese vocabulary is rather small and extremely systematic, so those 1000 or so characters form a solid base for understanding. Far from looking up every other character or so. Only a few % of encountered characters are not among the first 2000.

I thought of trying to read the three body problem along the audiobook, however the one I found online doesn't seem to contain all the chapters.

> And Chinese vocabulary is rather small and extremely systematic, so those 1000 or so characters form a solid base for understanding.

Learning Chinese based on characters is going to be very frustrating. Most words have two characters and knowing their meaning only helps slightly with guessing the meaning of the word.

In the SUBTLEX-CH frequency data, 94% of characters are among the top 1000, but only 82% of words. So it's quite common to see a sentence where you know all the characters, but don't understand it because you don't know how they group into words.

> Most words have two characters and knowing their meaning only helps slightly with guessing the meaning of the word.

It's really infuriating how many two-character words contain an extremely frequent character (like 要 yào) and you have still no idea what the word means.

As someone that knows a bit of Russian and French Chinese seems like a language almost invented to be hard. Let me get this right; Chinese:

1. Has different character sets, including traditional and simplified.

2. Has tens of thousands of different characters.

3. Has both conjugates and homophones.

4. Makes new words by combining characters.

5. Has completely different ways of speaking; none of which are easy.

6. Generally assumes that the other communicator can use the context to denote the tense.

Like. Guys. Common.

If you were combining characters to make words why bother with tens of thousands of characters in the first place?

Also no spaces. This hurts so bad.

1. "Simplified" is technically a script variant of traditional developed in the last half century or so, only in the PRC - but they are ultimately still the same system. Those who can read traditional chinese script can read simplified with ease.

2. Only ~2000 needed for normal vocab. Compare this with 10000+ for english.

3. Mandarin in particular has a lot of homophones but it's practically not a problem since terms are comprised of one or more sound and thus easily disambiguate.

4. This is a good thing, vocab is much lower (see point 2)

5. Same with any language?

6. All humans use context

1. Most of the simplifications are regular.

2. You only need to know several thousands.

3. Chinese uses no cojugation (I guess you meant something else). All languages has homophones

4. That's good. That's why you only need several thousand words.

5. I'm not sure what you mean.

6. It simply doesn't convey tense most of the time.

Those tens of thousands is what you get if you count the most obscure characters you can find, that nobody really uses.

I find it pretty rare not to be able to group words to be honest. I do agree with your first points however.

similarly, learning by individual character (thousands) is much harder than learning by radical (dozens - ~250 total)

sidenote: does three body problem not translate well to English? coz I read an English translation and found the writing quite simplistic. the concepts used were great and I've never read anything like it in hard scifi but the writing wasn't as good as i'd expected for such a lauded book.

I think it's pretty common complaint to say Chinese doesn't translate simply to English. Like Chinese poems are said to contain wordplay based on alternate pronunciations or homophonic information which simply can't be translated.

I didn't read it in English, but I read it's bad. Basically if it's translated from Chinese, you can almost bet it's bad.

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