From the AllSet Blog: Web-savvy learners of Chinese have known for some time that there’s no single comprehensive grammar resource for Chinese grammar on the entire internet. Sure, there are some very helpful pages out there, but they’re not comprehensive or interlinked, or at least not publicly available.

We initially created the wiki to scratch our own itch. AllSet Learning provides highly personalized study plans for its clients, making use of a variety of materials, often including such disparate sources as ChinesePod lessons, textbooks, magazines, online articles, blog posts, and Weibo posts. While offering a variety of materials is great for keeping learners interests high, it does create a problem for tracking progress. How can we keep straight what our clients have studied, and what they still need to study?

The Chinese Grammar Wiki is our solution to the grammar part of this issue. Tracking client progress in grammar started with static lists of grammar points, and gradually involved into the current Chinese Grammar Wiki. We tried a number of approaches, but realized that the ideal solution needs to be online, easily edited, easily expanded, and heavily interlinked. Wikipedia was the obvious model for such a resource, and the Chinee Grammar Wiki is powered by MediaWiki, the same software that powers Wikipedia.

The site is still in early days, but already has more than 500 articles on Chinese grammar in the wiki. Unlike a wiki like Wikipedia, the Chinese Grammar Wiki doesn’t allow anonymous editing. However, if you feel you have something to add, John and his team hope you contact them to be an approved editor. All content in the wiki is released under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license, and so is free to share, distribute and re-use the information in a variety of ways.

As an on-again, off-again Chinese learner, I’m pretty excited for the resource. Few people I’ve met have spent as much time as John thinking about language learning, particularly as to how it relates to Chinese. His blog and various resources at Sinosplice have been extremely helpful over the years, and I have to imagine that with his ambition and love for the language behind the wiki, it’s sure to be fantastic. With some hefty Year of the Dragon mandarin learning resolutions to myself, I’m certain I’ll be wearing out my bookmark to the site in no time.

This past November the following question was posted on Quora: Why do so many Chinese learners seem to hate Dashan (Mark Rowswell)? He seems like a nice guy. Does he secretly eat children or something?. I’m sure we all have our own answers to that question, but none are likely to come close to the insight and self-reflection that the big Canuck himself answered with yesterday.

Mark Rowswell, the man behind the Mandarin, broke it down into 5 reasons:

1. Overuse – People are sick and tired of hearing the name “Dashan”;
2. Resentment (Part A) – Dashan’s not the only Westerner who speaks Chinese fluently;
3. Resentment (Part B) – Being a foreign resident in China is not easy and Dashan gets all the breaks;
4. Political/Cultural – People wish Dashan had more of an edge;
5. Stereotyping – The assumption that Dashan is a performing monkey.

The whole answer is a bit lengthy, but well worth the read. Here are a few choice excerpts:

On why Dashan is so popular (related to #2 above):

… Dashan represents or symbolizes something very powerful to a Chinese audience. I don’t want to get too deeply into this, because my answer is already running too long, but let me say this: Chinese have a very complex and conflicting view of themselves and the world at large. They have a very strong self-identity and sense of pride, and this leads to a strong sense of “us vs. them” and of being misunderstood and misaligned by the rest of the world, or the West in particular, as well as a strong sense that they are gradually losing their language and culture in the process of globalization. In the face of this, Dashan represents a Westerner who appreciates and respects China, who has learned the language and understands the culture and has even become “more Chinese than the Chinese”. It’s a very powerful and reassuring image that appeals to very deep-rooted emotions.

On being Canadian (related to #4 above):

Culturally, the Dashan character does tend to be quite Canadian. We’re just not as aggressive in general as Americans. The adjective most used to describe Canadians is “nice”. How dull and boring can you get?

Although Canada and America are very close culturally, there are some fundamental differences. Primarily, Canadians never consider themselves to be number one in anything apart from hockey. And although we are both relatively young nations built by successive waves of immigration, Canadians have a much weaker self-identity than Americans. We don’t have a strong mainstream culture of our own, which I think makes us more malleable culturally. When Canadians come to China, we don’t do things “the Canadian way” because nobody has the slightest idea what “the Canadian way” is. So we tend to adapt pretty well to different cultures.

On why Dashan isn’t political (also related to #4 above):

… So I work within cultural norms. This spills over into the political realm, because, to be honest, Chinese cultural acceptance of foreign political criticism is almost nil. In short, I don’t have to worry about what government censors might say because Chinese audiences would never let me get that far anyway.

I could make a short public statement like that of Christian Bale recently or Björk a few years ago. It’s very easy to do and ensures you get very good coverage in the Western media. You go home and everyone thinks you are a person of moral conviction who stood up to the great Chinese monster. But the fact is that these kinds of statements elicit almost no sympathy whatsoever from ordinary Chinese citizens. They simply are not culturally acceptable to the broad Chinese audience. And it’s very difficult to see what impact they have other than to further convince ordinary Chinese people that China is misunderstood and that the Western world is antagonistic towards China and resentful of China’s development. What use is that?

I’m curious to read what others think of Dashan. John, of Sinosplice, mentioned in his post on this topic that, “the hubbub about Dashan has finally started to die down”. I can’t tell if this is true, or if after a certain number of years you just stop noticing it. Any FOB laowai still cringe at the mention of Dashan by a taxi driver? Do the new generation of foreigners in China even know who Dashan is?

I thought it was terrific, but I had one little problem with their list. The 10 Famous Foreigners were all men! Not one woman had made it onto the list. It makes it a little hard for us girls to relate – where are our role models? To be honest, being a woman who blogs on China already makes me feel like I’ve joined a bit of a men’s club, although I see more and more great stuff from women bloggers coming out all the time.

I know there are a lot of female expats living here in China who do have excellent Chinese, but they tend not to be famous for one reason or another. Is it because Chinese culture is male-centric? Is it because the women are shy and don’t take the opportunities to become famous? Are men better at learning Chinese than women? What’s going on here?

Well I was looking for some crazy-good Chinese speaking famous foreign women to counter the all-male trend so I made a thread about it over on the Skritter Forums, but we only came up with three.

So here they are, the Three Famous Foreign Women Who Can Speak Chinese Really Well!

1. 苏斐 (Sū Fěi), Anna Sophie Loewenberg

Fashionista Sufei is the host of Sexy Beijing, a fun show about life in Beijing that’s been online since 2006. It features Sufei interviewing Beijingers on topics such as sex, fashion, and finding love in the Jing.

Her grandparents and father lived in Shanghai, so Sufei might have gotten a head-start on learning Chinese. Even so, her command of the language is impressive and her show is a lot of fun to watch! Check it out:

2. 白洁 (Bái Jié), Jessica Beinecke

Baijie is a host with Voice of America, and her show OMG! Meiyu (OMG!美语) has recently become very popular internationally. It’s a short video segment where she explains common English slang in fluent Chinese. She has more than 100,000 followers on her Weibo account, and her fan base is growing all the time.

Her breakout show was called Yucky Gunk and I learned some interesting Chinese vocabulary from watching it! One great thing about Baijie? She only studied Chinese for five years! Ok, for me that’s a bit depressing considering I’ve been in China longer than that, but she’s proof it can be done! Here’s one of her recent videos:

3. Holly Williams

Holly is Sky News’ Asia Correspondent and lives and works in Beijing. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has done a lot of great reports on some fairly controversial issues.

I have great respect for her willingness to listen to the people’s stories and retell them, as she does here:

I dream of one day having Chinese like these women! I’m still on the fence about the “being famous” bit though. Just being a laowai in China feels a little bit like being famous, and to be honest I’m not sure I can handle more staring, more people wanting to know about me without wanting to really know me. I had a chance recently to have a very small part in a Chinese commercial which will be broadcast on Mainland TV, and even that frightens me a bit.  But if I do ever become famous, I’d love it to be for a reason, for an actual skill instead of just being a white girl; something I can do well instead of just how I look. I still have a long way to go in that department!

So these three are my current role models, and I’d love to have more! If you know of any, or happen to be a famous lady laowai who can rock the zhongwen, please give us a link to where we can take a look and marvel!

The issue has even popped up in the U.S. presidential campaign. Former U.S. Ambassador to China  Jon Huntsman claims fluency in Chinese, the result of a youthful stint as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan. On the campaign trail- Huntsman is seeking the Republican nomination for president- the American media states his fluency as a matter of fact. But is it? This in-depth article in Slate shows why there might be good reasons to be skeptical of Huntsman’s claims.

In the American political context, who cares? It’s dubious whether fluency in a foreign language (especially Chinese!) is an asset in the Republican field, anyway. In the annals of U.S. History, “I speak Chinese” doesn’t quite rank up there with “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”.

Of more interest to the Lost Laowai readership is this notion of “fluency”. What does it mean to be fluent? And is it a useful metric at all?

Technically speaking, no. For one thing, fluency refers only to spoken Chinese and doesn’t reflect skill level in reading, listening, or writing. Put simply, “fluency” refers to a speaker’s ability to speak without hesitation and self-correction. A person can be fluent in Mandarin without having a particularly good grasp of vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammar. Likewise, I’ve met many foreigners with a deep understanding of the language who have trouble putting even basic sentences together. Language learners come in all different types.

Rhetorically speaking, “fluent” has come to mean “advanced” when referring to language ability. After all, nobody wants to go to the trouble of defining his Chinese skills with HSK-like precision, especially in conversation with someone who neither knows what he’s talking about or cares. What is lost in accuracy is gained in convenience.

How do you define fluency?

I really learned this lesson during a recent trip to Beijing. It was a weekend, and all the hostels were sold out so we were stuck staying at a low-end business hotel. You know, a sketchy place with smoke scented rugs; scuffed, cheap wood side tables; and a pile of prostitute cards at the door. Yes, that’s right, prostitute cards.

The size of business cards, with glossy full color pictures of “sexy” girls (some look like they were taken from a shoe catalog or something); these prostitute cards, or PC as I will refer to them from here on out, turned out to be good for a few minutes of laughing. With my poor Chinese I could read a few of the attributes of the ladies listed on the cards: campus beauty, movie stars, beautiful girls. I even busted out my dictionary to learn some new words like, grand (高贵) and elegant (典雅).

But one word left me stumped. It was on almost every single card and was 白领, which my dictionary translated as white neck. I was quite curious about this word. I mean, I’ve read Memoirs of a Geisha, so I know that a sexy white neck drives men wild in Japan, but China? I’ve never heard of it. So why was it on every single card? Obviously there was something lost in translation.

So we collected the cards and brought them all home with us. We ended up with a stack because every day we would get about 8-10, and we stayed for 3 nights. After our first day we wondered who the PC fairy was that delivered the cards. My husband thought maybe it was the girls as they left from a job, I guessed it was a big fat, chain smoking madam. We later learned we were both wrong as we got back early one night right as the prostitute fairy was delivering the cards. It was a few teen boys smoking, chatting and sliding them under the door.

So when I got home I showed the PC’s to my Chinese friend and asked him what it meant. Turns out white neck really means white collar. Like, the girls weren’t sex slaves working in an unjust system, but were white collar workers sitting behind a desk at a big corporation during the day and ho’ing around at night for the fun of it. (“But I don’t think that’s true,” my friend said.)

My friend also pointed out another interesting feature, something else I was unable to read. Some of the cards said that they could provide legitimate receipts for the gov’t and corporate workers so the businessman could get reimbursed. I guess the average cash stipend doesn’t cover a little late night nookie delivery?

Just so you know, prostitution is technically illegal in China. It’s not Vegas over here or anything, but it is an open secret that in business hotels there are girls at your beck and call. In fact another hotel we stayed at, also for businessmen and tourists, we received a call late one night. I couldn’t understand the speaker, but I know it wasn’t room service asking if we wanted fresh towels at 11pm.

But I have to thank those ladies and their calling cards. I learned some new words, a little bit of culture and really, what more could you ask for in a day? The benefit of full immersion leaning is even a prostitute can be your teacher.

One of the original founders of Paper Republic, Brendan is a host of the Mandarin Chinese language learning podcast Popup Chinese, and teaches a course in Chinese-English literary translation at IES Abroad Beijing.

He also (and far too infrequently!) blogs at bokane.org (English) and 在北京找不着北 (Chinese). He lives in Beijing with his wife and two cats.

Lost Laowai: What was the largest driving force in spurring you to overcome the challenges and actually learn Chinese?

Brendan: I’d been sort-of interested in Chinese from a fairly young age — partly because of a general interest in languages, and partly, I guess, because of a family friend who had studied Chinese in university, spent a couple of years teaching in Beijing in the early 80s, and always brought me Chinese-themed presents. And then I turned seven and decided I wanted to be an archaeologist instead, or something, and the interest faded into the background. It reemerged when I was 15 and my parents gave me a copy of Stephen Mitchell’s interpretation (I wouldn’t say “translation,” though I would’ve then) of the Tao Te Ching, and I decided that I’d like to read it in the original.

So I signed up for night classes at the local community college and studied Chinese more or less halfassedly for a couple of years, and then had the chance to spend the summer after high school in a program run by Stanford and Beida. Actually being on the ground in China made the language come alive for me, and if I hadn’t been hooked before, I certainly was afterwards. When I went back to the States, I got drawn in deeper by Chinese literature, and once I started studying Classical Chinese (which is, I maintain, where a lot of the good stuff is), I was pretty much done for.

Instead of going to my second year of college, I took a job teaching English up in Harbin for a year. It was not really the best year of my life — though it was great for my Chinese — and I actually might’ve quit if I hadn’t been accepted as a foreign student at Beida. I moved down to Beijing, fell in love with the city all over again, and the rest is history.

That’s more of a history of my interest in the language than a description of how I motivated myself to learn, I guess, but the driving force all along has just been interest. Chinese is now a much more common subject of study than it was when I was starting out (which was not all that long ago!), and I’m curious to see how that will change things for people. When I began learning Chinese in 1999, it was still kind of the exclusive province of the sad monomaniac; now, it’s a class you can take in high school. (And in elementary school in some cases, though I suspect that the classes are about as useful as all other elementary school language classes in the US.)

I’ve told people, half-jokingly, that learning Chinese as a foreign language is easy — all it takes is about five years of obsessive focus. At the very least, it takes a strong interest — and I encountered Chinese at a time in my life when I had the interest and the drive to follow up on it.

Lost Laowai: How has the Chinese learning landscape changed since you first started learning — what’s better/worse?

Brendan: You can find Chinese-as-a-foreign-language textbooks from the 1800s on Google Books, if you look. A lot of them are great reads — Chinese for Imperialists (Chapter 3: “I said ‘hot water,’ you impudent boy”), Chinese for Missionaries (Chapter 7: “Your beliefs are superstitious nonsense and your grandparents are in hell”), etc. — and if you look at them, you’ll notice that the methods used to teach Chinese really didn’t change much between 1880 and 2000: artificial dialogues, vocabulary lists to be learned by rote, and minimal explanation of grammar. In general, I think Chinese textbooks — then and now — reflect the unspoken (perhaps unrealized) assumption that most students won’t make it past the first semester, so nothing ever gets explained in any kind of adequate way until like the third or fourth year, if people are lucky. Heaven forbid that anyone ever try to save students a bit of time by explaining at the outset that “adjectives” in Chinese are really stative verbs, or that 是 doesn’t mean “to be,” or anything else that would tell them how Chinese is different from English. Sometimes you’ll even hear people come out with ridiculous statements about Chinese not having grammar — while expressing disappointment about their students’ poorly formed Chinese sentences.

This is gradually changing, as Chinese pedagogy is slowly becoming grounded in something other than native speakers’ naive and unexamined assumptions about how their own language works. The general state of things still isn’t great, but it’s getting better, and there seems no longer to be the assumption that anyone studying Chinese is going to commit to it for the next decade or two. There are now even people studying Chinese and other things! It’s not just for prospective sinologists anymore — which is a pretty healthy thing, I think. Over the last few decades, and especially in this past one, there’s been a realization that not everybody studying Chinese is going to want to read Warring States-era philosophy (or that they’ll just read the damn 论语 in translation the same way Chinese people do), and so teaching materials have moved increasingly in the direction of presenting the language with a focus on communication. They’re still not great, of course, but if you put, say, Integrated Chinese next to the old Practical Chinese Reader, you’ll see a huge difference. (Though I do have a massive soft spot for the old PCR. Friends of Gubo and Palanka, represent!)

And then there are Chinese-learning podcasts like Popup Chinese (where I’m one of the hosts, full disclosure!) and ChinesePod (where I know and like a lot of the people). I don’t actually agree with the claims that Chinese-learning podcasts can or should or ever will be able to replace a good classroom environment, but I am kind of an old fart in some respects, and this may be one of them. Taken as supplementary materials, though, they’re great stuff — something that I really wish I’d had when I was starting out. With Popup Chinese, since we’re often addressing a more advanced audience, I try to take the chance to spend a little more time on the mechanics of things — how a certain pattern or sentence structure may work, or some finer points of intonation — just because that’s the sort of thing I always wanted to know more about when I was studying. (And I try to do it without getting boring, which is always tricky.)

The internet has been an absolute godsend for language learners everywhere. Back when I was starting out — which really wasn’t very long ago — if you wanted to watch Chinese TV, you’d have to go to a store in Chinatown and buy a bootleg VCD of the CCTV Chinese New Year Gala to watch at home six months after the fact. If you wanted to read something in Chinese, you’d have to go to the public library and root around through their selection of Chinese books, most of which were Qiong Yao novels or something similarly barf-worthy. The bigger your local Chinatown, the better your selection, of course, but I distinctly recall it sucking even when I went on trips to Manhattan’s Chinatown in 2001. Then again, it’s probably also that I didn’t know what to look for then. And don’t get me started on newspapers. You might have been looking for an idea of what was new and cool in China, but you’d end up getting time-delayed snapshots of lowest-common-denominator, squeaky-clean popular quote-unquote culture — not so different, come to think of it, from what you got in your textbooks.

Even leaving aside — which would be a mistake — the Chinese-learning podcasts out there, there’s such a wealth of content on blogs and Weibo and Renren and Youku nowadays. Say you want to follow the news. Instead of bothering with newspaper coverage (which is written in a dull-as-ditchwater “professional” register that hasn’t changed much in decades), you can scan Weibo for posts about a given topic to get a sense of what people are thinking. When (and I do mean when) you find some new Weibo meme that proves impervious to your dictionaries, you can turn to Baidu Zhidao, where someone will assuredly have asked about it. The Internet, and particularly Web 2.0 sites like Youku and Weibo, disintermediates between students of Chinese and the Chinese language as it’s actually used. It lets you dip your toes into a stream that’s flowing, instead of the algae-covered kiddy pool that we used to be stuck with.

Lost Laowai: Do you believe a single method of learning works best, or would you recommend a multi-pronged attack?

Brendan: People learn in different ways, and have different areas of interest. The foundational stuff — tones, Pinyin, characters — is going to be the same for pretty much everybody (though more on that later), but once people get to a more or less self-sufficient level, they’re going to want to spend more time on the things that interest them — classical Chinese, spoken Chinese, business Chinese, or whatever. The key thing is to recognize that there are two aspects to language ability — input and output — and that being able to deal well with input doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to produce acceptable output. It’s important to address the output side of things as soon and as often as you possibly can.

There are some things you can do at home — character practice, flashcards if you’re into that sort of thing (I’m not), reading and writing practice. But as you can see, they’re mostly very artificial things: for anyone really interested in interaction, you’re going to want to step outside and actually talk to people. This goes for internet nerds too — chatting on QQ only gets you so far. And as John Pasden said in his answers, the thought of structuring my entire study of Chinese around any series of textbooks just makes me want to stick my thumbs into my eyes. Once people have gotten to a level of Chinese where they only need to break out the dictionary once or twice per sentence, it’s time to step outside and get lost in the biomass. That’s easier to do if you’re actually in China, but as I said above, the Internet has made things a lot easier for people stuck elsewhere.

I’d strongly recommend that people pay more attention to Chinese literature and composition. Right now, I’m not aware of any program that pays much in the way of attention to second-language students’ Chinese composition skills (beyond maybe teaching them how to write a resume), which is a real shame. I used to write a blog in Chinese, and I found that it helped me straighten out my understanding of how certain things worked stylistically in written Chinese.

I’ve been lucky. I absorb information through the eyes pretty well, so my learning style worked well with the methods of teaching that were around when I started, which were mostly text-based. That happened to overlap with my main interest, which was (and still mostly is) Chinese literature. At the same time, I’ve been living in China since 2002, so I haven’t been able to follow my natural instincts and just crawl up into books: spoken Chinese is still a part of my everyday life. My spoken Chinese is by far the weakest aspect of my Chinese ability, but because of my environment it hasn’t been able to atrophy too badly.

Lost Laowai: What do you feel as being the most effective tool in learning Chinese?

Brendan: Tool? Dictionary. Go out and get a good one — a good paper one, if you can. Electronic dictionaries are awesome (and I use Wenlin and Pleco all the time, as well as pirated custom Chinese-Chinese dictionaries for the OS X Dictionary.app), but the sheer inconvenience of looking something up in a paper dictionary will make you more likely to remember it. Paper dictionaries aren’t the way to go for work, or for anything where time is really of the essence, but if you’re studying at home, there is still nothing better, in my experience. A pocket dictionary will get you through a conversation or a road trip; the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary will get you through a novel; the 汉语大词典 will get you through just about anything written before 1911 (but probably not all that much written afterwards). Once you’re able to, or maybe even a little before you’re able to, switch to a Chinese-Chinese dictionary for a more accurate picture of the language on its own terms.

Record yourself speaking Chinese. I spent a year back in the US to finish up my college degree, and in order to keep my spoken Chinese from going entirely down the toilet, I started making myself record a one- or two-minute audio diary every night. It was painful — think about how uncomfortable you feel when you hear your own voice in English, and now add in mangled tones and stuttering — but it did a lot for my accent and the overall naturalness of my speech.

If you want to learn how to write characters by hand (something that people are increasingly ignoring these days; I sympathize, but think it’s probably a fool’s economy), get a few 字帖 — the character-tracing workbooks that students here use. They’re a completely mindless way of getting characters into muscle memory; you can even use them when you’re watching TV or something.

Lost Laowai: Where do you think a new learner should start, and is that where you started?

Brendan: The Johns (Pasden and Biesnecker — yes, I cheated by peeking) mention tones and Pinyin, and it’s pretty hard to go wrong with those. I’ve come increasingly to believe that it may actually be a mistake to start learning characters too early on: they subtly reinforce the popular but wrong notion that Chinese is “made of characters,” and by pulling learners’ attention towards the syllables that they represent, they might lead to unnatural pronunciation focusing on syllables rather than words. Then again, maybe not: Pinyin-only instruction is still kind of a new thing, and it’s too early to say whether or not it’ll help learners speak more naturally at the outset.

I think there’s probably something to be said for encountering other ways of romanizing Chinese early on. Not long after I started studying, I found a couple of old Yale textbooks in a second-hand shop. In the Yale romanization, the sound that Pinyin romanizes as “x-” is “sy-” — a less elegant, but slightly more accurate way of representing the sound. (Pro tip: make an ordinary “sh” sound, then put the tip of your tongue behind your bottom teeth.) The Yale textbook also had a good description of how to make the “ü” sound that so often gives native English speakers trouble. (Pro tip: make like you’re going to whistle.)

I often see people online arguing about the relative merits of simplified and traditional characters for learners. The arguments are crap on both sides: simplified characters are probably slightly less inhumane, but otherwise there aren’t that many differences between the two, despite how it may seem at first.

Lost Laowai: What mistakes, if any, did you make when learning that you hope others can avoid?

Brendan: The dirty little secret of Chinese language learning (and instruction!) is that nobody learns the tones right the first time around, unless they’re really unusually gifted. A lot of that is just because tones are weird for those of us who come from languages that don’t use lexical tone; part of it, too, is that existing teaching materials don’t really do a very good job of teaching tones as they’re used in actual speech. (John Pasden’s tone pair drills should be required reference material for anyone writing a Mandarin textbook.)

Oh, man, this is going to sound really discouraging, but: there are some mistakes, like getting the tones wrong the first time, that I think everybody is going to have to make for themselves as part of their study, and then fix for themselves later. The good news is that once you’ve gotten to the point where you can see that you’re doing something wrong, it’s a lot easier to figure out how to do it right.

Lost Laowai: What are some of your favourite resources (online or off) for learning Chinese?

Brendan: After I’d been studying Chinese for about three years, my parents got me Wenlin for Christmas and I started using it to read real-world Chinese texts on my own. It’s no longer the only game in town for Chinese students, but it’s still probably the tool I use most often when I’m working.

Pleco offers the same ABC dictionary (among others) and a whole bunch more goodies (OCR through your camera phone? So this is what the 21st century’s going to be like!) in mobile form. Nciku is a very useful resource for technical terms and English-Chinese (which Wenlin is nearly useless for); Adso is good for helping to make sense of particularly torturous sentences; International Scientific’s online interface to the 说文解字 and to scans of seal, bronze, and oracle forms of characters is hours of fun; Baidu Zhidao, which I mentioned above, is great for any kind of new coinage, meme, or line of film dialogue.

For more from Brendan, check out Bokane.org, and follow him on Twitter. Also, check back next week for more Mandarin Monday.

John surely doesn’t need much introduction for anyone studying Chinese. In China for more than a decade, John’s been mastering the language for most of that time, including securing a masters in applied linguistics in Shanghai. He pens the popular Sinosplice blog, oversees academic content and serves as host at ChinesePod and founded AllSet Learning, a Shanghai-based consulting company that offers highly customized learning solutions for frustrated learners of Mandarin.

Lost Laowai: What was the largest driving force in spurring you to overcome the challenges and actually learn Chinese?

John: Well, I came to China specifically to learn Chinese, so it would have been kind of a shame to go home mission unaccomplished. I also have a stubborn side, and I was shocked and dismayed that no one could understand my Chinese when I first arrived in China after three semesters of university study. But that also strengthened my resolve to overcome the pronunciation hurdle.

Lost Laowai: How has the Chinese learning landscape changed since you first started learning — what’s better/worse?

John: Everything is better! There are better textbooks, numerous podcasts, plenty of videos, tons of blogs, iPhone apps, and desktop software. I came to China with a paper dictionary. That thing was my best friend for my first year in China.

I guess in some ways it’s harder to get started now because there’s so much “noise.” It seems like it was more work 10 years ago, but it definitely felt simpler.

Lost Laowai: Do you believe a single method of learning works best, or would you recommend a multi-pronged attack?

John: Always multi-pronged. It’s not just that different methods are better in different ways, it’s that variety will help keep you interested. I think many learners jump in with a lot of enthusiasm, and they’re prepared for the mental challenge, but they’re really not prepared for being bored out of their minds. I mean, if your plan is to buy the whole New Practical Chinese Reader set of textbooks and just work your way through it, you’re going to have a very tough time. Diversifying your tools and sources of input is a must.

And, of course, don’t forget the “talk to Chinese people” prong. If your desire to speak the language is fueled by a desire to communicate with Chinese people, regular reminders that your hard work is starting to pay off in tiny dividends will do wonders for motivation.

Lost Laowai: What do you feel as being the most effective tool in learning Chinese?

John: Well, I learned Chinese mainly by just going out and talking to people. Every time they said something I didn’t get, I wrote it down and looked it up later and just kept truckin’. This method requires a thick skin and a tireless attitude, but it really pays off… as long as you have a decent dictionary. For me, the dictionary was key.

If you don’t have the environment on your side, then I’d say ChinesePod is a great resource. I’ve been working on the material there for over 5 years, and much of it is the stuff I wish I had when I was learning Chinese.

Above all, you have to find some material that interests you personally, and the tools that help make that material more accessible.

Lost Laowai: Where do you think a new learner should start, and is that where you started?

John: Pinyin and tones. Yes, I started there, but I should have stuck at it a bit longer!

Lost Laowai: What mistakes, if any, did you make when learning that you hope others can avoid?

John: Don’t underestimate the importance of good pronunciation. It was a huge bummer to study Chinese for almost two years, arrive in China expecting to hit the ground running, and then discover that no one could understand me.

Yes, the difference between “q” and “ch” matters. You really do need to learn to pronounce “yu.” Tones aren’t going away, even if you try to just talk really fast. Yes, getting all these right can be painful at times, but once you get them, they really pay off immediately as well as down the road.

Lost Laowai: What are some of your favourite resources (online or off) for learning Chinese?

John: You’re making me feel very self-promotional here, but I work hard to create what I feel is missing. So of course I recommend Sinosplice.com, ChinesePod.com, and the stuff we’re doing at AllSet Learning in Shanghai. My favorite dictionary is Pleco, and Skritter continues to do really cool things around writing practice. Of course the best “resource” ever is Chinese people!

This is the industry I’ve devoted my career to. I’m only 10 years in, and I’m looking forward to some productive years ahead.

For more from John, check out Sinosplice, and follow him on Twitter. Also, check back next week for more Mandarin Monday.

For the third installment in our weekly Mandarin Monday series that discusses Chinese learning we’ve hit up David Flynn. Dave is originally from the UK, he’s been living in Taiwan and learning Mandarin Chinese for the last five years. He founded and runs ChineseHacks.com a blog dedicated to effectively learning Chinese; and co-founded MandarinPoster.com, a handy learning tool for any student of Chinese.

Lost Laowai: What was the largest driving force in spurring you to overcome the challenges and actually learn Chinese?

Dave: The story of how I got started learning Chinese is a strange one, though I think it might be similar to other foreigners who find themselves in Taiwan before they actually decided to start learning Chinese. I came to Taiwan right after graduating from a computer science degree in the UK and at the time I couldn’t write a word of Chinese, and the only Chinese I could actually speak was a few words that I had managed to pick up from the first few lessons of Pimsleur (which didn’t turn out to be much use since it’s heavily oriented for mainland Chinese).

I came to Taiwan because I had met my girlfriend at the time in the UK, she was Taiwanese, and I planned to visit Taiwan for a few months after graduating. Well, two months in Taiwan went by quickly, and I found myself in need of another visa. I did one visa run to Hong Kong before looking for other ways that I might be able to stay in the country, and that’s when I decided to learn Chinese. Learning Chinese in Taiwan you can stay for 3 months, which is the length of one semester, and you can keep extending your visa for the duration of your studies.

I didn’t plan to study Chinese for almost 4 years, it just happened. After I started learning I realised that I actually found it really interesting, and it very quickly changed from being a way to a visa, to becoming one of my main reasons for staying here.

Lost Laowai: How has the Chinese learning landscape changed since you first started learning — what’s better/worse?

Dave: I study Chinese in Kaohsiung, a city in the south of Taiwan. Even though it’s the second largest city in Taiwan, the number of foreigners here is really low. Though, I like it this way. It allows me to immerse myself in my Chinese studies and, with the exception of a few friends who can’t speak Chinese, means I can restrict myself to only using Chinese to communicate.

For the first few years I didn’t really use online resources much, there weren’t that many as I remember. I had briefly used ChinesePod, but after starting classes I found myself using resources that came directly from the teachers and a huge amount of my time out of class was spent drilling characters in those special notebooks that Taiwanese children learn to write characters. It’s for this reason I didn’t pay much attention to what others were doing at the time or at what stage the online learning scene was. Though what I can say is that the amount of people learning Chinese has increased immensely. I was at Kaohsiung airport recently and after buying myself a souvenir Taiwan flag mug the woman commented that all of the foreigners today had spoken excellent Chinese and that soon someone in her position might not need to know English. An exaggeration, I’m sure, but still goes to show that learning Chinese is turning out to be more than a passing fad.

The number of online resources has really increased in the last few years, though. Even since I started ChineseHacks in early 2010, there has been numerous blogs popping up and even social network style Web sites focused solely on learning Chinese.

Lost Laowai: Do you believe a single method of learning works best, or would you recommend a multi-pronged attack?

Dave: I’d have to say multi-pronged, and simply for the reason that no one method is perfect, and not every method suits every person.

It’s difficult for beginners, though, because the last thing you want to do is overwhelm yourself, especially at the start. I’d say that people starting out should just pick a class or an online course for beginners and stick with it to the end. I just mean an introductory course that might cover a phonetic alphabet and then a few basic modules. This way you can get a good idea of what you’re dealing with and have at least a basic understanding of what Chinese is. Then start branching out in other areas and reading around the subject.

One thing to be careful not to do, is to spend a disproportionate amount of time learning one aspect of Chinese. Depending on your goal and where you are learning, one aspect might be more important and valuable than another. For instance, if you are in Taiwan or China, you need to focus on speech and conversation over writing.

Lost Laowai: What do you feel as being the most effective tool in learning Chinese?

Dave: For me it’s got to be books or magazines — something that I can look over, write on, and study anywhere. Though I know it depends on the person. I know some people who like to watch cartoons or movies over and over. I like movies as a way to passively study while relaxing, but for actually studying it’s got to be written material for me.

I always have a pencil in my hand when reading a book. I draw a line between the words so I can clearly see them (this is one drawback of reading Chinese, the words don’t have a space between them like in English). If I come across a language construct then I draw a box around each part of the construct. Then I’ll circle words I don’t know and when words come up a lot in the text I might write them in the margin to come back and review later.

Lost Laowai: Where do you think a new learner should start, and is that where you started?

Dave: First learning a phonetic alphabet is obviously the way to go, and most course are structured this way anyway. Though what I would say is don’t overly focus on the phonetic alphabet itself. From what I’ve heard, courses in the West focus on Pinyin and then the learners only read Pinyin for months before actually reading Chinese characters. In Taiwan we learnt the Zhuyin phonetic alphabet for a couple of weeks while at the same time being introduced to Chinese characters.

My point is that you should expose yourself to Chinese characters as early as possible and in the early stages make sure you at least look at the characters that you are learning the phonetics for.

As I mentioned above, you need to get a solid foundation laid for you to build on. But after you have learnt the basics and have a phonetic alphabet under your belt then I would start looking for learning materials that you are actually interested in. I always think that materials aimed at native speakers are the best, so don’t be afraid to start looking in places other than textbooks for interesting materials to learn.

Lost Laowai: What mistakes, if any, did you make when learning that you hope others can avoid?

Dave: I honestly feel that in the first year or so of Chinese I spent too much time drilling Chinese characters. Though this was through no fault, or choice, of my own. The course that I was enrolled in at the time focused heavily on writing characters, and each week we would have a writing test. Obviously this has value, and I know it’s what the children in Taiwan do, but when you’re an adult learning Chinese you don’t have as much time as a full time student and I really think that this time could have been better spent on other aspects of learning Chinese.

I also used to get quite frustrated at a shop or on the street in Taiwan when someone would refuse to speak Chinese to me. Refuse is a harsh word — it’s more that they wanted to practice English, or didn’t know that I could, or wanted, to speak Chinese. Though in retrospect I can see that it didn’t really matter that much, and compared to places like Hong Kong where you have no idea what language the other person can speak I think Taiwan is a great place to learn Chinese.

I also wish I had started blogging about Chinese earlier. Something that always held me back was that I would constantly think “I’ll just wait until my Chinese is a bit better, then I’ll…”. The problem is that the time never seems to come as you always think your ability could be better, or that other people are better than you so what’s the point. My advice now would be to just start. Writing about the learning process is a great way to solidify and organise your knowledge.

I would even say keep a diary or write a blog in Chinese, so you can use what you are learning while you are acually learning it.

Lost Laowai: What are some of your favourite resources (online or off) for learning Chinese?

Dave: I focus mostly on books, and during the first few years of learning Chinese I used to buy books aimed at children of around 10 to 12 years old. You’re probably imagining me reading a big picture book with huge Chinese characters, but I don’t mean those kinds of children’s books.

In Taiwan there is a biographical series aimed at young adults about famous people and the story of how they came to be who they are today. The only difference between them and an adult book is that the characters have Zhuyin next to them and overly complex words might be omitted out in favour of simpler equivalents. I remember reading the story of how Google was founded, and also a biography of Bill Gates, so next time you are at the book shop don’t rule out the children’s section as there really are some gems in there.

Online I rarely read Web sites that are targetted at learners. What I like to do is read Web sites and online content aimed at native speakers, and I use a selection of Firefox plugins that help me convert web pages into Traditional Chinese (since I learnt Chinese in Taiwan), read words that I don’t know using a pop-up dictionary, or annotate web pages with a glossary of keywords. With these tools^* you can turn any Chinese content into learning material.

I really think that the sooner you start reading and studying content meant for native speakers the better. You’ll find that most textbooks won’t teach you so called ‘real-world’ Chinese and depending on your teacher you might be stuck learning more formal Chinese. I recently heard a Chinese teacher tell a student that they shouldn’t watch TV in Taiwan as there is a lot of slang and it would be bad for their studies. In my opinion, what is the use of of learning a language if you can’t use it like a native speaker? Imagine going to the UK and only learning the “Queen’s English”, you wouldn’t last 5 minutes in most cities.

^* Tools I use to read Chinese online:

• Perapera-kun: Chinese Popup Translator
• 新同文堂 (New Tong Wen Tang)
• MandarinSpot: Annotate

For more from Dave check out ChineseHacks, as well as his personal blog: Tech & Tea. You can also follow him on Twitter. And, of course, check back next week for more Mandarin Monday (I’ll even do my best to get it posted on Monday!).

This week we speak to Kellen Parker, co-founder of Sinoglot, an organisation of Chinese linguistics researchers. Kellen is an American linguistics researcher who’s spent the last few years in Shanghai as a grad student, and currently resides in Seoul where he’s researching Mandarin use among Korea’s overseas Chinese population.

Lost Laowai: What was the largest driving force in spurring you to overcome the challenges and actually learn Chinese?

Kellen: Language is really interesting. I spend a lot of time thinking about it, so I may as well be putting that time to good use. That’s what pushes me to spend the time trying to constantly improve. The initial push, however, was me not wanting to be the jerk who couldn’t communicate with a single soul in the country I chose to live in.

Lost Laowai: How has the Chinese learning landscape changed since you first started learning — what’s better/worse?

Kellen: Pleco’s OCR is the first thing that comes to mind. Actually smart phones in any capacity. I didnt own one for my first three years in China. I finally bought an iPod and everything changed. There are also more specialist type resources available like Carl Gene’s site or the work of my co-contributors on Sinoglot. More learners are producing more insightful commentaries than I was aware of four years ago.

Lost Laowai: Do you believe a single method of learning works best, or would you recommend a multi-pronged attack?

Kellen: Multi-pronged, to an extent. The biggest thing has to be speaking all the time, but people shouldn’t neglect being able to read or understand more complex grammar.

Lost Laowai: What do you feel as being the most effective tool in learning Chinese?

Kellen: Contact with the language. Dictionaries and grammar primers and all that are nice but secondary. Don’t go buying a bunch of books if you’re not going to spend the time to try what you’re learning.

Lost Laowai: Where do you think a new learner should start, and is that where you started?

Kellen: I never took a proper class, and sometimes I wish I would have. It would’ve saved me a lot of time making a lot of simple mistakes.

Lost Laowai: What mistakes, if any, did you make when learning that you hope others can avoid?

Kellen: Not so much a mistake as a pronunciation issue. No one explained ü correctly. Many people explained it incorrectly. It’s not “oo” like many western learners say it and it’s not “ee” like many Koreans say it. It’s somewhere in the middle. Learn r and x and sh and learn them early.

Lost Laowai: What are some of your favourite resources (online or off) for learning Chinese?

Kellen: As mentioned above, Carl Gene’s site is good, and other sites like Chinese Hacks that give some themed post. I used to use nciku a lot for example sentences but the Qingwen iPhone dictionary by Karan Misra replaced that a while back. Jukuu.com and cibo.cn are awesome for sentence construction and obscure vocabulary respectively.

For more from Kellen, and a whole host of posts about Chinese, check out Sinoglot, and follow him on Twitter. Also, check back next week for more Mandarin Monday.

Our first guest in the series is John Biesnecker. John is an American software developer who has been in China since 2003, and has been working on his Mandarin since 2001. He, his wife, and his son live in Shanghai, where he works at ChinesePod.

Lost Laowai: What was the largest driving force in spurring you to overcome the challenges and actually learn Chinese?

John: I think more than anything living here was and continues to be the largest driving force. Lots of second language acquisition experts talk about having a high tolerance for ambiguity as being a good thing for learning a language, and I’m sure they’re right, but I have a very, very low tolerance for ambiguity , and so not understanding pretty much drove me crazy. I’m an avid reader, too, and I couldn’t stand being illiterate. My only choices were to either learn Chinese or go home, and I chose the former.

Lost Laowai: How has the Chinese learning landscape changed since you first started learning — what’s better/worse?

John: There are so many more resources available now than there were when I took my first Chinese class in university in 2001. Pretty much every aspect of learning Chinese has been and continues to be touched by technology, making everything at least a little simpler and more convenient.

I don’t know that anything has gotten worse. In my eyes life as a Chinese learner is much, much easier now than it was a decade ago.

Lost Laowai: Do you believe a single method of learning works best, or would you recommend a multi-pronged attack?

John: I suspect that most everyone has one or a handful of methods that work really well for him/her, but that those methods aren’t the same for everyone. I’d say when you’re first starting you should try out anything and everything, and you’ll likely find yourself slowly settling into a few routines that work for you.

Lost Laowai: What do you feel as being the most effective tool in learning Chinese?

John: Honestly, books (and magazines, and newspapers). Obviously you need all four aspects — speaking, listening, reading, and writing — to really be able to communicate in Chinese, but I think reading trumps in terms of bang for your buck. The sooner you can read, and the more time you spend reading, the better off you’ll be (this is probably true for every language, including your native language). Sure, characters present a rather unique challenge that a lot of other languages don’t have, but they’re not going anywhere, so you might as well just suck it up and start reading.

Lost Laowai: Where do you think a new learner should start, and is that where you started?

John: If I were to do it all over again, I’d really pay attention to the fundamentals — pronunciation and tones, how pinyin works, the radicals, etc. My one semester at university sort of glossed over those and I didn’t pay them much attention, and a couple of years later I had to undo a whole lot of bad habits and learn them right. No sense in doing that to yourself if you don’t have to.

Lost Laowai: What mistakes, if any, did you make when learning that you hope others can avoid?

John: Well, the above, not paying enough attention to the fundamentals. Also, spending too much time trying to figure out the “best” way to learn things, rather than just plowing into them and learning. There are probably cases where a bit of strategic thinking will pay off, but most of the time it’s probably better to just put in the time and get the studying done.

Lost Laowai: What are some of your favourite resources (online or off) for learning Chinese?

John: Pleco is the best Chinese dictionary. I’m biased, but ChinesePod makes some pretty terrific learning material. Beyond that, bookstores and televisions are your friend.

Be sure to check out John’s blog, and follow him on Twitter. Also, check back next week for more Mandarin Monday.