SPEAKER_01

Welcome to the Changing Scripts Podcast. For about 15 years I was teaching the English language both overseas, mostly in Asia and then in the US. And I found it really fascinating the things that the Chinese language users were doing in the classrooms. And I always wanted to get on the other side of that. And when I came back to live in Shanghai, China in 2017, I decided to really, really focus on learning Mandarin Chinese. I have a YouTube channel that follows my process. This podcast is where I'm interviewing people that are learning the language. And I'm also interviewing people that grew up with Mandarin Chinese. This week on Changing Scripts Podcast, I am really excited to welcome Vaughn to the podcast. He's been studying Mandarin Chinese for about five years now. Let's listen to what he has to say. Thank you so much, Vaughn, for joining me on the Changing Scripts Podcast.

SPEAKER_04

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01

Can you tell the listeners a little about yourself?

SPEAKER_04

So I've been studying Mandarin for about five years. It's been quite a journey full of ups and downs, but as I've gone along, I've found new and more interesting reasons to continue studying and to uh get to fluency. It's just been one of the most interesting kind of challenges that I've done in my life so far. It's just kind of like an endless well of information and new ideas and everything. So very fulfilling, and I really, really enjoy it thoroughly.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. And you're based in the US right now, right?

SPEAKER_04

I'm in LA, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Let's backtrack a little bit. I'd like to get people's viewpoints of their beginning languages before we dive into their current ones, which are currently working on Mandarin. What was your first language?

SPEAKER_04

My mother language is English. In high school, I studied Spanish for four years or something, and then in college I took a couple of classes for Spanish. Didn't really get anywhere with it. I know you were a teacher, but um I just never found the academic system to be very good at teaching languages or really just imparting the the interest or passion to learn it. While I did learn a ton of vocabulary, it really didn't go anywhere. Uh recently I was in a Spanish-speaking country and some of it reactivated without studying. That was really cool, but wasn't really able to use it. So there's that. Outside of that, that's that's about it. I've dabbled in other languages here and there, but it's it's mostly just you know, Spanish was before.

SPEAKER_01

Fair enough, fair enough. And don't you worry there's a certain way things are done in academia, and if you book that system, it doesn't go well. I agree. There's something in the language classroom that is just not conducive to language learning.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_01

And I'd love to figure out how to change that or how to promote things outside lots of self-study stuff. But let's dig into that a little bit more. Specifically, let's talk about English. Do you have any memories about learning to read or write or speak or anything like super early on?

SPEAKER_04

There are a couple times where I remember not understanding what a word meant and having to go look it up, or just not understanding what it was for years. That only really became apparent while I was studying Mandarin.

SPEAKER_01

Do you remember what words some of them were?

SPEAKER_04

We're talking about something similar, and he brought up uh the example of to the left. Now, that concept is totally abstract. You can't really point to something and be like to the left. You can point to something and then point to the left of it, but it's still an abstract concept. That's not really something that you think about in your native language, like when you're thinking about learning a language or what kids have to go through, but it's something that you do come across when you're studying a new language. It's something similar, kind of like for Spanish. You know, you're learning the grammar and everything, you're starting to understand specifically what the past tense does and how it's created and the different kind of forms of the past tense, and then you realize, oh wait, we have this in English too, but it only became apparent once you started, you know, setting another language.

SPEAKER_01

I went to school just before they stopped explicitly teaching grammar and having to do like diagramming and stuff, like in the US in the 70s and whatnot. Apparently, just after me is when that explicit instruction stopped. And I hear that's what you're saying from so many people. When especially the English teachers that go overseas and they're like, you know what, in my English training program or my first classroom, they were like frantically looking up titles of verb tenses and things because they're like they knew how to use the language, but they didn't grow up in the educational system, labeling it and knowing how to categorize it.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, that's a good point. I did learn a little bit about uh different things. I I do I remember not understanding what an adjective was as a child. I I couldn't wrap my head around it. There are a lot of things I remember from school that I didn't quite get at the time, and like lately I've been like starting to like understand. Yeah, I mean, like stuff like that. It just it didn't make any sense to me, but over time it improved definitely.

SPEAKER_01

So when they're growing up and learning their first language or first languages, some people tend to really gravitate towards reading, some people really like speaking, some people like writing. Where did you fall in that?

SPEAKER_04

I think I hated it all. Very, very introverted and everything. That that's probably the easiest part for me was talking. I didn't really like reading, but that's mostly because I didn't like academics. Uh like it's too forceful, I think, didn't really cater to my interests, which I mean it's not supposed to, but I never felt motivated. So, you know, like reading Hardy Boys or or Cam Jansen or something like that. I was like, uh, this is not really for me, you know.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, boring.

SPEAKER_04

But yeah, so definitely speaking. And then occasionally I liked writing, very kind of like expansive imagination. Yeah, writing still was kind of boring, mostly because it's just for school, you know.

SPEAKER_01

At your any point in your life, start to read a lot or start to write a lot or start to enjoy those things?

SPEAKER_04

I don't think so. I've been trying to read more, but that this has more to do with like trying to get away from YouTube, try to get away from like, yeah, like this.

SPEAKER_01

Blasphemy, Ron, blasphemy.

SPEAKER_04

Well, every once in a while, you know, I'll watch some YouTube. I don't like so much having to uh be part of like this one more click, one more like scroll down just a little bit more just to see what comes next, you know. So I've been trying to like drive my own entertainment and do something that's more productive. This is kind of sparked by the idea that IQ is linked to reading, and also your ability to use a language is also linked to reading, which I mean they're all kind of tied together. So, you know, I started with reading uh Mandarin. My personal uh uh method of studying Mandarin is through just reading, and it's like from the very beginning, it's just yeah, it's it's like incredibly um laborious, I guess is the word, but it gives you like a massive amount of vocabulary and understanding of the language very quickly. I'm trying to transition that over back to English so that I uh continue to develop there too, because uh I notice that you can lose functionality in one language as you learn another one, or at least temporarily. I don't know how it is like later on, but yeah, like it's important to keep balance, I think.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, no, it's really true. And in language teaching, we I don't know if it's an official term, but we would just call it language erosion because as we were teaching, especially low-level language learners, we weren't necessarily functioning in the local language. Also, we weren't really using our regular home language, what have you, to any normal degree. We we were doing very simple sentences to help teach them the language and things. So we would end up not being able to form full beautiful sentences by the end of the day. We'd be like, uh kind of thing.

SPEAKER_06

Wow.

SPEAKER_01

It's a real thing. I think that's when I started listening to a lot of podcasts and reading a lot online because they didn't have a lot of paper books where I was overseas, but I needed something to go in so I could keep the language alive while I was teaching.

SPEAKER_04

Interesting. That that's gotta be like kind of frightening to be like, I can't remember what that word is anymore.

SPEAKER_01

I did grow up as a reader. I think it was just instinct. As soon as I started to notice it, I was just like, obviously, I just need more content. So I just started grabbing at whatever I could to read that the more commas, the better. The the meatier the vocabulary, the better.

SPEAKER_04

And maybe more like literary kind of novels, or do you really like technical kind of stuff?

SPEAKER_01

Or honestly, it depended on what the internet would let me get a hold of. I read some news stuff. There were some travel writers that had really beautiful, dense, meaty, introspective sentences. So I read a lot of their stuff. I read some autobiographical stuff. I started to listen to podcasts and I tended to lean towards stuff that had presenters that had really colorful, very intense vocabulary because I felt like I was losing some of mine. Yeah, yeah. But it wasn't the only stuff. I was still watching ridiculous videos on YouTube and listening to songs. I mean, I don't want to give the impression that I'm like the super intelligent person that only reads really deep stuff. That's a lie. Cat videos come up into almost every interview I do, no matter what the topic is.

SPEAKER_04

Oh my god. I I mean they're popular, they're cool.

SPEAKER_01

It was like the beginning of YouTube with cat videos, but no, no, I do watch silly videos on YouTube, but for some reason the animal ones are not where I gravitate. Okay, do you have a channel you recommend for silly cat videos?

SPEAKER_03

Uh I there are a couple of videos that I could recommend. I'll have to find them, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Fair enough. I will keep an open mind. I do like cats, I don't know what the deal is. So did you skip over pinion completely then and just go to the hunts of characters?

SPEAKER_04

Oh no, no, no. First of all, I found Chris from forget his last name, but I think he changed his name to learnmandarin.com or something like that. That's his YouTube channel. But he recommended a whole bunch of things. One of those pieces of software was Dem Sum, which is what I used before Pleco. I looked at all these resources, and then I didn't really know where to start. So I try to find somebody that could kind of bridge me into it. And that was Serge Melmick. He has like a whole set of not podcasts, but audio lessons with transcripting. Like he would have some vocabulary, he would say the word, and then he'd have a native speaker say the word. And you know, from lesson to lesson, you'd have like it sounded like a Taiwanese one mainland speaker or something like that. And so, you know, you'd listen to him say it, then you listen to her say it, and then you would say it. So over over time I built up that kind of responsiveness, and then I would look at the thing from trans wherever, actually, I'm not really sure where I got that at first. I did that for a few months, and then I started to realize that there are a lot of homophones and uh homonyms. There are a lot of times when you can get tripped up thinking that one word is another, or the characters are reverse.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

It's a different word. And so I started realizing I'm not getting enough information from just reading the romanization, not getting enough information from just listening. It's just a soup, muddy soup. So I started looking at the characters first, simplified, and then over time I was curious, I like wonder what the traditional ones look like. Yeah. And I I kind of like through reading traditional characters, I saw there's more information there, and it was just kind of helpful to be able to like understand the way that characters were simplified and everything, and yeah, it just started creating all these other connections.

SPEAKER_01

Jim Sounds like a good online dictionary or an app, or it's like a PC application. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I I was using that first, it was good, but it's so cumbersome. Full idea for dictionaries and stuff, get as fast of a lookup as possible. The amount of times I look up a word in a reading session or something, like it's crazy. I remember the first day I started studying, the first page I read, it took me three hours to read maybe a five-sentence paragraph. And like my brain was on fire from from uh eventually finding Pleco like is way better because you can go so much faster, and then learning how to handwrite in Pleco, it's like even faster.

SPEAKER_01

I love that feature so much.

SPEAKER_04

Did you ever use the um the photo?

SPEAKER_01

I do, but I actually find it faster if I write it.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Although I have a slight gripe with them that they still consider the stroke order important, because if it looks the same, I'm still on the page of it should be recognized. But I still think just it's so easy because if you don't know how it sounds, yeah, you just don't know where to start. So I just start drawing it in and poof, there it is, and I'm like, that's crazy.

SPEAKER_04

How do uh deaf people in China actually learn the language? Like there's so many characters and everything. I can't imagine trying to understand characters without the sounds.

SPEAKER_01

That's a really good point. Okay, I'm gonna research that. I've seen Braille in China. I'm not sure if it's like an international version or a different languages version, or do they have their own version? But I have seen it. I've probably taken pictures of it, and it doesn't look like the characters, it looks just like the dots of other brailles that I've seen.

SPEAKER_04

That's definitely something to look up because unless I'm like very intimate with the character, like I really understand it, yeah, then I subvocalize. And like that's the only way that I can understand it. Like I can I can see it and try to like split myself from it, but like it the comprehension doesn't work so well because it kind of connects.

SPEAKER_01

I have a new YouTube channel called Tube to Pod, and what I want to do in this channel is have micro videos of people answering three questions about podcasts. My goal for this channel is to bridge people from YouTube over to podcasts, not to replace their YouTube viewing, but to supplement it with podcasts. A lot of people apparently still are not listening to podcasts, still are unaware of what they are, what they can do with them, what they can learn from them, that kind of thing. So the three questions are one, where do you listen to podcasts? Two, why do you listen to podcasts? And three, what is your favorite podcast at the moment? Now, if you're interested in participating in this, you can either post a video under two minutes on Instagram with the hashtag tube to pod t-u-b-e-t-o-p-o-d. Or you can email me your video and I'll post it on the YouTube channel. If you put it on Instagram, I'll record it, copy it over onto the channel. If you send it to me via email, I'll post it over onto the channel. And if you are more tech savvy than clearly I am, and you know a better way how to get other people's videos onto YouTube, please let me know. Because right now I'm doing a copy and paste kind of thing. So I really look forward to your participation in that. Again, it's under two minutes, it's three questions, it's super easy. I want to expose people on YouTube to another audio experience that I think they would really, really enjoy to spread the joy of podcasts. I think there's a lot of specific niche content out there that can teach us a lot about the world and a lot about the things we're already interested in in moments of the day when we're not doing anything else with our brains. So yeah, it's a push to people to learn more about the things that they're already interested in or learn about things that they don't even know exist yet. Anyway, tube to pod. I'll also put the link to the new channel in the show notes. You mentioned Taiwan and you've been studying Chinese for a while. Have you been to any place that uses it as their main language?

SPEAKER_04

I was in China in 2008, right before the Olympics. Um and I knew some words. I grew up around the language, I never spoke any of it. Gained like a kind of passive understanding of a few words, but I didn't really understand them, and I definitely couldn't pronounce them. So I mean I I had some limited words that I could say when I was there. And and of course, like you always pick up stuff when you go and you're in a country. So just for a couple weeks in 2008.

SPEAKER_01

And you were up in Beijing for the games?

SPEAKER_04

And you know, it was just kind of an experience because they had people from uh all over the US and actually all over all over the world come and join to home school.

SPEAKER_01

Now you mentioned you grew up with the language around you. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_04

So I I practiced uh martial arts uh uh yeah, and uh my coach was from Beijing. You know, she would talk to other people in it, and I I hear it a lot. You know, having having characters on shirts and stuff like that, like you see it, like you're exposed to it. But I mean, it's complex language, it did help to kind of like spark interest in learning it. Like you're around it, you see it, and you're like, you don't know what it is, and then someday like it just dawns on you, like, oh yeah, like I could just learn that if I wanted to.

SPEAKER_01

So you started learning Mandarin Chinese after your schooling?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

What sparked that interest?

SPEAKER_04

I used to do this thing called uh tricking, and it's like martial arts uh that got turned into acrobatics that kind of combined with gymnastics. So I was doing that for a while, and I would follow people on YouTube and like watch their videos, and came across this guy, he's Danish, I think his name is Victor, but he would post videos about tricking, and then occasionally he would post videos about Japanese, and he would do like these these language lessons for Japanese in English. Like, oh that's really cool. So I would I would like look at those you know from time to time and be like, oh no, this is really cool, like it's easy and it's it's kind of fun. And I asked him, I was like, wait a second, so you're you're teaching Japanese in English, and English isn't your first language either. Like he's like, Oh no, no, this is my second language, Japanese third. And I was like, oh my god, well, he was showing like how he was learning Japanese. He showed like he went to Japan and how he had worked there for like one or two months as on the grocery store and how he's communicating with people, he was on TV, you know, spoke it, he spoke it really well, he spoke English really well. Yeah, I just kind of was like fascinated by that. It seems like he had learned Japanese the same way he had learned how to trick, which was you know, a lot of self-study and dedication. Oh, this is actually possible. Like somebody can actually do that. Because at that point, I was about six years into my tricking career, so like I had gone from total scratch to like had built up a certain amount of skill in that, and I I'd seen something that should have been impossible or people feel like is impossible be very possible for me. So it's like this can definitely happen for something else. So gave it a try.

SPEAKER_01

And you're still doing that now.

SPEAKER_04

I do it off and on. I mean, I've kind of gotten my fill from it. It's been about 10 years, so I've kind of done everything that I wanted to do in it. There's a lot further I could go, but muscle not as young as I used to be. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Let's play with the comparison between learning Spanish and learning Chinese.

SPEAKER_04

Are there any comparisons on how you learn them or the languages themselves or the one that I always bring up to people that like don't study language is the the amount of effort you have to put in. Now, for the first pretty much four years I studied Mandarin, I never thought it was hard. For me, like in my opinion, it was like an exercise in diligence and patience. It's not really challenging in that it it's hard to understand. You just need to take your time and learn every day, you know, study some. But the the comparison I give them is Spanish, you can study for four months to a year. You study, I don't know, somewhere between two hours and eight hours a day. You'll attain some ability to speak to people, to write, to read, to be like you'll be actually somewhat uh good at the language, you can use it. Chinese though, I studied for at least six hours a day for a while. And I, you know, I would take breaks. Obviously, I'd do like two weeks on, and you know, I would get burned, and I would break something off and I'd do it again. I couldn't say anything, I can't still couldn't read anything, I couldn't, I could barely listen to anything, I couldn't understand anything. It was ridiculous to me because you know at that point I was still understanding what a word was in Chinese. I didn't understand that character is not a word, I didn't understand how many characters formed a word, or I didn't understand what uh different grammar particles were and what they did. I was still trying to grasp things like or like uh other some other basic ones like uh or or lo. And I'm still having trouble with those, to be honest. They have so many different meanings, they have so many different instances of of their uses, and it's just all of that combined just makes it so much different from learning Spanish. I feel like now that I'm five years in, I'm finally getting to that point where I was with Spanish. Because I'm finally getting to the point where I can look at a news article or I can look at a book and I can read it without the dictionary and get a gist of it. I still need a dictionary, I still have to look up dozens of words all the time or hundreds of words in a serious session, but it it's taken this much time and effort to get to that point where I can like just kind of like absorb it more casually.

SPEAKER_01

I'm actually really relieved to hear you say all of this because there's a lot of people that do intensive classes and immerse themselves in the environment and claim that like six months to a year and they're fluent. And I hear them talking, but I can't gauge if they are or not, or if people are just being kind and responding in some way to them. So I've heard a lot of people do that stuff. And so I'm like, I don't know, a year and a half in, and I'm finally able to read very graded text. Like we're talking HSK3 text, I can read, mostly looking up some stuff, but I don't really understand a lot of what I'm reading yet, but I can finally read without the pinion and like entire sentence or two, an entire six-sentence conversation. And that's only happened in the past few weeks. And I'm like, okay, I'm excited that I can now sound like a buffoon when I'm reading out this thing that that's there, but I still don't understand what it means yet. So I guess that'll come at some point in the future, but this is a stepping stone. Like when I learned Spanish, and I never got very high up with Spanish, but when I learned Spanish, the reading and the comprehension seemed to come pretty hand in hand. The script was very similar, a lot of the words were very similar, the intonation and the sound seemed very similar. So it didn't feel like a lot of meaning was lost, and that's not true for me.

SPEAKER_04

Wow, well yeah. I commented on one of your videos recently, it seems like you made a lot of progress all of a sudden. You've broken through like that plateau, and like all of a sudden I've got all these other things I I know how to do now. Like it stuff just all of a sudden just clicks and it makes sense. Yeah. I was really happy to see that because I I remember that.

SPEAKER_01

It takes so much time though, because I I'm not doing six hours a day, I'm doing like under two hours a day. But it's like you said, five, six days a week, seven days a week sometimes, and like really pushing and making sure that you're doing it all the time and not missing too many days in a row. And it's just it's almost a challenge because it seems so unobtainable. It's almost like I'm feeling myself pushing more than any other language that I've tried to learn before.

SPEAKER_04

You know about what is it? It's not it's not a learning curve, but like it's supposed to be like in the first like 20 hours of learning a skill, put in a small amount of time and you get a large amount of benefit from it. I feel like for learning Mandarin as an English speaker, it's like you'll be in that phase for a year.

SPEAKER_01

Like yes!

SPEAKER_04

Like it's not just those 20 hours, or it's not just a couple months, you'll be there for a long time.

SPEAKER_01

A man from the UK who has learned to speak, read, and he's reading science fiction in Chinese within two years, which I think is just crazy. But he also spent a lot of time, and I think he was dating locally and things like that that you know give you more exposure, those kinds of things. Not to excuse it, because he seems very good at learning languages. He was saying that with some languages, it's very easy at the beginning, and then it gets really hard when you get to the finer grammar points. And he said that Mandarin's the opposite, where it's really hard at the beginning, and then when you reach a certain point, you start recognizing, even if you don't know the word, you can probably read parts of it. There are like sound components and things that can help you, and the grammar is still the same because that doesn't vary that much, and da-da-da-da. So it's like the hardest part is the first few years, and then it gets a lot easier. But that was his theory.

SPEAKER_04

I agree with that, with one exception. I think that it gets harder again towards the the top level.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_04

I haven't gotten there yet, but like I don't know if you try to watch like a movie or something like that and like look at all the subtitles and like pause and like, but sometimes the grammar, dude, like this is not the same grammar I was just ago. Like, what happened? But it's it's because as far as I know, like there's a literary language, there's like there are other languages or quote unquote languages, but but it just gets crazy like that. Or then if you go into their classical language, it's like it's totally different.

SPEAKER_01

It's funny because I was interviewing this gentleman from my PhD program. He grew up in China and now he's in the US doing his PhD. And he was saying in China, they start with those literary references, first and second grade, they're reading like poems and literary pieces. And so they're getting those bits of language that are used later on in everything, even in newspapers, people are saying, right? So he's like they're getting them like in first and second grade, and then the whole way through, but they're starting that early.

SPEAKER_06

Wow.

SPEAKER_01

Right? And I've heard people complain about this, like, oh, I thought I knew the language, and then all of this happened.

SPEAKER_04

You ever wonder if like we learn it backwards? Our way of studying a language is to deconstruct it and then like rationalize it, but the way that you learn it as a native is is different. Maybe maybe we should be going about it the same way they do.

SPEAKER_01

Maybe, because then you wouldn't have to learn that stuff, which is commonly used later on when you think that you've already learned so much. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. And uh maybe, maybe problems with fluency or like the correct way to phrase something, like the phraseology, wouldn't be so like different.

SPEAKER_01

And I asked him, I was like, Well, okay, you guys were in first and second grade. Do you feel like you and your classmates understood what you were reading? And he's like, Of course we did. And I'm like, Oh, okay, never mind. I'm thinking of like eight-year-olds in the US and the intense stuff we didn't read at that age. Well, we did read the Declaration of Independence or at least part of it.

SPEAKER_04

That was is that even a comparison though?

SPEAKER_01

Like, no, I don't think so.

SPEAKER_04

Would this they're classical Chinese? Would that be compared to like Middle English or like old English?

SPEAKER_01

Maybe. I had somebody else compare it to Shakespeare, which does take some time to get used to. Like that's one author with that way of writing, I suppose. I don't know. I don't know enough Chinese to know this yet. I'm just kind of getting it first your mouth in English into I'm collecting information. But I was floored by how early they started that. And they had to memorize it and recite it, they had to write it to do their writing practice, and I'm just like, whoa.

SPEAKER_04

That's amazing. Like I can't imagine it because it's just like it's totally different from what you hear on the street, you know, or or anywhere.

SPEAKER_01

Like we would we quote Shakespeare every now and then, sometimes jokingly, sometimes not.

SPEAKER_06

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, we have literary references throughout English too. Because we grew up with it, we don't think about it until somebody says, hey, what does that mean? So but that's not taught in English language textbooks either. Language teaching in general ignores reality for a very long time. Crazy. Second grade. What was the hardest thing you read in second grade?

SPEAKER_04

I don't even remember second grade. Um blocked out most of my schooling experience.

SPEAKER_01

I just remember the Declaration of Independence because it's just when we moved from New York to Pennsylvania. And so I was like super conscious about standing in front of my new classmate reciting it. But if it wasn't for that, I don't think I would have even remembered that.

SPEAKER_04

Maybe it was like learning the American kind of things. I do remember I missed the day that we learned the uh Star Spangled Banner. I came back the next day, everybody was singing it, and what are the words of this song?

SPEAKER_01

Oh yeah. That's funny. They spent only one day on the national anthem.

SPEAKER_04

I don't know why. I don't know. I don't ask questions about that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, oh hey, I was I was not an active participant in most of my schooling until I got to the last part of my bachelor's. I really, really disliked my primary and secondary school experience in the US. Yeah, K through 12 was like, can it be over now, please? If you're enjoying this conversation about the Chinese language and would like to participate if you're studying in the Chinese language or if you come from the Chinese language and have learned other languages, either perspective is greatly actually both perspectives are greatly appreciated on this channel. Let's have a conversation. Let's take that sucker and let's get it into this podcast. And let's adapt the details on how to get you and your valuable language learning experiences onto this podcast. All of my information is in the show notes. Also, all over social media except Facebook. I am Steph Fuccio S-T-P-H-F-U-C-C-I-O. That includes Gmail for my email, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and LinkedIn. So I look forward to hearing from you. You've started and stopped calling character words and words characters, and I find that this happens so often when I talk about Mandarin Chinese. When you're talking about learning this to anybody that isn't learning it, how do you describe to them how confusing characters and words are?

SPEAKER_04

Um I I say uh terms now. I use the word terms.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, instead of either one of them.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, because I mean, even technically in English, what really is a word? I mean, like we separate things out with spaces, so that's what we call a word, but you know, it gets confused sometimes. Like, I mean, I'm sure you you obviously don't know this, but like each other, like that's that's one word, or is it two words?

SPEAKER_01

You know, it's like I thought it was two, but I'm beginning to question it now.

SPEAKER_04

Or or you know, myself, you know, is that one word or is that two words?

SPEAKER_01

Well, that one's well, yeah, going by spaces, it's one.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, you know, and if you think about like German or something like that, you know, how they concatenate like words together, so it becomes a lot of longer word, you know. It's like really what is a word? In my opinion, a word is an idea, like it expresses one basic idea.

SPEAKER_01

So would you call collocations like get up, go to sleep, those kinds of things? Would you call like each one of those a term?

SPEAKER_04

So I those those move on into phrases, I would say, but like just slightly smaller than that is a is a term or a word, and and I think that's that's what's more important. So um when I when I describe what Mandarin is like to people that don't study languages or or study Mandarin in particular, I I say like, oh well, you know, imagine imagine you were learning English by syllables. Like, what would that be like? You know, oh man, you know, I learned today I learned like 30 new syllables. I'm like, okay, that's great, but like what does that actually mean? Like what have you what have you actually done? It's like you haven't really done anything. Like sometimes a syllable is one word, right? You know, stuff like that, you know. But like, um, but yeah, like again, you say like yourself. It's like, uh, yeah, I mean you got two syllables there, but like that's not two different, that's not really not two different words. Like, that's that's like the one idea right there. Yeah, it takes a time to like put those together. And Mandarin, I I would express it as which is like word language, like term, which means term, you know.

SPEAKER_01

I gotcha. No, that makes a lot of sense. We have syllables in English, we sometimes teach syllables, we understand what syllables are to a point, but Chinese is much more syllabic than English is. We have a lot of loan words and things like that that don't like we don't have the specific pattern to English, like Mandarin does. And yet spacing and words and the sentences with only punctuation generally at the ends is very confusing at the beginning, I think. What was the biggest thing that was hard for you when you first started?

SPEAKER_04

This might not be kind of like in the direction you're looking for, but it's like getting in the habit. The the way that I do like new skills or new information is like I won't tell anybody about it. So I can promise myself that I can do it for a month, at least a month straight. So it's just really hard because of that that that brain burn or whatever it is, like I've never experienced that before, like ever. Uh this is the I think there's only been uh one other thing now that I've I've gotten like this, but I mean this is just recently, this is after studying memory, but like that that that serious like headache you get after like trying to decipher what things mean for a song. And so like because of that, like I it was just really hard to commit. Like it becomes like, and that's that's why I have to take those like those breaks after like two two-ish weeks.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

I can't manage to think about studying, like it's it's almost physically painful to feel like, oh, I gotta do this again. It's like, oh my god. So so I would I hate doing that, but like I forced myself for a month, and then after that it became easy.

SPEAKER_01

That sounds like a natural rhythm, but you keep coming back to it, and that's the important part.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

What do you do to make sure you keep coming back to it? Do you have any sort of like time frame where you say I'm gonna take this much time off and then I'll come back?

SPEAKER_04

I've gotten clever on my my ways of studying. So a couple months in, say six to eight months in, I switched my phone to Chinese. And then shortly after I switch my browsers on my PC to Chinese. And I started subscribing to a ton of Chinese channels and everything. So if I didn't want to look at it, like I will always be forced to look at it. And then so I still get burned out. But what ends up happening is at the end of the burnout period, basically what that what I've deciphered that means is that I've processed the information and now I'm like open to receiving more information. So I'll become curious again and I'll see the words, I won't know what it means, and I'll be like curious to look it up. That's when it happens. That's when I know I can go back in. And it just happens organically.

SPEAKER_01

How long is it usually when that happens, like a few weeks?

SPEAKER_04

Um, yeah, it's it's usually a couple weeks, but you know, it can be longer because of work. I like to learn a lot of different things at once. I can only balance like certain kinds of things, one like kind of academic thing, one like kind of physical thing. So basically that that's that's all I can do is uh I have one of those each of those slots filled up, and then like over time, like I can just return to it. Felt that the burn yet like this.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, yet from the beginning. Well, I did do a lot more games and apps and learning about the language for the first few months, but ever since I switched over to words, and especially when I started to read with the characters without the pinion. Oh, the burn's been real. The burn's been real. And I I do do physical flashcards because I didn't find that the um the digital ones didn't quite stick. I don't know if it was the process of writing them or what have you, but I will literally just stare at the flashcard and wait for it to hit me. And the burn happens a lot of times then. When I get to the point where I start to recognize it, but I can't remember it, it it's a little painful. And by the time I get to the fourth deck that I'm reviewing that day, I'm like, ah. But I well, there's only nine in a deck, so I mean it's not that impressive.

SPEAKER_04

No, I mean it is it is what it is, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, but it no, it the burn the burn is there, but I feel like the burn's what happens just before it hits or it sticks. Do you know what I mean? Like it feels like the burn is the ki precursor to the muscle changing for good. At least that's what I want to believe, because it it hits often.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, no, that's that's that's really cool. Like, I I've that is one of the things I've been most interested in your process is is that you decide to stick with a lightener box. And uh I I really just want to see how this progresses. Uh like like I said, like there they're not that there are not many other people that I've found that sell your language. Either they're like the pros, like the polygoths and stuff like that, or like they're people that are just now beginning or something like that. So I'm like, I saw you posting videos like holy crap, like I get to like actually who's like actually developing and doing this and is passionate about it. So like every time you post a video about like a new like plateau or progress, I'm like, I'm stoked because it's it's that's so cool.

SPEAKER_01

It's so funny because I was looking for five-minute language videos when I first started, and that's what got me on YouTube looking for that. I usually just use YouTube for videos, maybe interviews. I don't know. I didn't use it for a lot of things, and so I was looking for the grammar videos and I stumbled across my first YouTube language blogger, and then one led to another, led to another, and the algorithm got me and sucked me in and pulled me in, and I started watching a bunch of different people doing this, and I was like, oh, wait a minute. There's a way to track my progress because I have a habit of or I had a habit of starting languages and just kind of petering out, and I was like, if I'm visible visibly accountable, then maybe that'll be part of you know the process to pressure me to keep going.

SPEAKER_06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So it was a bunch of different folks talking about the languages they were learning and showing their methods. Oh my God, it was so cool to watch other people study languages because I've only seen my students do that in the classroom. I'd like I've never actually hung out with like in a study group watching other people study languages, and I was like, oh, how is this done? How are you doing this? So crazy, so crazy. Are you an Instagram person?

SPEAKER_04

Not really.

SPEAKER_01

There's a hashtag called studygram, and it literally is pictures of what people are studying. They'll take pictures of their highlighters, their study material, their textbook, like all these different things.

SPEAKER_04

Okay, I want to look this up then.

SPEAKER_01

Really bad. I first I first saw it, like somebody recommended it to me, and I'm like, I don't know, I'll check it out. And like after the first day, I'm like, this is my tribe. You sound like a lifelong learner. You like to learn new things, right?

SPEAKER_06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And that's what these guys are doing. Only they're showing you what they're working on, and it's like, that's so cool.

SPEAKER_04

So nerdy, so awesome.

SPEAKER_01

So awesome. Yeah, well, I've met, I'm sure you've met a number of people outside of an academic setting and even in who don't really aren't really curious about a lot of stuff and just want to make some money or just have a happy life and all that kind of stuff. And that's not how my brain functions. I need new, I need to be challenged, and yeah. Yes. And then that hashtag CityGram. They're those folks.

SPEAKER_04

Right now, yeah, I'll check it out. That sounds freaking awesome.

SPEAKER_01

It really is. Okay, there's a little, a little too much highlighters, but get past it. The other stuff is very cool. From one of the local women in Shanghai that I interviewed about her learning languages outside of Mandarin, she wanted to know what language people dreamt in.

SPEAKER_04

Normally, I uh I don't really think about that, I guess. I I guess I would say I dream in English. There have been some times where I think I'm dreaming in in Mandarin. Uh maybe two or three times that's happened, but uh I would relate it to what happens when you read a novel. You don't really read the words, you you experience the story.

SPEAKER_01

So you're not thinking about what language things are happening in, you're just experiencing things.

SPEAKER_04

I'm working on my output now. Like I've totally neglected output the entire time. I'm just now starting it. When I'm listening to people, or when I start feeling like I'm I'm able to communicate in the language, like in small sections, I'm not speaking the language, I'm speaking the story of what I want to say, and it just happens to be coming through that filter.

SPEAKER_01

The only other question is what should I ask other people that I interview in the future? Because I'm I'm interviewing two sets of folks, folks learning and then using the language, like you and I learning and using. And then I'm also interviewing Chinese folks who learn other languages. And so for either set of folks, what should I ask them?

SPEAKER_04

Being from an IT background, I've seen a lot of developments in the past couple years, um, mostly pertaining to AI, artificial intelligence, right? One of the things that's coming up is natural language processing. Well, is that that new product which I'm forgetting the name of that uh Google just showcased? It's in its beta form. It's the one that that allows an AI to talk to restaurants or something, to call restaurants and have a conversation that sounds like a human is.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_04

Things like that coming out and going to be happening very soon. Do you still find a point in learning a language?

SPEAKER_01

That's a good one. Thank you. Well, okay, do you want to answer your own question?

SPEAKER_04

I will answer it for from my perspective. Yes. I will still learn it. Still learn languages because of the challenge. You know, it may not be the most efficient way to communicate. Computers may do it better. I mean, we still have to always communicate with our own voices, obviously, but despite the fact that the language learning process could be totally upended and replaced by robots, I still would find a lot of value in it. Same as learning any other skill from my own enrichment. You know, what about you?

SPEAKER_01

It's a tough one. I don't this does not come easily at all. There are skills that I find writing is super easy for me. I'm not saying write writing eloquently or amazingly or whatever, but writing the process of writing, what to write, how to write, editing, I find that entire process super easy. If anything, I overwrite. So and I know that a lot of people struggle with that. On the opposite side, learning languages is one of the hardest things my brain tries to do. If there was a chip that I could put into my brain to learn a language, I wouldn't want just the words. If I could put the chip in my brain and see that point of view from the languages that use that language, then I would want the chip. If the chip was only the language without the point of view, without the cultural stuff that goes with it, then I think I'd still want to learn the language.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I get it.

SPEAKER_01

The most interesting part for me, in addition to just the script of Mandarin Chinese, is the viewpoint that goes with it that I hope I can understand at some point in the next 12 years, is the different ways to view things in the world. That's really what I want.

SPEAKER_04

What do you what do you think causes that that viewpoint um gives that to you?

SPEAKER_01

With different cultures, you mean?

SPEAKER_04

With learning a language, getting a new perspective on the world. What do you think it is that actually facilities?

SPEAKER_01

Oh, I I mean the viewpoint of the the people that use the language I'm trying to learn. Oh, part of the appeal with Chinese is that there's a lot of things that seriously confuse me with Chinese culture. And as I learn the language, are those going to start making sense?

SPEAKER_06

Oh, I see.

SPEAKER_01

And so it's sort of like a cultural puzzle in addition to a linguistic puzzle. And they may or may not, but that is to be seen.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. So I think if that were taken away from the experience and it was just communication with just words that meant a word was an intention and it something happened and that was it, then I'd say, forget it, technology can do everything. I'll go do something else.

SPEAKER_04

Interesting. I mean, I think that's a pretty practical and reasonable answer.

SPEAKER_01

Although I don't think any of this is going to happen in my lifetime.

SPEAKER_02

No, you don't think so?

SPEAKER_01

No, there's there's so much behind AI and machine learning that's really clunky right now. And they're they're testing out stuff, but they don't really know what's happening. And with natural language processing, my God, that's a whole other conversation. learned to use Python in order to do natural language processing and it was not the beautiful creature that I wanted it to be. Yeah, yeah. I had high hopes. It's it could still turn into something really amazing. It's just not there yet and I'm an impatient person.

SPEAKER_04

Is this is this the the app that you were talking about?

SPEAKER_01

Oh no no no this is the PhD program we were in we had to learn Python to use. And I'm not remembering the natural language processing stuff. But there was there was all this all these packages and all these things we needed to do. And so the first class was Python, the second class was just natural language processing. We had a variety of different projects to work on in that and I eventually wanted to lead that into helping folks with writing fluency but it's just so freaking clunky. A lot of the language apps right now seem to be made from people in tech that don't know or don't want to know about the language learning side. And then you have the language learning teachers or creators of paper content who seem to be allergic to technology and the two folks are not really getting together very well. You haven't given up have you um I think I've moved over to the motivational side to be honest with you. This is the part where I was supposed to play the clip from uh from Star Wars no you were the chosen one I would not run from a situation where I could use my language learning teaching expertise with this much technology stuff that I know I wouldn't run from a situation but I think there's a space for motivation in language learning as well which could still be app driven but it would need to connect people to people not just be automated. Like I've got some great ideas I just have very little patience to sit down and code the damn things into existence. Fair enough yeah at some point I need to find somebody who has the technical expertise and not the ideas so I can put the ideas with their technical expertise and poof.

SPEAKER_04

Wow have a lovely thing yeah I say I say this in my late 40s as if I've got like 50 hundred years left in my life right well you know that's that's the great thing about ideas and and everything is that well while it might feel like it will take forever like it doesn't it just takes the right stuff at the right time and then it can just like that and you'll be like already there.

SPEAKER_01

For sure for sure for sure and like I said I'm not closed off to any opportunities. If anything I'm putting myself all over the friggin' internet I'm much more comfortable with the audio version like what this is going to turn into but the characters were the thing that drew me in this time and I had to give them a life in a visual sense which is why I ended up going with the YouTube channel for that. If it wasn't for that that would have been a non-visual thing. But they're so cool and here in Shanghai there's just tons of characters everywhere just giant sized and small sized stylistic size they're just they're just so cool looking crazy.

SPEAKER_06

Oh yeah for sure.

SPEAKER_01

So thank you so much Bon for joining us today on Changing Scripts Podcast. Well thanks for having me it's been a blast thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Changing Scripts Podcast. Again if you are learning the Chinese language or if you're coming from the Chinese language learning another language I'd love to interview you for this podcast. Go ahead and contact me and we will hash out how to get you on the sound creation known as the Changing Scripts podcast.

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