Welcome to the Changing Description Podcast. Every Sunday we'll have one or two types of episodes, all of them revolving around learning and using Mandarin Chinese. One type of episode will be my update on what I'm learning, how I'm learning it, the different quarters within the language, and sometimes information about China itself is in I am living in Shanghai, China, right now. The second type of episode where I'm interviewing people that are either learning the language like I am, or people who grew up with Mandarin Chinese and have learned other languages. The updates used to be on a YouTube channel, but have now migrated over into the podcast only. The interviews started on the YouTube channel as well, and they very quickly ended up on the podcast. So everything's been kind of going back and forth. But I think this is where we need to be. I think we need to be in your ears. I really, really do. Now having said that, the podcast is also available to listen or audit YouTube channel, which I don't know that I you can find the link to the YouTube channel there. Just an audio form. If you are studying Mandarin Chinese, have studied Mandarin Chinese at all, whether it be as a child, as an adult, or you're currently studying or you're currently using the language, I would love to interview you. So please contact me. Also, I am happy to announce that we now have an Amazon affiliate account. What does that mean to you? It means that you can support the podcast without actually spending any extra money in the show notes or on my Weebly account. You'll notice that there's an Amazon button. Click on that, and that'll bring you to my very personal podcasting affiliate account with Amazon. Here's how it works. You just click on that link shop normally pay, get your items, be happy, and I'll get a tiny percentage of whatever you ordered. You do not pay anything extra. You also don't get a discount button. You get to support the podcast without doing anything super specially different. I greatly appreciate your support. I have one fancy new microphone, but I could use a second for my guests, and my computer is very quickly dying. There's a lot of podcasting conferences, to be honest with you, and I'd love to be able to go to. But since this is a passion project, I kind of need some help with that. So that's what we're doing. I'm setting up some affiliate accounts, and hopefully getting some sponsors, and hopefully we can make the podcast even better with each other passing season. Having said that, there's a few ways that you can read that about what you hear in these two types of episodes. In any given episode, actually. If you go back to that Weebly website that I mentioned earlier, Fujo.weebly.com, go to the contact page and you will see a bright orange button. That's where you can send me a voice message. Thanks for the speaker. I love this service. You can leave me a voice message for free, and I can even reply in the voice message where I'm back to you. Let me know what you like, what you don't like, questions you have about the episode, life in general in China, learning Mandarin Chinese, anything that you're curious about related to what we're talking about on this podcast. Thank you very much for the supporting the podcast in any way you can. And I look forward to your feedback. And again, if you know anybody learning Mandarin Chinese or interested in Chinese culture, especially modern Chinese culture, please do pass on the podcast. These kinds of podcasts are passion projects. They're created from a place of deep interest, and they need to find other people that have those interests. And the best way to do that is word of mouth. So you can go fill out an Apple Podcast review if you really want to. But honestly, I'd much rather you tell a few of your friends about this podcast, especially if you know that they share this similar interest. Thank you so much, and let's dive into the episode. Alright, well, thank you so much for joining me today for this conversation. In, can you quickly introduce yourself?
SPEAKER_01Hi, my name's Ian. I'm from the UK, from Northern England, and I've been living in China altogether for nine years. I currently work in language testing, and I started learning Chinese a few years before I came to China on a sort of uh very ad hoc basis.
SPEAKER_04Alright. Before we dip into the learning of Chinese, I would like to dip into your language background as a whole. Let's dig back from whatever you can remember from your childhood about what was your first language? Let me just say that.
SPEAKER_03English.
SPEAKER_04English. Okay. So when you were learning English, either at home or at school, do you remember any part of that process?
SPEAKER_01Um, I do at school, yeah. I remember the reading and writing part. Um, speaking, listening, not really, no. Too early.
SPEAKER_04Why does the reading and writing part stick out?
SPEAKER_01I remember my first few weeks at school having a board with flashcards stuck around the outside. I remember t to T-O. And I remember I had a teacher who said tut like that, and I said to because I'm from a different area. And I remember that really stuck out because she was constantly correcting my accent.
SPEAKER_04Right, right, right. Did you grow up in a different area and then move in there?
SPEAKER_01Yes, I moved when I was three and a half from Northeast England to Manchester, which is a very different accent. But I also remember getting confused between words like the there, the ones at the beginning of TH they looked similar to me. I remember.
SPEAKER_04That's interesting. That's interesting because I grew up with Italian parents who spoke different dialects of Italian. And so when I went to school, I remember similar flashcards, and I remember looking at the words and going, huh, that's not how I've heard it. Like hearing people say it, looking at the word, and going, that's what that is. Because hearing it from different accents for so long. So that's interesting. Even within English, there's there can be that that that big a difference.
SPEAKER_01I remember as well piecing together words, like uh whatever that's called, where uh my exercise book had something education committee, and my second journal of being so pleased when I managed to piece out the the different sounds.
SPEAKER_04What grade were you in when you had that?
SPEAKER_01Uh second, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Really?
SPEAKER_01So well it was just the type it was the you know the the maker of a book book.
SPEAKER_04So you're reading like the back of the book at the end. Okay.
SPEAKER_01I've always been like that, yeah. Anything I see I need to be able to read.
SPEAKER_04No, we do. Before I I start reading a book, I have to look at all the parts of it and I have to know what's in the general shape of it, yeah. That's funny. Wow. Do you remember any part of the language being more enjoyable or less enjoyable to learn in school or out of school?
SPEAKER_01Reading, yes, definitely reading. I really enjoyed it. It opened up a whole world of like autonomy and uh just knowledge, I think, and also the escapism with stories, things like that. I loved that independence, and um I think I always found writing quite a lot harder. I think I was quite good at it at school, but I just found it required a lot more effort.
SPEAKER_02Right, right, right.
SPEAKER_01Um, and I think speaking, I always had a bit of a problem with um expressing myself properly, yeah. Whereas with with reading, it was just a fluid, you know, great way of constructing new worlds in my head.
SPEAKER_04Oh my gosh, we're we're so carbon copies right now. Except for one thing. For me, reading was I did latch onto it early, but it was very difficult for me at first. Yeah, making the sound appearance connection or the sound text connection was really, really hard for me. But once I did, I was always reading. Like my parents would come into the like knock on my door and be like concerned that I was in there too long reading. Right? And they're like, Are you still alive? I'm like, Are you kidding? I've been to different worlds already. What do you mean still alive?
SPEAKER_01I used to I was well known in my family for locking myself away in the toilet. Yeah, because I thought I could lock the door and nobody could disturb me. And my I remember my dad in particular going mad and uh sat and banging on the door. The whole family here. But that was my private study for reading.
SPEAKER_04Right, right, right, right, right. That's hilarious. What part of writing do you remember? Do you remember what part of writing was diff why was it difficult?
SPEAKER_01I think because you have that time to assemble your words and you can always shift things around. And I think even when I was very little, it was I always thought, does that sound right? Should I write it better that way? And I'm still like that. I can never finish a draft because I'm so perfectionist with it. Whereas in speaking, you don't have that luxury, obviously. Um, but yeah, I think that's what it is. It's that um it's that perfectionism that it really irritates me. You know, I really know what I want to say, but I never feel I quite express it clearly enough.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's never finished. Yes. I remember hearing a writer's, I don't remember exactly who it was, but I remember them saying a writer will never think anything is finished. So literally what when it's done is when the deadline is. Yeah. If there is a deadline.
SPEAKER_01And that's a unique, yes, I think I've I'm I think I'm quite bad at that setting my own deadlines. If someone else is doing it, I'm quite good at meeting them, but I I yeah, I'm never finished with my own stuff.
SPEAKER_04Um you mentioned one of your teachers in primary school. Do you remember any of the methods that were used in addition to the flashcards? Any of the methods that were used to teach the language?
SPEAKER_01You know, I don't really. Yeah. That's the only thing that's really stuck. Um I do remember doing a a lot of reading, you know, with um, yeah, piecing together the um the phonics, is it? The whatever. Uh and yeah, reading things out loud, but no, I I think I I think I was quite quick at getting the reading, so I've forgotten the process, if you know what I mean.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, no, me too. I I do remember the sound emphasis on things, but once we got to whole chunks of words and sentences, I don't remember anything.
SPEAKER_01But I remember some of the books we had, and we had series, you know, graded books. Um, and I remember really getting into them, you know. I just really loved the stories, but I think that's when I really learned with you know. I'm jealous.
SPEAKER_04The graded books we had were so like the content was so boring for me. Like it wasn't until like I got a library card and then was like checking my own stuff out that I was like, okay, this is cool content. The stories were just so I know they were made for kids, but they seemed so uncle not colourful at all. They were very dull and like matter-of-factly, like I feel like they didn't get into the heads of kids, they were just writing about kids in the stories.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so we've certainly had some like that, yeah, which were quite dry, but I remember others getting really quite into that thing of yeah, the first library experience and all that, I think was uh that was when it got really exciting.
SPEAKER_04Oh, library experience. I haven't even been asking that as a question. That's a really good point. Do you remember when you started to get into libraries?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I remember my dad taking me, it was probably that same year, actually, the second second year's primary, and he introduced the whole concept. I remember it was a Monday night, it was winter.
SPEAKER_04Oh my god, you remember that?
SPEAKER_01He took me and I was fascinated by the whole process. What is it? What does it do? And you know, he told me how many books I could choose and got me my my card, which really was a piece of cardboard at the time, and I was just fascinated by the whole checking out process. To me, that was all I think I love processes like that, you know, learning about a new system. And um, yeah, I remember going home with those books and just loving that sitting down with a little pile of books, and even without starting to read them, just looking through, like you said, through the shape of the books and what was in it. That was uh yeah, it was just something to really get into.
SPEAKER_04Loved it. I think one of the first questions I asked was, How many can I take home? Yeah, we're like, wait, all of these? I can read all of these, all of this is available to me, but just not all at once.
SPEAKER_01And we had different limits on fiction than non-fiction, so you have two quotas you could fill, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. And I think at the time, let me think, because I started going to libraries, I'm guessing, in the mid-70s. So I I don't remember checking out records. I don't know if that was a thing, but I definitely remember cassette tapes in the 80s.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Because we moved to New York to Pennsylvania. I remember checking out like cassette tapes, uh, but not many. I do remember it being mostly books, books, books, books, and later magazines.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Which was just crazy to check out because it was like, okay, now this is like modern, like current super current information with glossy pictures that I don't have to buy. Cool. Oh, our library must have been poorer because uh we had a big rack of magazines, but you couldn't take them out, and they had uh they didn't set off the alarms if you tried to and some didn't, and I moved around a lot, so that was one of the first things I looked for was what can I check out here that I couldn't in my last library? Yeah, and it's one of the first things I actually do when I move to a place. And um, my husband and I actually go to libraries when we go on vacation. We'll tend to go to libraries in the place that we're in. Because the structures a lot of times are also beautiful.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I I was quite surprised because I was back in the UK um for a couple of 18 months, and I actually signed up for the local library, which is now in a brand new modern building. Yeah, I was just amazed by how the process has changed, and the staff is so minimal now, and it's all you put the book books into a machine which checks them out. And every the thing is as well, the amount of stock has decreased a lot because they share it among different branches, yeah. And now you can do a little digital ordering of the books and they arrive the next day or even the same day. So it's a very different experience now.
SPEAKER_04It's a really different experience. I do you remember um card catalogues?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yes, I was about to I was gonna mention that actually. I enjoyed that just as much as the books.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Oh dear listeners that are younger who are what Gen Xers and Gen Y, hmm, how would you describe card catalogs?
SPEAKER_01Very long draw, very, very long draw. Yeah. And very narrow with index cards, and yeah, you went through with your fingers like this and looked for, and they would tell you which branch often it was held at. I don't know about you, but we ours were shared among one local authority area. Yeah, um, yeah, so you'd find in there, oh wow, they've got this, get so excited, but you had to do a lot of manual searching to find it.
SPEAKER_04We did, and that's that's how you search, no computer whatsoever. That was oh my gosh. I remember the last library, the last school I was doing my PhD that I didn't finish, it they had those cards, they were recycling them. So by the computers, they had those cards as scratch paper.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And I was like, oh, no computers, like car catalog cards. These are so exciting. So I started to take a bunch of them in my backpack to like use them in classes and stuff because they're great mini note-taking things, and they were just they had this meaning that I know my students didn't get. They were just like, oh, it's tiny paper.
SPEAKER_01I remember as well arriving at university and had a great library at the university, and it was full of research papers and journals. And I remember they'd just taken delivery of their first CD-ROM drive, which cost about four or five thousand pounds at the time, I think, for CD-ROM. And their entire catalogue had been put onto a series of CDs, I believe. But you had a book time on this one computer, I think it was allocated in five-minute slots or something. What? And in that time you had to quickly search them. But the feeling of that was amazing. So all of these probably billions of journals are all indexed onto this one disk.
SPEAKER_04Do you ever wonder, like if you were growing up now with the internet and mobile phones and tablets and all this stuff, do you think your love of reading would be as strong?
SPEAKER_01I have wondered about that actually because I remember I just wonder about the sort of perseverance aspect, yeah. Because even you know, now I find myself skipping between things and you've got to tr try quite hard to focus. That's why sometimes you use a Kindle instead of iPad to read, because you can't do that as easily. And I do remember that feeling of yeah, there being very little to do apart from pick up that one book or those several books.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And even if you got sort of sick of it, put it down for a few minutes and pick it up again, because there was very little else to do, to be honest. So yeah, I think that did sort of teach me certain things about for concentration, focus.
SPEAKER_04Me too, me too, me too. And one level I think I could have gotten into things sooner because I grew up in a small town, so I feel like I would have had access to more stuff sooner.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04But on the other end, I really worry about not my intention span so much, but kind of, but just would I have sat in a corner and read stuff online like I did books? Yeah. Would I have gone off into that world that was just starting in those paper pages and then kind of continued with whatever my brain was doing with it?
SPEAKER_01But I remember things like uh I would say someone else at school had a library book, and I'd think, oh, I want to read that as well. But I'd have to wait for them to check it back in. But that anticipation meant once you did get it, you made sure to read it. And also certain series of stories, you know. Um it was it's almost if you if you had the freedom just to download them whenever you wanted, then you might dot around between them and that's so true. Not follow things serially in such a way.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and not having the physical books around. Like I have tons of stuff that I have to I have to create reminders for things that I have saved digitally that I want to go and remember to read. Like, wait a minute, what?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so much choice now.
SPEAKER_04It is, it is, it is. It's a bit of a romance. Well, we don't have to consider it because we're not actually going to come back right now, but as different people. But it's something I that I think about, like looking at like when I was teaching freshmen, looking at them and going, what would I be like having grown up with the stuff that you had accessible? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Very much shapes your your experience of growing up, I think.
SPEAKER_04It does, it does, it does. Let's switch over into Chinese. So, when did you start learning Chinese for the first time?
SPEAKER_01Uh the first time I ever looked at it at all was during my first ever trip and to Hong Kong, which was 2003. Okay, and I just found I was suddenly in this place where the writing system was completely different, and I just could not help falling in love with that writing system and just being so fascinated by it. I I felt for a start quite irritated that I couldn't read signs and things, and I was like, what could that possibly mean? You know, and I was guessing. So I went and bought a book um which is actually a little cartoons of the history of the characters, and um I basically read the first one, then went and got the second and third one in the series, and they only covered the most basic characters. Right. Then I went back to the UK and it was a few years, it was 1995. No, no, 2005. I went and actually bought a textbook, a Teach Yourself Chinese book. Oh, yeah. Just from pure fascination. And it was a period over about a few months that I slowly got into, then realised I really want to start learning this.
SPEAKER_04So in 2003 in Hong Kong, you the book that you were using, I'm assuming that was in Cantonese?
SPEAKER_01It's well traditional characters, uh traditional characters as opposed to the simplified ones used here on the mainland. Um and it was from the Straits Times, uh, which is uh Singapore, I think, Singapore newspaper. Okay. And so that they use traditional characters as well. Right, right, right. And it was actually a little um little cartoon they had in their newspaper every day that introduced a new character to uh you know people living in Hong Kong. Sorry, it's the poison, I presume. And it's called Fun with Chinese Characters, I believe. Uh and there's three books in the series, and yeah, that that's kind of what got me in because it was colourful and funny, and uh it was quite an easy way to just look at the to be honest, a lot of the meanings, derivations were made up, I think, for entertainment, but they helped you to you know yeah, to remember them. Absolutely. And yeah, after that, once I started getting into the actual colloquial Chinese textbook, which was my first one, which I actually found was a really good book, I was driving quite long distances to work as well, and I started listening to the the CD, the conversation, the dialogues on there.
SPEAKER_04And you're doing that in England or in China?
SPEAKER_01That was when I was in England. Okay. At that point, I had no um plan to come and live in China, it was just because I found it such a different language. I think that's the key thing.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because I'd studied French and German at school, but Chinese was just a whole new world, you know, it was a very, very different language, and uh I think that's what just got me interested.
SPEAKER_04But French and German, did you get to a level that you would consider fluent in those languages?
SPEAKER_01Not fluent, no. I I did them for O level, which shows my age because that was the exam before the current exams in the UK. So I studied them up to 16 for my uh national exams at 16. Okay. Um I didn't carry on with them to 18 because I got focused into science and maths, which the school had a lot to do with as well, and you weren't allowed to mix these things in our school. Uh so regrettably I had to let go of German because that's the one I really enjoyed.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But I'd I'd been studying French for what five years, German for three years by the time I took the exams, but I felt much, much more confident with German than I did with French.
SPEAKER_04Did you feel the pull with Chinese like you did with German, or was it a different kind of uh no, I did in a very similar way actually.
SPEAKER_01It was it was about sort of I find German very systematic, very logical. Uh China, Chinese, sorry, has its own quite strong logic as well, actually. And I felt that same pull which I never had with French. I fent I felt like French was much more like English, more freeform, messy if you like. That sort of I found that off funny.
SPEAKER_04Wow. Oh wow. Okay, so 2005, you were listening to the audio and you were reading the textbook.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Were you focusing on writing the characters at first?
SPEAKER_01Not at all, no, not at first. I I took a few lessons from a um a tutor and she got me to start writing a journal and I could write basic stuff. So I started learning then, but writing has never really been a focus because it's a very different skill in Chinese sort of thing. And you can read perfectly well, or you can learn to read perfectly well without having to write the characters, and you need to allocate your time really, and it's also time consuming.
SPEAKER_04It's very time consuming. And then with the pinion input, uh, because I thought I was going to focus a little bit on writing because reading and writing are the two areas I'm very interested in. But once I learned how to type using the pinion, I just kind of went, okay, never mind.
SPEAKER_01Exactly.
SPEAKER_04I just don't I don't foresee myself handwriting anything in the future, but I do hope that I can once I get enough vocabulary be on social media and like communicate with people via email and those kinds of things, which I can do with the pinion input so easily.
SPEAKER_01What what did happen with me was I got to a kind of plateau with my character learning with my reading, and I was finding it very difficult to cram in any more characters. So one thing um I thought I'd do was to start learning um to write.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because what I was finding was I couldn't differentiate between so many characters.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So by learning to write, I then started to find like I removed that log jump. But then I got up to a certain point after a few years where I was practicing writing every day, where I thought, I mean, this is so time consuming, and by then smartphones all started to have the opinion inputs, and even Chinese people were saying to me, we're even forgetting how to write a lot of the more complex characters because we don't need to very much.
SPEAKER_04Somebody told me yesterday that there used to be a TV show on in China where they used to have like a game show where they would uh say the the word and people had to Chinese people had to like write it. Right. And they were kind of testing them, do you remember how to write this this word?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And I don't know, right. He's gonna send me the information later, but have you ever heard of this show?
SPEAKER_01No, I haven't.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. I was like, oh my god, that's the kind of thing I would watch. Can I remember? Wait, pause and try to record.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I've imagined that.
SPEAKER_04Do you feel like that that would be necessary at some stage of learning the language? That there would need to be an emphasis on writing for a little bit to get past that the recognition part?
SPEAKER_01Um it certainly it helped for me. It was a sort of scaffolding thing for me to get past that barrier for whatever reason that I reached that barrier. Um but I d I d I know so many people who've who are very good with the language who can't write at all, so I don't think it's necessary, but just for me it was. It's something that's worth trying, I think.
SPEAKER_04If you're enjoying this conversation about the Chinese language and would like to participate if you're studying 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. Contact me and let's etch out the details on how to get you and your valuable language learning experience onto this podcast. All of my information is in the show notes. Also, all over social media except Facebook, I am Stephio, S T E 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. Okay, so let's keep going with that chronology. So you're listening to the audio, you're doing the textbook. What was the next stage of your learning?
SPEAKER_01Uh listening to the audio doing the textbook. I was uh working my way through characters um by the by several months before I came to China, I got through the Magic 800 or close to a thousand mark. But that had taken a whole year to get to that point.
SPEAKER_04Magic 800, is that a known list of no it's not.
SPEAKER_01The reason is because the book, I got a book uh which a lot of people don't rate very highly, but I found incredibly useful learning Chinese characters, which dealt with the first 800. And I I think that was tied to the old HSK as well. I think it might have been, yes, it was, it was one of the HSK levels in the old exile.
SPEAKER_04I gotcha.
SPEAKER_01Um so to me that was a massive milestone. I remember when I first got that book, I looked at the back page and thought that's what I need to get to. Um it was when I came to China, I was at about the thousand-character mark, that's when I hit this uh logjam. Yeah, and uh I and also they never brought out the second level of the book, which I think it didn't sell well enough. I I'm guessing that. Uh so I had to then start thinking of how I was going to go beyond that because the scaffolding I'd used to get to that point, I couldn't use anymore because it involved making up little stories, and uh well, I I didn't really have the time to do that. Um that's a lie. I did have the time to do it a lot of work. Uh so I bought the flashcards, the Turtle Flashcards, and I started buying those, which were quite expensive, but I started using them, and I started also using a list of HSK characters, but not all the HSK characters were in the Total cards, so I supplemented them with my own flashcards. So I ended up with these index box after index box full of cards.
SPEAKER_04Oh, look right behind you. Yeah, those are mine.
SPEAKER_01And I used my own SRS system as well by putting the you know the ones I knew to the back, and every day I sat and gradually over the next few years I got to the sort of 3,000-ish mark.
SPEAKER_03Oh my gosh, I'm so jealous.
SPEAKER_01Um but some people said you're doing it all wrong, there's much more efficient ways to do it. But I But it was working. It did, but yeah, with me that was at the expense of my spoken language because I used to just sit and go through these cards, eventually I moved on to using software to do it instead. But I got very little practice actually speaking.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, so I learned to read quite well before I could even really string together in conversation. So very different from a lot of the people around me who would be the other way around.
SPEAKER_04There is an I want to say an over-emphasis because I'm very skewed on this. I think there's an over-emphasis on speaking very, very soon with Chinese. And I think because the writing system, the sound system, and uh the grammatical structure is different enough that there's so much that I don't think everyone needs to speak in the beginning. I think we need more of an incubation time, and I think that's why there's a huge drop-off in the beginner levels, is because people say I can't do what these people are doing. I'm I this obviously isn't for me. Um, but that's that's my own opinion.
SPEAKER_01I personally found though, I found very, very early on when that textbook I was using started with pinyin, I found that I just couldn't remember the words because you've got no reference point. Uh I remember the word uh pinyin for welcome. And I remember I remember driving somewhere one day, I kept I kept thinking, what's that word for welcome? I just couldn't get a grip on it. So I felt I had to learn the characters so I could visualize the word. And learning the pinyin can become very confusing because of all the homonyms uh involved, you know. So I decided very early on I couldn't proceed without the characters for me.
SPEAKER_04For sure, for sure. I want to, and then listeners, if you know anybody like this, I want to find somebody that learned Chinese before pinyin. I don't know if that's possible anymore because that was quite a that was what 1950s, 1960s or something, is when that was introduced. But I really, really want to find somebody who didn't grow up with the language who learned it without the pinion. Because I'm very curious if that would be it would be harder at first.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04But would it be easier to not take it away? Because that using pinion and then taking away the pinion can be a little painful.
SPEAKER_01Um, the other something I'd like to add there, though, is the short time I actually went to a language school, which was about four weeks in Beijing, um, I went there and the teachers there were very um adamant that pinion was not to be used. So we had a bunch of people there who'd been living in China for several years and could speak quite well. But then the teachers were insisting on writing up characters on the board, and then people were saying I can't read that, they were getting quite annoyed. They were saying pinion is artificial, you shouldn't be using it.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01Whereas for people it was certainly a crutch that they'd been used to, and um they were told to go away and write a journal for the next day, and it's like they they couldn't because foreigners learning as adults is very different from the methods that Chinese children use.
SPEAKER_04It is it is, it is. Well, and they're apparently using pinion with children too.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I think it's again used initially and then quite quickly.
SPEAKER_04Maybe that's it, maybe it's just used too long. Yeah. Because I'm I'm doing this is my HSK year because I'm just I jumping straight into graded readers and things with just a basic knowledge was too much. So I'm literally just using HSK's one, two, and three materials to just get me enough vocabulary to use the content I want to use.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04So I'm I just finished two and I'm working on three to take in December. And in HSK 1 and 2, they have the pinion and the Hansa. Except for the transcript, which they have just in the characters. Yeah. For the listening, that's the transcript of the listening. But everything, including the test for one and two, is pinion and hansa. And for one, I do think that's probably helpful, but for HSK two, you're talking about almost the entire first year of a language. Yes. That's a long time to get used to having both. And as much as I tried to cover it up when I was practicing, it's there. It's so hard.
SPEAKER_01I mean, there is this uh very good series of abridged readers of well-known Chinese stories, very well graded, but they put the pinyin in between every line of characters, and it is so distracting. I mean, and I I read an article on this recently where someone was saying, Well, our eyes are drawn like magnets to the pinyin because it's a familiar script.
SPEAKER_02Exactly.
SPEAKER_01Um, whereas that doesn't happen with Chinese people, apparently they don't get drawn to the pinyin, they get drawn to the characters. So the publishers, I think, seems like they didn't quite get that, but they did start um releasing a plastic grid that you could slide over the page.
SPEAKER_04I have that in one of my graded readers.
SPEAKER_01The trouble is that that to me It's not realistic. It's not it becomes a pain to use.
SPEAKER_04It's a massive pain. And if you take notes on the stuff that you're reading, like I do, you're holding the grid and trying to take notes and it gets then you're just always off and you're covering the wrong thing, and it's just I even find this is a self-discipline problem.
SPEAKER_01I even find I slide the grid down slightly if I get stuck so I can see the pin.
SPEAKER_04And then you see the next word when you just wanted that word. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And the what what's great is recently Pleco dictionary released as an add-on the same readers, they're purely in characters, and now I can finally read them in electronic form. And uh I've started really quick quickly reading those books because the opinion isn't there as annoying.
SPEAKER_04Wait, wait, wait, wait, just backtrack on this again because I love Pleco. The add-in does what again?
SPEAKER_01The add-in you can actually buy the whole series of graded readers and you can read them in the Placo reader, so you can you can press on any character and it pops up in the dictionary. Oh my god! Even uh you can use text to speech as well, so it reads the stories out.
SPEAKER_04You've just blown my mind.
SPEAKER_01So you can practice your listening and then check the text over um and they do that with the readers, uh, that series of readers, and also uh the chairman's bow articles um they that you can buy packs of those and they're in the reader, which is a very good reader as well.
SPEAKER_04That's so good.
SPEAKER_01So uh that's been a bit of a godsend.
SPEAKER_04Oh my god. So I'm collecting the resources I want to use after December when I'm done with HSK 3. Because I noticed last year when I was starting to try to read, is that a lot of the gr uh lower level materials started at 3. There was very little content for HSK 1 and 2 level, which is definitely where I was. And so I was like, okay, I'm gonna do HSK through three, and then I'm gonna pick my next material. Yeah, because I'll have all this beginner stuff, which really isn't beginner stuff. But yeah, so no, that's amazing. Yeah, because I don't want to see the whole line. Yeah, I want to see that one more time.
SPEAKER_01It's it's off-putting to the extent that I was giving up because it's just I it's hard enough plowing through the reading, and you know, it can be enough of a battle without having a distraction, which is what it was. Yeah, it's like a voice whispering in your ear all the time.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, and like you, I like the look of the characters. I like uh what they what they're I don't know, mine kind of move around a little bit, they have some fun, they like dance and do different things. Anyway, they're kind of they're kind of they're fun. And so I don't want to break from that if I'm on if I'm on a roll with words and I know what I'm reading. I don't want to break from that and go back to the the script that I know very well that's very boring.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yeah. I think especially if you're doing uh extensive reading of the you know, if you're trying deliberately trying to read something quickly for fluency, um and opinions uh just wrecks that whole process. You know, I don't think it's as bad if you're actually going through doing the intensive of trying to understand most of the stuff.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I think yeah, like scanning would be definitely hard to do. I'm not at that level where I can scan yet, I really have to sit down and really read a sentence to know it, but I imagine that would be Yeah, very distracting. What would an equivalent in English be?
SPEAKER_01Putting Chinese characters into Right.
SPEAKER_04There was there was a gentleman that I there was a TED talk and he had this whole project where he made an inter because basically pinions an interlanguage between or that bridges people into Chinese from English, right? Or from a romance language that uses Latin script. And so he actually created one using Chinese characters to bridge Chinese speakers into other languages. And it's a really cool video, and I keep meaning to follow up with this project to see if it works. Because he said that you can actually use it with people from not just from Chinese, but you can actually use that sound system to bridge a lot of people over into other languages, not just Chinese to English, or Chinese to Romance languages. But I haven't followed up with it because I'm a bad person.
SPEAKER_01Is it a similar idea to IPA or similar? Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, but apparently right now, because coming from Eng going from English to Chinese, we have opinion as the intermediary stuff. But going from Chinese to English, even though they're familiar with opinion, it's used very differently than English. Like the opinions very I mean opinions, you know, of of Chinese, and so it's very syllabic, it's very short, parts to it, and English comes largely from French, which has those crazy long, misspelled things that you don't say. Yeah. So they're like looking at the English going, I don't know how to say those. Yeah, that's right. So there apparently there isn't any real intermediary step. I don't know. I don't know, I don't know.
SPEAKER_01So I know a lot of their books in in China, a lot of the textbooks in China, the English, um, have the IPA representation in there. So a lot of the students I've uh have dealt with that they uh know the IPA quite well. Actually, they know it better than many foreign foreign teachers, yeah, because we don't use IPA generally, and we're we're aware of it, but we don't fluently use it, I don't think.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I was teaching full-time, I got in the habit of using it. But if you put it in front of me now, I probably struggle with a few of them. But I found that my Japanese students and my Chinese students like really clung to it because they do have a phonetic understanding of this means this, let's go. Like it's just it's yeah. Whereas yeah, I can't imagine uh English speakers clinging, I thought opinion is kind of that, but it doesn't have the tone, yeah. Pinion drives me crazy. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01That was a thing, and I think a lot of people um approach pinion thinking that it is meant to be for foreigners, you know what I mean? And it wasn't it was largely invented uh as a support thing for local souls.
SPEAKER_04Children use it in China. They teach children Chinese through pinion first. Is it first or at the same time? I don't know. But they definitely use it with children.
SPEAKER_01Yes, it has lots of peculiarities in the representation of the sounds which strike us as odd. Yeah, and if you this is the problem as well, because I started learning on my own and there's no real explanation, no, there was no decent explanation of the pinyin. I picked up all sorts of bad habits which have taken years to slowly I'm still making a lot of them, because you attach you see the representation of the sound, you connect it to your own language, and even between American and British English, there's some very different sounds which um without a teacher you can pick up the uh the wrong the wrong way to pronounce the pinion, I think.
SPEAKER_04Absolutely, absolutely, and then you get the the thing of individual sounds versus a bunch of sounds together. Yes, yeah. And that seriously changes when you're speaking Chinese in China. It's like, whoa, you didn't say about three of those sounds in there, which I can kind of see in my head and opinion. What just happened? Yeah. Yeah, the struggles of opinion. Okay, so where were we? So the flashcards, not the ones that you made, but you said you also bought some flashcards. What were those?
SPEAKER_01I think it's called, I think that the series is called Chinese and a Flash, and it's Total Press, uh, who actually also published the book I was talking about where I learned the first Ayton of characters. Um I think that they're quite easy to get in a lot of the um the bookstores in China, um, and they're in four, a series of four. And yeah, they they contain uh uh example sentences, uh which are actually quite complex sentences, quite detailed, um, and the yeah, traditional and simplified character as well as the translation.
SPEAKER_04And was it a time issue in switching from making your own to using those?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because at that point I still yeah, I wanted to get to the 3,000 level. That series I think covers what two and a half thousand. It would have meant making 1400. Oh, I also wanted the the ones that I'd already learned in the first thousand, so I basically decided I was gonna buy those sets. I think I think altogether it was about a thousand you end buying the sets. So it was quite an outlay at first, but uh you know it but that's a lot. Well, even making the filler ones, the supplemental ones, it used to take a lot of time because I used to have to check which one didn't exist in the set, and you know, it was uh I didn't want to waste that much time because it's time consuming enough.
SPEAKER_04Understood, yeah, understood. I have often looked at different flashcards available. A Fujolu is an area of town I love and hate because I just I go in there and I think, oh, I could buy all of these and work on this, and I'm like, wait, I've got a study plan for the whole year. Stop, stop. That isn't necessarily the language I need right now, but they're done. Yeah, you know, as opposed to making my own and have it look super goofy. Okay, so we're at the flashcards. What was after that?
SPEAKER_01Um, well, uh as I mentioned shortly after moving to Beijing, I went to a language school for four weeks. I was doing 20 hours a week for um and it was quite a lot of homework as well. I signed up for the old HSK at the first level, um, and I think it was one and two. Uh I sat that I got through the first time, I think I got a two. Yeah, I got two. Um, but then I went for the two to three level. I I can't remember how it was structured, but it wasn't as straightforward as it is now.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um and I didn't get through the next one. I kind of gave up on the process at the time and focused just on my learning. Yeah. So I went anyway. So I got ahead of myself there. I went to this language school for four weeks. Uh, to be honest, I had plenty of time to do it, it was quite expensive, um, but uh the style teaching didn't quite uh gel with me, to be honest. It was a lot of um the quality of teaching between different teachers was very variable. Um teachers were constantly leaving and joining, or you know, so you never could guarantee you had the same teacher.
SPEAKER_03I gotcha.
SPEAKER_01And also there was a lot of just writing on the board and reading out, you know, going around the class, you read this sentence, and I just didn't feel it was value for money.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_01So I've been on my own most of the time with it. Um I carried on with the uh learn the characters against, didn't get much practice at all uh with speaking for several years. It was only really when I met my current girlfriend who uh she's she's Chinese that I really started being forced to speak, and then my my speaking because I had quite a lot of knowledge, it it's my speaking got to a reasonable level fairly quickly. Um, but at first we used to talk a lot online because that was easier to communicate because my my reading and writing were better.
SPEAKER_04Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. Is there anything that they did in the classes that you found helpful to bring into your self-study sessions later?
SPEAKER_01Writing, they used to make you write a you know a short piece of something on a topic or a journal as well, and uh I kept that up for a while, but then that sort of dropped away because I'm I've again I've never re-emphasized the writing side. I think the discipline of working through, even though it was quite mechanical of working through texts and checking the forecarb, you know, having a read through, um doing some follow-up exercises, I think I did bring that in as well. I've never stuck with one series of textbooks for a very long time. Yep. Uh but I had a whole shelf full of different ones, and I just dipped in and out of them, and yeah it all adds up, but it's not very not not a very efficient way of learning. I don't see.
SPEAKER_04No, no, as long as you're progressing, it is. And this is the funny thing, because I one of the first people I interviewed for this series, this podcast, um, he talked about in the app world, in the mobile app world for language learning, it's well not just for that, but He was talking about it in that realm. He said stickiness is the word they use for how app companies or people that make apps want you to come back to the app. But they find with language learning apps people will experiment with an app for a little while and then move on and move on and move on. And stickiness is they want you to keep coming back to the app, but people aren't, they're hopping around a lot. And I you can see from I have a tiny pile of books, mostly just because I've been doing the HSK stuff, which is that other pile and the pile up there. So my HSK stuff has taken over, but I just bought those within just a few months last year. Yeah. Because I'm like, oh, that could help, that could help, that could help. But is it really a bad thing to use different materials?
SPEAKER_01It almost feels sort of undisciplined, but that's probably because of schooling and things where you you get used to doing things in that sort of linear way.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I th I it probably isn't a bad thing. Um it's maybe not the most efficient. Then again, I don't know because I I'm not uh like I when it comes to language learning, I don't really do things in a quantitative way or um data-driven. So I yeah, I just know that I have made sort of steady progress over the years. So I probably could have done a lot more quicker if I'd been more organized, I think.
SPEAKER_04I don't know. It's such it's such a marathon going from English to Chinese, it's such a marathon that it's like they're taking time off and doing things slower sometimes and faster sometimes seems like a necessity in a way.
SPEAKER_01I think one of the issues with Chinese as well is because the the different uh disciplines or skills are so separate, uh the reading, the writing, the listening, speaking, that I find that I'm constantly I'm doing a certain amount in one direction, one skill, and then I'll move back to the one, and I keep topping up the different levels, but the trouble is certain stuff gets left behind as well, but it's more of an intuitive thing that I need to do a bit more listening practice for a while now, and it's more driven by instinct or difficulties in my everyday life that I want to improve upon. Yeah, uh, and I don't think if you know learning French and German, that wasn't it was a more integrated study because from the from the very beginning you could read stuff, even if you might not be able to read it and understand it, but you could still piece together the words. Um, with Chinese, you just can't. You've got to get a certain critical mass before you can start reading stuff.
SPEAKER_04Uh that is such an essential part to all this because it really is, no matter which part you're working on, you're kind of neglecting another part of the language. So it's it's a constant state of guilt.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Of study guilt or something. Have you made peace with the study guilt, or do you do it constantly just yeah, does it chip away at you?
SPEAKER_01It does chip away at me. I also feel guilt that I could be so much more structured. Um and that that would help me. I just because I'm working as well, you know, I I do the Chinese as a sort of sideline, and I I've never bothered to get a infrastructure in place for learning.
SPEAKER_04I do it more by the gut thing, but maybe that's not so surprising when you're working as well, and you know the thing is, even as structure as Chinese is as a language, it's still a language, and there's gonna be an ebb and flow in what you can comprehend and do and all that kind of stuff on any given day.
SPEAKER_01That's what I was gonna say, actually, was that I find the Chinese, for example, you've got the the log jam of the of the reading, that you need a certain number of characters to be able to even piece together sentences, so I to get the point being able to read a newspaper is quite a challenge. That's always what I aimed towards for a long time. Um, I can now read newspapers fairly well. Uh but for a long, long time you just didn't have that percentage of characters that you knew where you could make more sentences work because you'd have a few crucial characters missing, um, which I don't think quite works the same way in other languages, for example. Also, uh with listening, I find a very similar thing happens in Chinese because of the number of homophones. Um, I find that a whole sentence, if I don't know the context, it could mean any of dozens of things. And because it takes a while, I think, to get sensitive to the tones, the tones are what makes the difference because if you can spot the tone patterns in there, you've got a clue to what the words are. Right. Um now all of these things are what makes it so different, yeah, but also it means yes, you constantly have this topping up of the different skills and you get a logjam in one until you get past the level. Now that's a very vague way of talking about it, but that's how it feels to me.
SPEAKER_04No, that sounds exactly true. That sounds that sounds very, very, very, very good. Newspapers, funny enough, is one of my first goals because my overall goal is like reading and listening will come later. Listening and speaking, although I'm working on them, are not my main goals right now. And so I thought that noobs papers would be kind of like a first step. Now that first step is gonna take me about two years to get there because of the complexity of the language, but that's my first step. I'd like to move over into social media, but then we've got slang and all kinds of stuff, and that'll that's just much, much further down the line.
SPEAKER_01With the newspapers, that was always my one of my goals was to be able to pick up uh or go onto a website, a news website. Yeah, it took a long time to get there, and despite all of my practice with reading and getting good in reading certain types of things, newspapers remained elusive, and part of the reason is the formal language, which there's a lot of classical Chinese connections in there with written language.
SPEAKER_04Um, you know, is it the words themselves or the the historical references?
SPEAKER_01It's a lot of it's historical references, cultural references, the uh the four letter, the four character idioms, for example, okay. Which are used quite a lot in formal newspaper writing. That's still a problem, and I think always will be. But it's also, yes, it's the use of different uh different lexics for the written language compared to the spoken language, and a lot of that goes back to classical Chinese origins. Um there's also just the more advanced language, obviously, that's used in newspapers, but there's also kick just chunks that appear in newspaper writing which you don't hear or you don't come across in textbooks. Right. And the strange thing is when I was back in the UK, um, I took a bit of a break from my Chinese learning, but then I sort of started missing it, and I went online and started reading some uh different sources which were more readily available in the UK for newspapers, and I suddenly got into them reading and I found myself reading for several hours at a time. It was just different kinds of articles available, and suddenly my reading just took off in a way that it hadn't with all the graded practice and all that kind of thing, and that's when I found that could start picking up an article and get at least getting the chest on even more for the first time. Can I ask what you were reading that was um I was reading uh the New York Times because it has bilingual editions, and you can you can put the split pane up there and you can get the English and the Chinese next to each other, um, which is incredibly useful because I would try to read it first in Chinese, then read the English, then go back and fill in the gaps where I'd got it wrong. Um, so that was incredibly useful. Also, I do use the chairman's bow, which I found really useful as well. Um, I was uh reading things like BBC Chinese, and so BBC News Chinese as well. And some of these things are much harder to access if you're living here.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Two hours at a time.
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah, on a good day.
SPEAKER_04That's oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_01It's quite tiring.
SPEAKER_04I read 15 of the because I read the transcript before I listen to the listening itself, and those are 15 inch in HSK 2 and 20 tasks in HSK 3, and that takes me about an hour, and I I'm brain dead after that. Yeah, and that's not a lot of language. Um, so wow, two hours straight uh without stopping listening to the channel.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I thumbs out a really, really got in it, but it was wow, it was also a different variety of material, I think, as well.
SPEAKER_04Um, you know, uh when you're in mainland China, you're not gonna You mentioned that you read uh you mentioned you were reading in the Chinese language in texts that weren't necessarily from mainland China. Can you tell us some of the places you were reading in the language?
SPEAKER_01Yes, uh I came across an article, a long article on the um New York Times, which was uh an American returning to Hong Kong for the first time since the handover after 20 years, and looking up an old uh acquaintance who I think believe was an artist, who at the time they couldn't speak together, they couldn't communicate, but they became the best of friends in the bar and used to go out drinking together and scroll things on beer maps. He talked about his time wandering around Hong Kong looking for this person and talked about the changes that have occurred and what was still the same after 20 years. It was translated to Chinese, but it was I think what fascinated me was that there was a lot of natural um language in there, which I was fascinated to find out in the translations and wouldn't necessarily have learned them since. But also they I think they'd inserted uh explanations, cultural notes to explain certain things as well. So that was really fresh. Um also uh it was around the time of uh Donald Trump being elected president, and I read a fair number a lot of articles, a lot of news articles about the early days of his presidency and the um controversial things he was saying. Um he was managing to upset a lot of people internationally, uh politically and culturally at the time, and it was interesting to read that from a Chinese uh speaker's perspective. There was a lot of again a lot of cultural explanations involved there, and again, terms I wouldn't have necessarily come across otherwise.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that's really useful. And these are all accessible online behind a paywall or are they free?
SPEAKER_01Usually um I believe New York Times, for example, I think you get a certain number of articles a month. Oh, so um yes, I think that's true. Uh things like you know the BBC Chinese News, that that's free, for example.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, those are some of the main ones I use. Nice.
SPEAKER_04Let's pick up on the timeline again. So you had the intensive class and then you've been self-studying since that, right?
SPEAKER_01Uh yes, I had a short spell um when I was teaching at a university where I had some free lessons where I joined international students for lessons given by the Chinese English faculty.
SPEAKER_04Oh, do I want to ask you about that? How were those classes?
SPEAKER_01Um I yeah, I to be honest, there was only two levels available. There was a beginner or uh yeah, the next level up. And I I did learn stuff from it, but I a lot of the stuff was old ground, and a lot of it was chanting in a group. Oh and it was going through a textbook which was extremely rigorously structured to the same in every chapter, which is often the case, and we would sit there chanting the vocabulist first, then there would go around 20 students who all had to read out the dialogue one after another. Oh I just it didn't suit me, and it was at the end of a long working day anyway, and it was a two and a half hour session, so the whole shape of it just didn't really work for me. Right, right, right. I was getting drips of useful refreshing information out of the uh ref refreshers out of it, but it just wasn't enough payback to warrant an investment. Uh so yes, I've been pretty much on my own since then.
SPEAKER_04What have you been using to self-study during that time?
SPEAKER_01For my character learning and words, I um actually use Scripta in a bit of an unconventional way where I turn off the writing thing, just use it as an SRS system. Uh I used to use Anki and I still do sometimes. Um but I don't know, I I think it's because Scripta's got a lot of built-in example sentences which I became quite familiar with when I was doing the writing. And I go back to that quite regularly and clear my back robin often enough. Um, I use, as I said, I read the Chairman's Bow. I've always been a user of Chinese pod, uh probably for the last 13 years or something. Um that's it's still a great resource. Uh, there's do Chinese, which I used to practice reading at different levels. Um, there's some different stuff on there, like for example, the high-speed train announcements, which you become very familiar with if you're traveling on Chinese training.
SPEAKER_04Oh my god, that's really useful.
SPEAKER_01They have those, they have it transcribed and with audio, and I found that quite fascinating.
SPEAKER_03That's so cool.
SPEAKER_01Again, it's actually spoken in very formal Chinese, uh, not everyday colloquial Chinese, so I've always found it quite difficult to follow. So things like that are little gems from your everyday life in China. Yeah, and it's like, wow, open my eyes, you know. Uh so there's that, there's a great resource which is new as well.
SPEAKER_04Um, what's it called?
SPEAKER_01I'll have to look it up.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, they'll come back to you. So, how do you do you uh like how much time do you spend per day, per week, per month, or do you just do it when you have free time?
SPEAKER_01Like, how do you When I first I came back from that break in the UK, I was spending a few hours every day quite easily. Um I've I've now ended a highlighted period which happens every so often where I just kind of get overloaded and I'm kind of focusing back on my IT interests at the moment as well. I try to tie the two together whenever I can because I find that's a great way of learning. Um I've tried developing some apps at times, which even that keeps you exp, for example, an app to um learn traditional characters, if you know, simplify. Even that in itself, if you can combine the two, it keeps you to a certain level while you're still learning new stuff just by inputting the data, for example.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_01Um, so I at the moment my practice is mostly in part of my everyday life. I'll pick up a book every swore, you know, well, quite regularly, several times a week, and read through some grammar notes or an article online. Uh, but a lot of it's just every day, you know, talking to people I know or just listening to other people's conversations.
SPEAKER_04Exactly. You're at the point where or you know and you've been at the point for a while where you're using the language every day, so it's like you don't need to calculate that because that's just happening. That's just a natural thing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I I read signs everywhere all the time as well, and I look up characters I don't know, which happens every day. So that's part of the immersion thing, I suppose, and which I'm I'm relying on more at the moment. But I know I can feel it coming back already in the next few weeks. I think I'll be spending more time again on it.
SPEAKER_04Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Again, I think it's kind of necessary, especially living here in it. I know a lot of people have this dreamy version of immersion, like once you break through, then it's just super easy because it's around you all the time, but it really needs to be comprehensible input. You need to understand what you're seeing and hearing for it to be repetitive and helpful.
SPEAKER_01And also, I mean, in China you have so many different uh you know dialects and accents, and you'll find that you're trying to listen in, but then you can't even work out where the people are from.
SPEAKER_04Let's talk about Shanghai, shall we? Can you hear the difference between Chinese and Shanghai? Sorry, Chinese Punang Fa and uh Shanghai's.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I can definitely hear the difference, and I can I can even sometimes, even if we're not in Shanghai, I can say to my girlfriend, it's is that Shanghai news? And she'll say, Oh yeah, that's good, but sometimes it isn't. It's something else.
SPEAKER_04How would you describe the difference between the two? Because I still can't hear the difference, but my comprehension of Pudan Fa is still here and there. Like I can hear just a few words.
SPEAKER_01That's a very good question. Uh it's to me, I sometimes I this probably isn't even a thing, but I sometimes get it confused between Shanghai's and Korean. Now that's probably nonsense to somebody who's Korean sounds like you're saying that Shanghai sounds like Korean. Well, to me, it's it it sounds as different from Budengwa.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_01Um, but I don't know if there's any sense in that whatsoever, because I don't know what Korean really sounds like, but I know I've confused the two at times, put it that way. Um but Shanghainese, I actually think it feels quite harsh compared to Kudangwa.
SPEAKER_04So is it choppier?
SPEAKER_01I think it is.
SPEAKER_04Because I always confuse, I have a hard time. I've lived in Japan, but I haven't lived in Korea, and I constantly uh I often will hear something and think it's Japanese or Korean and it's the other one.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_04And I think it's kind of a similar choppiness to the two languages. So I wonder if that's I think it is.
SPEAKER_01I mean, in the same way as for me, Cantonese sounds um much more um mellifluous, if you like, than Pudhamoi. Pudhang uh sounds harsher to me than Cantonese, and then Shanhainese sounds harsher to me than Pudenhua. But I I don't know if there's any sort of reason behind that or something like that.
SPEAKER_04Well if we let's do that again. Which one was the softest among all those?
SPEAKER_01I find Cantonese sounds the most sort of sing song to me.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's Pudang Wain in Chinese.
SPEAKER_01I mean that could be because I grew up being more familiar with Cantonese because a lot of Chinese people living in the UK were Hong Kong.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um so that's that's what I always knew as Chinese growing up was actually Cantonese. And then not Mandarin. Yeah, that's Kudanghwa. So um, yeah, it could be entirely subjective based on uh familiarity.
SPEAKER_04But that could also be very, very accurate. Interesting. Listeners, if you if you have your own description. Sorry, I'm gonna break for a second. If you have your own description of the differences between these languages, please um social media us and and put those into writing. I'd be curious what other folks um think about that. It only recently did I was I I I was viewing it's funny because in newspapers you were talking about reading foreign newspapers in Chinese and having different perspectives. And I watch a lot of YouTube channels about people vlogging about China in China, but they're foreigners, so they've got those foreign eyes and they can see things that sometimes when you grow up in a place you don't see. And these two gentlemen, Supenza and um the other guy that I can't remember the name or anything, yeah, that's horrible. Uh ADB China is their their China their YouTube channel name, and they went through China that to the they went through California and they went to different cities and they went to check out the Chinatowns. And they made it very, very clear, they're like, okay, in San Francisco, this is mostly a Cantonese population, in Los Angeles it was mostly a mainland China population, and I lived in both places, and I didn't realize how different those those two cities and their Chinese populations were. I just went to Chinatown and was like, I can buy this and this and this here. Awesome. And you know, those kinds of things, like I didn't have that that ability to m make out those those language differences when I was there, and so it was really interesting. I was like, oh my god, I've lived in those places and I don't know this. And these guys just travel in, talk to people in China, you know, in in Mandarin, and they can they're able to pick up on those those differences. So anyway. So those the having that far in perspective sometimes can make it easier to understand languages.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. It's uh I mean you know, let's again it's the complexity of China and that like a lot of other things, the variety of food, the uh variety of um uh the places, but the the languages as well, the the dialects or languages.
SPEAKER_04It's so hard to describe to people the scale of China.
SPEAKER_01When when I first moved down, I first moved to Beijing when I first came to China. When I first moved down to Changsha, which is central south China, um I was getting laughed at by taxi drivers because of my northern accent.
SPEAKER_04Oh my gosh. They weren't impressed that you were speaking in the language they were.
SPEAKER_01Forever with a Beijing accent, I was I I wasn't even aware that I had a Beijing, I didn't even think I'd got the point where it's possible for me to have an accent. Um and you know, I was saying very simple phrases, but apparently I'd picked that up, and now apparently I have a completely different accent. So um, you know, it's it's it's quite nice to know that you actually have an accent in a foreign language. That feels like some progress.
SPEAKER_04That does! That is oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_01I was just thinking I must have sounded like a small child, you know, didn't like that.
SPEAKER_04That is hilarious. If you're enjoying this conversation about the Chinese language and would like to participate if you're studying 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. Contact me and let's etch out the details on how to get you and your valuable language learning experience onto this podcast. All of my information is in the show notes. Also, all over social media except Facebook, I am Stephanie Puccio, S-T-E-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. Well, the the R sound, people keep talking about the R sound in the Beijing dialect. And I know my course books for HSK hit the R sound hard. I know it's there. I just can't fathom what it sounds like without it because I don't have the ability to converse yet in the real world. Do you is it really hit over the head obvious when you hear it?
SPEAKER_01When it's spoken in a northern accent. Yes, but down here in Shanghai or in the south of China, you you you you often hear it now. With an R sound.
SPEAKER_04You often do or don't?
SPEAKER_01You do.
SPEAKER_04You do?
SPEAKER_01Yes. I mean again, like my partner, she says it quite light we say it in English. She doesn't try the that retroflex thing at all. Whereas in Beijing you definitely hear that. It used to be transcribed in the old romanization systems as a J.
SPEAKER_04The R sound was transcribed as a J?
SPEAKER_01Because that's yeah, a lot of in one of the old, I don't know if it's one of the old systems.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It might it might be another. Yes, they actually trans because that was a better representation they thought of the Beijing region. R.
SPEAKER_04Doesn't it sound like an R sound?
SPEAKER_01Or it's a kind of buzzing.
SPEAKER_04Can you think of a word or phrase that would demonstrate that sound?
SPEAKER_01In Chinese or person, man. That's uh if you hear that spoken in the Beijing with a Beijing accent, then it's you know I can see why it would have been heard more like a J by um by foreigners at the time.
SPEAKER_04And how would people down here say that word?
SPEAKER_01Um I I don't really know about Shanghai in particular, but I've heard it spoken plenty of times around here with far less of that uh that curled tongue thing, you know, more like a ru. Um and I uh you know my closest experience is my partner She says it and watch my Ren. Just very much how I say it.
SPEAKER_04I always assumed it was an R sound added to other words, like it was an unnecessary kind of meaningless sound.
SPEAKER_01We're speaking about different things.
SPEAKER_04We are we are we are we are I've just realized you're talking about they're both R sounds, is that so?
SPEAKER_01Yes, sorry, I'm talking about the the R um sound. You're talking about the the the sound, the R Hwa, which is peculiar to Oh, are you talking about like the R L thing?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, no, no, I'm talking about Okay, hold on a second, hold on. Wait, wait, wait. Okay, so we're talking about two different R issues in the Chinese language. One being the and I don't want to minimize this, but there is a general Northeast Asian RL sound uh issue when they come over into other languages. Um I I know it's specifically in English, it's not that one. We're not talking about that one.
SPEAKER_01What I'm talking about is the the basic R sound in in Mandarin.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Which in when they teach you it, it's uh you've got to roll your tongue up with the reproflex thing. So it's related to the zr and the uh, you know, so it's one of those. I can't remember the exact linguistic but yeah, so they teach it like that, yet down here you'll hear it's much more like our straight R. Oh okay. Even that's different between American and British English, though, isn't it? It is, but I would say, you know, if I looked at the pinion for person, I would just say ren.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Whereas in Beijing or in standard Mamma is spoken, it's much more of a rr. And that's the J I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_04It's true in Japanese too. Right. Their R sound is, and I think that's part of the reason why they have a problem saying the R versus the why the R and the L are so close when they learn English. Is that that sound is is so so so different.
SPEAKER_01Like Japanese and Cantonese, I believe. Cantonese comes out some of the Mandarin doesn't have the R at the end.
SPEAKER_04Because there were, funnily enough, there were a lot of names, popular names in Japan that start with there are not past tense, there are a lot of Japanese names that start with an R.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And as a teacher coming into the language for the first time, you're like, I just can't say half these names because that R sound is so hard to do at first. Yeah, it is. But yeah, it is a much more intense. Okay, so that's one of the R sounds we're talking about. And what is the other one?
SPEAKER_01That's the uh that's the R H, which is the uh the turn the transforming of quite a lot of word endings into an R sound, which is uh the rotize roticization. We'll put that in. So then how to say but it's the uh yeah, it's the it's very much like the uh many places in American English will pronounce the R father, yeah, whereas in many places in the UK we don't do that anymore. Um we used to, but it for example in my local accent we as we say father, right? Yeah, with a schwa sound at the end. Yes. Um so it it's it's a sort of equivalent in some ways of that, but it it it does follow rules in the Beijing dialect, and it's it's actually a lot of them are considered part of standard Butonghwa as well, which is modeled on the Beijing dialect. But it seemed it's quite a strange part of learning because it's very particular. Yeah, there's plenty of people in China who don't do that.
SPEAKER_03Right, right, right.
SPEAKER_01So the yeah, like the Xiao Hai for child becomes Xiao Ha, which is what we're often taught in language schools, uh which is the official version, right? But also some much much less um uh predictable ones, I suppose, or unexpected more unexpected ones, like Park, Gong Yuen, Gong Yu R.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So there's plenty of destinations in Beijing where you ask the taxi driver, they'll actually correct how you'd expect it to sound into the R His. And more surprising ones still, like even Z a bottle here, I believe. Which really shocked me because I didn't know what the guy was saying at all.
SPEAKER_04Oh my gosh. So it's not an added sound, it's part of the original sound, but it's just not said in most parts.
SPEAKER_01Well, they convert some endings which in other places, yes, uh for example that you n becomes you are.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, they convert that uh ending into a I've no explained pronunciation. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_04You're explaining it probably the best that I've heard so far. Because I I did make the rhotic R comparison early on between English and and American English and British English, but it it feels like more than that now.
SPEAKER_01I I think yes, it to me it feels much more of a a jump to do that. And I feel strange doing it outside of Beijing, uh yet it is it is officially into the standard.
SPEAKER_04Right, right, right. Do people like on new news is generally in a lot of countries done in the standard language? Is news in China done in standard in Pudong? Yes, very much so. Do they use the this R?
SPEAKER_01They do, but it's it's a more limited scope because uh I believe there are a lot of um yeah, of the the R endings, which uh there are many more of them in the Beijing dialect, but they use a subset of them. Oh my god. And I think too what I just said, the word for bottle, I think that is that that I don't think they would say that on the news. It's very much a local thing. And it varies by region of Beijing, even I believe. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Of course it does.
SPEAKER_01Um but I just know to me that that whole that's a whole different impenetrable thing about.
SPEAKER_04So can you go in and out of your Beijing accent now?
SPEAKER_01No, not at all. I mean I I uh the accent apparently I have now, but I I don't know this myself, I've been told by um native speakers, is quite similar to my girlfriend's accent because she's not a native Mandarin speaker either. So um apparently mine's more of a southern variant.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, a southern variant but not Cantonese.
SPEAKER_01Not Cantonese, no. Uh but it's based on the you know, a lot of the um the con the visual consonant sounds blend together in the southern dialects. Yeah, southern dialects, um, which I first noticed going to Chang Sha Chang Shah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so apparently I've got a few of those now, so I'm much more non-standard than I used to be.
SPEAKER_04Oh my gosh. Do you find yourself kind of easy to listening-wise, to slip in and out and understand what people are saying, even if they're no, no, I I mean my my listening is still weaker than we should be.
SPEAKER_01Uh it's hard.
SPEAKER_04The accent differences, I can't tell what people are saying, but I can hear the different accents. And there are so many and they're so distinct.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean I find, as I said earlier, I find listening to Chinese it it's so difficult difficult because of the homonyms and the tones anyway. But then when you start getting different pronunciations of the the leading consonants, for example, um, or they blend together, I've so often mistaken entirely what someone's saying uh because they're not differentiating between those consonants. So yeah, it's a real challenge for me. I mean, um I I think apart from writing, it's my lowest skill is listening.
SPEAKER_04Oh, I I can barely write. If we take out the pinion input, I can barely write, and I still think the tones are lower, the not the tones, but the the sounds of the language and all of these things are even lower for me. It's so hard to hear. Even just like most of my transactions right now are at the coffee shop counter and in taxis, to be honest with you. That's how small my exchange is, how much I can handle. And taxi drivers are from like in most cities in the world, they're from all over that country or uh, you know, other places, they're usually like international or internal migrants or what have you, right? So they've got like a variety of accents. And when we first moved here, it's not giving away too much because there's tons of apartment buildings here, but we're really close to Pan Yulu. And I thought that's a really easy word to say. So I'm gonna use Hong Chao Lu, which is which generally is understood no matter how bad my tones are, and Pan Yulu, because that's not there's not a lot of other street names that are confused with that. And I thought, there's the intersection, I'm very close to there, that's what I'm gonna use.
SPEAKER_03Yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_04No, um, depending on the taxi driver, about every other taxi driver would want me to say or confirm that I lived on Fan Yulu.
SPEAKER_01Right, right, yes.
SPEAKER_04And I'm like, what? And part of me wanted to stop using it because I just needed to get home, and the other part of me wanted to start asking them where they were from, and then kind of make a little mental list in my head to see if that was a dialectical difference in some region in China.
SPEAKER_01But I think many um people, expats living in China or who've whether they've studied Chinese or not, will have the same frustration about the difficulty of being understood at times. And you know, I just just the last few days, two days running, I've taken a taxi back uh to where I live. Yeah, I've said exactly the same thing to the last night the taxi driver was absolutely spot, he just got it straight away, didn't have to say ask me to repeat, and then the guy the night before I just could not communicate at all until I showed him my phone, and then he went, Ah, and he said to me pretty much what I'd been saying. Yeah, um, so it can't, and so yesterday when I got in the taxi, I was dreading it because I thought we were gonna go through this again. Yeah, he understood me first time, yeah. The same happened again this morning.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh so it can be very much like that, and even a colleague um who is pretty much fluent gave me a bit of advice. He said when you're given an address, always start off with a district. So you're narrowing down the context. He says he has to do that. Yeah, I he's one of the most fluent people I've heard, as far as I'm concerned.
SPEAKER_04But I mean Shahui, that's a huge district. Does that narrow stuff down?
SPEAKER_01Um well he says it it's it almost directs the thing.
SPEAKER_04It's kind of uh Oh, because that's how the addresses are.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Oh my gosh, so I would say Shohoi and then Hong Chau Pan.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Um my god. You could even possibly narrow it down further by naming a metro station or something first and then adding the street name. It kind of just again it cuts down on that sort of space of uh between all the the homophony and the tones problems, it it narrows it down a bit more. I think anything helps to be honest. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Well, I've started to take pictures of the street signs of places I go often. Like near work, you UA UAUM, which I cannot say even when I'm not focusing on the tones. I I just can't. Taxi drivers do not understand it. I don't understand what I'm saying. So I've just taken a picture of the street sign, and I'll say one, I'll say the one street, and then I'll show them that one. Yes, yeah. And then we seem to be okay. But but they but I hear them say it when they're reading it, and it's different. It's literally different for every taxi driver.
SPEAKER_01I also think some taxi drivers, I mean, they also admit it as well, it's uh don't know the streets as well as you might expect. A lot of them live very quite a long way out of town, but they don't get the familiarity with all it's a huge city, I mean so is Beijing in just in terms of the geographical area. Yeah, um masses there's probably areas they might not know very well at all.
SPEAKER_03I'm gonna try that discount.
SPEAKER_01Um, and some of them have moved between cities and may not have that knowledge, you know. So you you can never be sure which factor it is that's causing the miscomprehension.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, no, it's so true, it's so true. The first uh my goal last year, and it's it's quickly changing, was to uh find out what's missing in the beginning, learning Chinese mobile app world, and create one. And I thought, oh, I thought I had it down. I was like, oh, we're gonna, I'm gonna take location names that that people would often go to when they first get here, and um, and and teach the language bit by bit so they get used to the the script and the sounds and all this stuff, and I'm gonna teach it by location names. I'm like, that's too many. Street names, there's too many. Okay, metro stops, too many. What about just central Shanghai Metro stops? Okay, and the more I dug into the words, the more I realized how historically significant they were, how the characters weren't used very much in regular Chinese. And I'm like, okay, that would not help them at all. They'd learn all this stuff and barely be able to use it anywhere else.
SPEAKER_01Some of it's uh yeah, some of its local usage as well. You get characters which um for geographical features which aren't necessarily used right.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I mean there's one in Shanghai uh which is used a lot, which is the Bang with the three dots. And I think it means like a creek or something. Yeah, yeah, it's like a little creek, a rivulet through. Um and that's probably quite common here. But I I never saw that in Beijing. I don't know. It's certainly not very common in Beijing, I don't think.
SPEAKER_04Um one thing I've noticed on street signs for um is we tend to use Lu like 99% of the time in Shanghai. And even just like in Nanjing or in Suzhou, they also have what is it, Gia?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Beijing's also got a lot of Gia. And there's another Gia as well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like they have a lot more. I guess the equivalent to street to road to all that.
SPEAKER_01I think they often in certainly in Beijing they're often translated as avenue. It tends to be a wider boulevard kind of idea, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Sure, sure, sure. But in China, I so rarely see anything other than Lu.
SPEAKER_01And here we also have the the the Nong as well.
SPEAKER_04What's what's that?
SPEAKER_01The the lane in the addresses. Ah it's based on the old the the old layout of traditional Shanghai.
SPEAKER_04I don't go to those places, so I haven't really been exposed to that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well uh the address I love at the minute it's a modern estate, but it's still the blocks are um of the estates, it has a lane number and it's what used to be there before they built the estate.
SPEAKER_04Um and what is that used for building number too?
SPEAKER_01Uh well we you tend to have building yeah, room number, building number.
SPEAKER_04Is it anywhere in this?
SPEAKER_01Yes, this one.
SPEAKER_04Long isn't that how?
SPEAKER_01No, that's how.
SPEAKER_04Oh wait, after the one?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, after the four, one, one.
SPEAKER_04Oh I didn't realise.
SPEAKER_01Oh sorry, I I think it's long. I don't it's one of these No way. It's actually long, sorry. It's a character with a couple of pronunciations, a couple of pronunciations.
SPEAKER_04Oh okay. No, no, no, I I don't know what that what that is. Okay, okay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it means lane and no way I've read one account which said um I mean reading a book about old Shanghai, about an um expat in Shanghai.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And it claims in that book that the long is actually a transliteration of lane. Oh, because a lot of uh old Shanghainese has got uh English terms built in with approximations, yeah, and because that is also uh non that character.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, yeah. So apparently that I didn't even know that we were just looking at my address, which I'm clearly not gonna read online, but um but yeah, I didn't know what that meant.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Um I just have a version of it so I can copy it over and buy things online.
SPEAKER_01So even those addresses, even though everything so much of Shanghao is now modern uh tower blocks and estates, it's still the address system's based on the old what lanes and uh Wow.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, because we're not yeah, we're not we're in a complex, but we're not technically in a lane like lane house lanes.
SPEAKER_01But that's well lane house is yet it comes from that. Yeah, yeah, but we're in an apartment complex.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, so they're still using that for that. Yes. Oh my god, there's so many nuances.
SPEAKER_01Beijing has its own addressing system as well, which is totally different.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my god. It's a wonderful. No wonder the taxi drivers can't come from sometimes because I was going around the town when a friend of mine who used to live in Beijing was here, and we were going, we were taking DDs and talking to taxi drivers and stuff, and I was giving intersections because I feel like that has been the when it's understood the most effective way to get them to go just go, go to that thing, that area, and then I can direct you left, right, and all that kind of stuff. And she they must not do that in Beijing because she was like, No, you have to give them the address, you have to give them the number. And I'm like, that's never worked for me in Shanghai. Yeah, like I give numbers and they look at me like, and even if I show to them, they're like, I don't care. What's the what's the intersection kind of thing?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Beijing is much more of a grid system. Oh but despite that, yes, you don't you you often don't get the intersection. They have this sort of block system, I don't know what it's called formally, but the postal system, you have a whole area of several blocks which has a name, uh, which I think probably relates to the old sort of village name. Oh god, and then you have numbers within that which are kind of things like square or rectangular areas. So you can have a number of one of these uh sets of blocks, but it you can't necessarily predict where that number's gonna be within, you just know the general area and the amount of times I got lost in Beijing because of that. Um but you need to kind of have a mental map of where these various things are.
SPEAKER_04And did you know this going in, or did you learn this by default when you resigned?
SPEAKER_01At first I couldn't understand what our address was, and then it gradually started to understand. I think a lot of the names in Beijing are based on the old um the families that lived in those areas or uh something like that, or functional trades that were carried out there, that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's quite disorientating because there are even things like addresses work in very different ways.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and those really are those functional moments where you just want to get that task done, and that task oftentimes is just getting home.
SPEAKER_03Yes, it is.
SPEAKER_04Oh my gosh, there's two more things I want to touch upon briefly before we finish. Um, I know that you're reading a book on Chinese script.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_04Can you kind of talk about how you got into that and what you I don't know, just like it's a good idea.
SPEAKER_01Well, one thing that has always frustrated me was that no matter how much my reading developed and improved, um I still had no idea what handwritten Chinese was saying. And I was always quite baffled how I just could we're talking about cursive script basically. Yeah, um you know Chinese people will print characters, but very rarely, it's uh very rare to actually print them out, uh, from what I've seen. So, for example, people I know would leave a note, a handwritten note, and I would pick it up and I wouldn't I'd be able to recognise maybe a few of the characters, but often I was just baffled. Sometimes I couldn't even tell who left it. Right, so I was determined to try and improve this, but there's a complete dearth of uh information about it. But there was there's a book, um learning Chinese script, I think it's called, and it was published in the 50s, I believe. And it went out of print. And when I was back in the UK, I managed to get hold of a copy of it. Um and I've been working through it, and now the differences are so apparent because there are there are almost certain parts of characters are almost written in a um a shorthand, okay, which you you'd have to you have to know first that that's what it's trying to represent.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_01Um so I'm working through it and it's it's very effective actually. Um but it's no wonder I've never been able to just pick that up clear from people's writing.
SPEAKER_04Are there any examples that can be described? The downfalls of an audio medium. Like a common word they would have to abbreviate the word for eye, because there's so many friggin' strokes in that. Do they abbreviate that one?
SPEAKER_01They do, um yeah, they I can't really describe how it's abbreviated, but it's easier to write, it's quicker to write.
SPEAKER_04Okay, are there less strokes in it?
SPEAKER_01Yes, they tend to reduce the strokes. Um, put it this way, a lot of the simplified characters that were introduced in the 50s and 60s, um, people are always complaining about simplified characters saying they lost the beauty and that's arbitrary. Many of them weren't arbitrary, they were the way that people wrote in cursive. Yeah, um, so they were familiar to many people anyway, but they didn't necessarily have a strong relationship or any relationship to the existing part of their character. So uh yeah, some of them are quite familiar, and you realize why, you know, yeah. But for example, you may have um this is just a very vague example. You may have two lines that cross, which are two separate strokes. People all do it as a loop instead, a self a crossing loop because it means you don't have to take the pen off the paper and you just continuous. Yeah, um, and you know, we do similar similar things with our writing as a poems, but I think it works in a very different way. Some things will be simplified right down from the quite intricate part to a squiggle, quite literally, that's the only way it is. Described it.
SPEAKER_03Wow.
SPEAKER_01You know, you'll have something that just it looks as it's like zigzag, and it actually represents four or five strokes or a part of a character. I remember one time, one of the few times I ever went to get my hair cut was in rural Hunan province with a friend. I went in, my friend went off shopping, they cut my hair, and at the end the guy kept he was trying to say something, but in a local dialect. I couldn't understand what he was saying. Disappeared in the back of the shop for ages, came out with a notepad and scribbled something in cursive script. I was like, I can't read that at all. Eventually my friend came out and I said, Can you help? He's trying to tell me something. Eventually she talked and said he's saying he's finished.
SPEAKER_04Oh my god. Isn't there a hand gesture for that? Oh my god.
SPEAKER_01I couldn't understand his dialogue, I couldn't understand his cursive. Yeah, that's all he was trying to say was I finished you and get up now and pay.
SPEAKER_04I love how he thought the written version was going to be easier than the spoken one.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, that's actually people tracing the character in the air with their finger, which is very common to be. Yes, to assume that you can understand Chinese writing before you. Right. But in my case, that's actually true.
SPEAKER_04But not with the cursive, because that's a whole other thing.
SPEAKER_01It's a different skill again, yeah, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04So do you feel like you can read the script more now that you've been?
SPEAKER_01More, but that's I'm s I'm I'm halfway to the book, and the book only covers 250 characters, but it covers a lot of components that are common. There's a certain logic to the uh the simplification or the the the the cursification.
SPEAKER_04I wonder if there's the there must be a equivalent for English writing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, put it this way, my dad, you know, he learned to like sort of copy play handwriting in school, and his to me his writing is very, very hard to read. And for example, my nephew and niece can't understand their granddad's writing because that was how they were taught in school, and it's changed so much in it. I suppose that uses a similar sort of coding. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I remember learning script. When we move when we moved from New York to Pennsylvania, in New York we hadn't start cursive, which is the fancier version, right? Um, and in Pennsylvania they did. So when I moved in, they had already they were already in the process of learning it, and like on day one, I was supposed to be doing the writing practice with everybody, and I was like, I've never seen this before, I don't even know. And I was very shy girl, so I was just like, I'll just sit here and draw circles. Because I'm like, if it looks like I'm writing, then I should be fine. And my teacher's like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I don't know what this because it was it looked like such a different creature to me. Yeah, so yeah, so I just interesting.
SPEAKER_01I can't I can't write cursive anymore. I I was always terrible at hand writing, but I've realized that now I can only print. It's amazing.
SPEAKER_04I can't because of that experience and because of the so much the amount of practice we did in elementary school, I think I could, but it would take me a while to remember some of them.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Like even just the letter F, because my last name starts with F, it's something like is it something like that? Oh my god, I'm not a good No, that's T, that's F or something, right?
SPEAKER_01I don't I don't know.
SPEAKER_04Like it was so intricate, and I was like, dude, look, it's three lines, why are we doing that?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, that's so it's so ridiculous.
SPEAKER_04But it was it was you know, a few years after that, I think is when they stopped teaching it. Right and everybody just went to script or d went to print just the regular. I think so.
SPEAKER_01Oh, didn't know that, right?
SPEAKER_04I I'm pretty sure they stopped.
SPEAKER_01We we actually we used to have handwriting lessons and we had to use a fountain pen.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, okay, we didn't.
SPEAKER_01I remember the teacher shout because I was I was so messy with my handwriting. I actually have remedial lessons for my handwriting. Oh yeah. And I was such a messy writer that using a fountain pen. I remember one point the teacher shouting at me, pointing upwards, was ink on the ceiling. No I don't know what I was doing, but um I think it's you're probably thinking or something.
SPEAKER_04Oh wow, I wrote that, okay.
SPEAKER_01But for me, I mean if they come out of those lessons just covered your forehead, my hair, and I've been covered in blue ink.
SPEAKER_04To this day, I don't think I've ever used a fountain pen. No. I've used kind of fancy pens that look like they would be, but they have ink inside of them. Like you don't dip them in.
SPEAKER_01I've always been curious about the theory was at the time that using such an instrument would actually force you to write beautiful flowing script. And for me, it was exactly the opposite. It just looked like something a bird had walked all over the paper.
SPEAKER_04I appreciate, especially with Chinese calligraphy, I appreciate that there is an art form attached to the language that's a really neat version of it. But when you're talking about communication and learning and those kinds of things, I think when we get stuck in the tradition of it, when we're trying to get something done, I think that can be counterproductive sometimes.
SPEAKER_01And I guess back in the 70s we're still in the era of um of having to write letters and a lot of jobs involved letter writing. Yeah, yeah. And they had to they had the look neat and follow, and uh, you know, that's just not an issue anymore.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't use computers on a regular basis until what university? I think definitely not in the classrooms. We didn't have laptops in the classroom. Pewline couldn't afford laptops at that time. They were still super expensive, and they just weren't like I remember in elementary school we had one class where we they were kind of introducing us to computers and we went into the computer lab that was new and fancy and all that, and we played some game where we moved something up and down.
SPEAKER_03Moved something up and down.
SPEAKER_04I it was it was a game, I think, but it was such a rudimentary game that I was like, this is is anybody having fun? Like, what are we doing? We're we're using the cursor. We've got an entire keyboard and we're using the cursor. What are we doing? It was very bizarre.
SPEAKER_01One of my first jobs uh I I had a clerical job where I had a write to customers, and literally, if you wanted the thing typed, the letter type, you had to send off to a typing pool and wait three days for it to come back. So we were actually handwriting customer accounts even in tables and sending them out, and that was in the early 90s. So uh I always felt quite embarrassed sending out these things because my writing was awful, um, and I would draw these tables, I was so messy. Um but that was only in the 90s, you know. So yeah, handwriting was still important, then I suppose.
SPEAKER_04But uh and there are still applicate job applications where you have to fill them out. Yes, but they don't require, they've never required script. Actually, print has been the norm for those.
SPEAKER_01They often say print in the book or something, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and they'll even have examples of the the crisp print that you're supposed to be using so they can read it. And I'm like, wait, so okay, so for function, we're gonna use the readable stuff, and then it's yeah, it's interesting how fast things have changed.
SPEAKER_01It is when you look at Chinese and the way that people use the writing system, even since I've been here, um, you know, that because everyone's using their mobile devices and computers to enter pinion. Um I remember going to Carafour and the first few days and buying something and had to take it back. And I remember she couldn't find one of the characters in our address on the system. So she ended up just typing out an opinion. That still happens sometimes, yeah, because it's a rare character.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But I remember the way she was using the computer, it was all like drop-down menus and it was all ding-da-dig-top, key top, key top. Whereas now people are so fluent with it and touch screens, also some people use strokes.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. I I often do that in Pleco because I find if I have the word in front of me, I find it easier to I I would say draw instead of right, but I find it easier to to use that because I kind of the stroke orders seem kind of logical to me, so I can as long as I get those right, because Pleco is a bitch about that. Yeah. They actually are strict about stroke order, which I find sort of one of the things I'm not fond about with Pleco, one of the rare things that I don't like. But I find I can draw it kind of easier and then find it below, as opposed to try to remember what it's called, like the name of the word or whatever.
SPEAKER_01That's right. Yeah, it you're right, it it's worth learning the stroke order, even if just for these for uh systems like recognition systems like that. Um I know some people say it's not important, but the trouble is these things do tend to work on stroke orders.
SPEAKER_04They do. Now, what would be better is if Plecko didn't care about the stroke order. But then supposedly you can people can tell the difference when you're handwriting them if they look differently.
SPEAKER_01Apparently, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04I don't know if that's gonna stick around much longer. Honestly, it's I don't know how I I actually want to at some point ask some folks that it'd be fun to like go into. Actually, one of my viewers from the YouTube channel was telling me, Oh, you should go to the parks and you should like ask how people write it two different ways and ask them if they can tell the difference. And I'm like, when I get to that level of speaking, that sounds like a really good thing to do, but right now I'll just be like pointing, going, ah, ah, ah, and I won't be able to convey it. But it would be kind of a fun thing, like, can you really tell the difference if it's written the right way?
SPEAKER_01I I I think if you I wonder if that comes from um calligraphy where you would. If you're using a calligraphy brush, right, you would tell where the stroke starts and ends, but then again, that's part of the craft as well. But I wonder if that's a misconception because of that.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_01I did have a teacher at one of the places, the school I went to, where she was trying to tell me off for not using crack one, and I was because I I was always very picky about doing it. I got trying, I'd really try to drill myself in doing that, and she was insisting I'd written a certain character one way that I had literally just written it, so I knew, you know, but I think she was trying to make a point, but you know, you do it. So I mean it was a bit of a futile. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04And I didn't have people topic like I do all my flashcards in um in pencil, just so I because I know no matter how much I watch how it's drawn, written, I I know I'm gonna get some things wrong and I'll wanna go back and erase and redo it later. And if it's just one little part of it, I do go and erase one little part and do it and do that part over. And I've had people tell me you have to write Chinese in ink because that will that changes the look of the character enough.
SPEAKER_01Right, yeah.
SPEAKER_04And I just I don't know.
SPEAKER_01I I find when I'm writing Chinese characters in pencil, like the pencil's continuously snapping. I've never got the fresh area, yeah. I've never because my writing's messy anyway, I just find I'm scoring into the paper, you know, and that's terrible.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's funny, it's interesting you said that because I went on a stationary run when we're when we were in London last year, this year, and I bought tons of pencils that had erasers on them, because I find way too many pencils here don't have erasers on them. And I like to have the all-in-one thing. But when I came back and was using them to to write my flashcards, I did find that they were they were snapping easier. And I'm like, what? That's not happening with the ones I bought in China. And I'd be writing with the Chinese ones and going, these are working fine, but the eraser's not there, and I was like, where's that middle ground? So I wonder if they're because it was they were both 0.5 or 0.7, like those are the only two ones that I use. So they weren't a different thickness.
SPEAKER_01I wonder if they use a different more durable thing. Interesting.
SPEAKER_04Why would we need more? It's is it because the strokes are longer than isn't a more variable pressure people using a character.
SPEAKER_01I would I would assume, but I don't know, because I I personally I don't. But uh just I'm guessing in um when we're writing English we use a consistent pressure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I'm imagining characters, it would be very because certainly with calligraphy, yeah, you do use different pressures.
SPEAKER_04Oh my gosh, that's so if anybody is in the business of making mechanical pencils, please let me know. I'd like to interview you about this process. Sorry, I like it, I thought throwing those in. The final thing I want to ask you about is coding. You've done a fair bit, uh, which is an understatement, of computer coding. Do you make any connections to the Chinese language and coding, the learning of, the usage of?
SPEAKER_01You know, I well in a certain way, um, I don't know whether this is I don't know if this is really what you're asking, but in one aspect I can see a connection in the I I think what I've identified in my life as I really enjoy learning systems of things. You know, the brand new system, uh like the writing system of Chinese, um, even the grammar system. And you know, even when I was younger, I remember getting my mother to buy me a um getting me to buy me a shorthand book. She learned shorthand as a secretary. And uh she says, Why on earth do you want to learn shorthand? It's just because it was a system, and I think coding's a bit like that. Set of rules, there's a certain consistency and logic to it all. Um, I find Chinese is more like that than certain other languages, I would say.
SPEAKER_04Thank 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. Please feel free to contact me in any social media way that you see. Go ahead and contact me, and we will hash out how to get you on the sound creation. No, changing the scriptures of the podcast. A lot of words coming your way to the soon.
SPEAKER_00You know what is wrong with health in today. Why didn't you go to the gym today? You're so lazy. You have no health control.