Chinese

Pages

Pages on Chinese authored by me,

• On 'Chinese'—a description of that thing we call 'Chinese'
• Chinese Characters—funny moon runes that take a long time to learn to read
• Learning Chinese—my experience as a second language learner of Chinese

Let's Study Together!

Here are some conventions I currently am making use of. By having standard operating procedures (yeah.. yeah... the business people understand some of these things well) we can ensure a consistent, quality experience for all 🕴

1. Make use of existing standardization efforts. For foreigners, we can make use of HSK vocab, grammar, etc. to establish a "common core" of things we can expect one another to know.
2. "Code switch" over proliferating confusion. The convention that I am adopting in Chinese is to just use normal Romanized spellings for names of Western things, for example. So I can write 你吃过tacos没有？ [ni3 chi1guo TACOS mei2you3?] "have you tried TACOS" instead of trying to make up some weird phonetic transcription of "tacos". A corollary to this is that, if one would like to speak more "pure Chinese", they can simply avoid loan words that demand switching to another writing system.
3. Use Pinyin to help your readers. In Japanese, it is common to have furigana annotations in materials for learners (e.g. grade school students) as well as for adult readers when presenting something that is just... uncommon/difficult. We can use this technique to help improve Chinese literacy. While the "number system" isn't especially pleasant to look at (then again, lots of digital text is quite ugly...), I prefer it overall because it is significantly easier to type than the correct accent marks. If you would like to learn/use Chinese well with lots of different people, it is necessary for the methods you employ to be easily usable/accessible to non-nerds.
4. Share/Cite Reference Texts. I am not mainly talking about "grammar books", but rather sources of "correct Chinese"; In order for a standard to succeed, people must have examples of proper standard usage.

Resources

Below are some online English language resources I use.

Online

• MDBG Dictionary
• Zhongwen: Chinese-English Dictionary (popup browser dictionary)

What sort of Chinese language content do you look at? My current "go-to" translation of the Bible is the 新译本 [Xin1yi4ben3] "New Translation", which can be found here. For political babble, I go to VOA Chinese because it loads fast enough in the USA and there is lots of audio/video.

Paper

'cause looking at screens sux

In Asia, lots of study materials are available, but not all of those are readily available in the USA. I'm looking for useful materials that readily available/purchasable from Establishment enterprises like Amazon.

• Chinese Characters: Reading and Writing CHINESE: A Comprehensive Guide to the Chinese Writing System (3 ed.) (William McNaughton revised by Jiageng Fan 2013, Tuttle)
• Traditional Chinese Culture: CHINESE: Symbolism & Art Motifs: A Comprehensive Handbook on Symbolism in Chinese Art Through the Ages (4 ed.) (C.A.S. Williams 2006, Tuttle)