I Got a Tablet!

I never really saw the point in having a tablet in the past. I mean, it all seemed like such a fad, having a big touch screen device around. How was it going to increase productivity or anything like that? It was something that seemed great to have, but not a necessity, unlike a laptop (now that’s a necessity!)

I bought an iPad 4 a few months ago, but that was a present for my mum. I played around with it, but even till now, I still don’t really know how to navigate around iOS.

The past week, I’ve been playing with a Surface Pro 2. It was on special, so how could I pass the offer by? Not only was the price comparable to similar late model Samsung tablets, but I was getting a full sized computer system in a tablet, so in thinking that I would be buying a tablet in the near future, I jumped in and bought it.

I thought that why not spend a little money? It will be like my birthday gift and xmas gift to myself for all the hard work that I slogged through during my previous rotation (man, and hard work I did!)

Anyway, so I learnt about the windows 8 gestures, and the new desktop without the start button. I like windows 8.1, but then again, I’ve had a windows phone, so I’m kind of familiar with the tiles and all.

What struck me about the tablet, was it’s beautiful finish and beautiful screen. It felt very responsive navigating around, and having the wacom pen was fantastic in writing notes and such. It was just fantastic.

The windows store is lacking in many things however compared to iOS and android, but with full blown windows, I can install any desktop app I want. The only reason why I wanted a fantastic store, was for finding apps to learn chinese from, but the apps on offer are extremely limited, and the ones that require me to pay are too basic for me.

I was a little pissed that apps like Pleco and skritter were available for android and iOS, but not windows store, but then it made me realize that before I had a tablet, I was learning chinese just fine on my laptop without apps. So, I realized that I could just continue to use the full websites like memrise, fluentu, lang 8 and other chinese websites to learn my chinese from. What’s neat, is that I can just pin the sites to the start menu.

Anyway, with such a new tablet at hand, I’m going to have a lot of fun exploring the new possibilities I can compute.

Awesome Website For Learning a New Language

Quite a while ago, I stumbled across an excellent website for learning a new language. It’s called Lang-8 and it works by allowing you to post things in the language you want to learn, and having native speakers of the language you’re learning correcting your mistakes.

However, in doing this, you will also have to correct other people’s entries – it’s a community of give and take. The more entries you correct, the more L-points you get, meaning your entries get a higher likelihood of being corrected by other users.

It’s a website that I frequent quite often, as it helps me to learn a lot in Chinese. It’s however something that I find difficult to learn to speak and listen in. It’s very good for my grammar and vocabulary, but I need practice in listening and speaking.

I hope to skype with some of the people there so that I can improve my chinese skills.

🙂

On Learning Chinese

Chinese is hard, I’m not going to lie. After studying Chinese for over 2 years, I still feel I can’t comprehend much of the language.

The 3 main issues I have with learning Chinese are:

1. The thousands of different characters

Chinese has so many different characters, and you’d likely need to know at least 5000 unique characters to comfortably read a Chinese newspaper. It’s not just the characters you need to know, but character combinations that are used to form new meanings and words.

For instance, the character for love 爱 (ai4) and for good 好(hao3), form a completely new meaning when placed together, meaning interests 爱好 (ai4hao3). Even though you knew what the characters individually meant, you would miss the meaning of the word 爱好 if you had never learned the meaning of that word combination before.

There are many Chinese people I know, who can read the characters, but who cannot write the characters. So called “character amnesia” happens very frequently to people, who cannot manage to write simple characters. It’s happened to me too, when I try and remember how to write characters that I could easily recognize. It’s about constant repetition, and constant practice of writing characters that trains the muscles of your hands to write the character. A lot of motor skill memory to write the characters.

So essentially, there is a great deal of memorization needed to master Chinese.

2. It’s a tonal language

In mandarin Chinese, there are 4 different tones. These are neutral, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th tone. Pronouncing a word in a different tone can lead to misunderstanding of a completely different word.

For instance, ai3 (矮）means short, whereas ai4 （爱）means love. To the english speaker, they would pronounce it as “aye” for both words, but in mandarin, you need the tones present to distinguish the words apart.

It’s something that has been very difficult for me trying to pronounce tones. Speaking quickly, I’d get the tones mixed up, so I need to speak very slowly. And listening to others when they’re speaking very quickly gets me confused at times.

3. The characters aren’t phonetic

One of the biggest gripes I have with the language, is that the characters aren’t phonetic in nature. If there is a new character you have never seen before, you won’t know how to pronounce it. If you don’t know how to pronounce it, looking it up in the dictionary is going to be very difficult, as a lot of electronic dictionaries rely on pinyin (the romanization of chinese character pronounciations). There are radical searches of course, and stroke numbers search, but these are very cumbersome.

For instance, if I see a new character such as 河 （he2 – river), I would not know how to pronounce the character at all. I could vaguely guess the meaning, as the 3 strokes on the very left indicate relation to water, so I could guess the character had something to do with water. But not knowing how to pronounce it would just be frustrating. English is better in this sense, in that words are all phonetic, so even if I don’t know the meaning, I can at least probably read it out approximately.

 

Aside from these gripes with the language, I still learn mandarin, because it’s challenging, and it’s a part of my identity. In fact, writing is extremely therapeutic, and through the years, I can start seeing results in my ability to read short texts and understand what has been said by mandarin speakers.

My Chinese character practice – lots and lots of practice

I hope to be able to get to HSK5 level by the first half of next year. It involves memorizing a lot of characters, so I take it day by day. It’s an exercise in patience and persistence, and that’s part of the draw for me in learning chinese, and in learning any new skill in general. 🙂