Thanks for listening. Very glad you found the interview helpful. I feel the same way. If you’re interested it would be great to document your progress using sentence mining methods over the coming months on the blog! Good luck.
It’s clear that something like anki won’t make you fluent by itself.
That said, the opposite conclusion that it is useless is also false.
SRS is based on solid science so if you want to memorize a ton of stuff it works.
For listening, however, I suspect Chinese’s much more simplified grammar is an advantage.
This may be one of the biggest misconceptions in linguistics.
Allow me to scream this one from the rooftops:
Chinese grammar isn’t simple. In any sense whatsoever.
The reason people say that it’s simple, is because it lacks certain specific features which make some european languages challenging to learn, for example genders and cases.
But in fact Chinese grammar is extremely complex. So complicated, in fact, that it’s virtually impossible to summarise in bullet points that students can make use of to learn the language.
The parts that can be easily summarised in this way are in fact extremely simple: subject, object + verb etc. They are fed to new learners who then go around telling all and sundry that Chinese grammar is very simple.
In order to encourage new students Chinese teachers also go around making this claim. And finally it makes its way to lay people who have never studied the Chinese language.
But if you want to speak Chinese with accurate grammatical constructions that mimic how natives speak, that is extremely challenging. Not something to be taken lightly.
This podcast gives me a lot of hope! I started learning Mandarin in lockdown and tried to approach it like learning a Romance language totally ignoring tones. I have since altered my approach and Will’s strategies assure me that I am studying the right way and has given me concrete ideas on how to progress. Thanks Will for sharing your story!
The reason I’m going to keep ignoring you is that you seem to think everything about Chinese is super-difficult and in spite of your statements to the contrary that you allegedly have an open mind I’ve yet to see you agree you’ve made a single flawed statement. I’ve heard your arguments. About 30% of them are sound and the rest are derived from shaky conclusions and half-baked dunning-krueger level assumptions drawn from a laundry list of rhetorical fallacies. Come down off your high horse and we’ll talk until then, snooze.
you seem to think everything about Chinese is super-difficult.
I didn’t say everything about Chinese is super difficult. That completely depends on what you want to achieve.
If you want to able to order food at a restaurant and be understood then no, Chinese grammar isn’t hard.
If what you want to achieve is native like proficiency or near native like profficiency then yes. Every single aspect of Chinese - whether it’s grammar, pronunciation, reading - or anything else is extremely difficult.
Anybody who achieves near native like profficiency in any one of those aspects has done something extremely impressive and deserves respect for that IMO.
I’ve heard your arguments. About 30% of them are sound and the rest are derived from shaky conclusions and half-baked dunning-krueger level assumptions.
I’m not sure what the Dunning Kruger reference means. The only sense I can make of it is that you’re positioning me at a point of low confidence on the classic Dunning Kruger graph, following the sharp come down. As a result you think I’m overinflating the difficulty of Chinese? I’m not sure what else it could mean.
In any case to reiterate I’m not trying to say Chinese is super duper hard, much harder than any other language etc. I’m just saying the Chinese grammar is “simple” take is a widely held misconception among language learners with no experience of studying Chinese…
So here’s an example of the issue I have with your arguments:
You said “I didn’t say everything about Chinese is super difficult”
then you said only a couple sentences later: “Every single aspect of Chinese - whether it’s grammar, pronunciation, reading - or anything else is extremely difficult.”
No doubt you’ll turn around and say this is not inconsistent.
EDIT: to be fair you did clarify “to achieve native level”. So my bad.
Also you said: “If what you want to achieve is native like proficiency or near native like profficiency then yes”
This is true of pretty much any language though.
The FSI has already done a bunch of work categorizing languages.
Chinese is in group 4 which makes it among the hardest.
But why? It’s mostly the writing system and the fact that (stupidly) [and we agree on this point] most learners are using a traditional system of learning which is read and take grammar based traditional classes or read grammar books on their own.
Which is exactly the wrong way to do it. All polyglots know this.
It is pretty clear to anybody (you don’t need a PHD in Chinese to see this) the writing system in Chinese is among the most difficult to acquire.
So Will ignored it. I also ignored writing systems. That simplifies things dramatically.
Now what are the most complicated factors then?
Tones? So what. Tones will make it more difficult to speak and more difficult to identify precisely which “ma” was spoken. But that’s no different other kinds of pronunciation issues like not being able to distinguish between e.g. “chat” and “jat”. You could still know that e.g. “chat” means horse and “jat” means “mama” and understand it from context.
You say the grammar is more complex?
It has a fixed word order. It doesn’t have cases.
It doesn’t decline the nouns and it doesn’t conjugate the verbs.
Now it probably does have something equivalent so you can tell whether it’s present, past or future but not necessarily anywhere as complex as you’ll see in other languages.
So your point is that to be a perfect native-like speaker it takes a lot of work.
Sure. But again, this is true for other languages.
And I don’t care. I’m interested in whether I can get to understanding TV shows or communicate with the natives.
Active communication is much more difficult in any language even for bare bones communication than passive understanding is. That’s why there are many children who can understand their parent’s mother tongue but cannot speak it.
But for me your point is moot and irrelevant. I don’t care about perfecting speaking. If I can order a beer, ask directions and tell a story about where I went to school and get my point across that’s good enough.
Russian is super complicated grammatically - due to the cases. Spanish is super complicated grammatically due to all the conjugations. You need these things just to be understood, not to be perfect. As far as I can make out the most difficult part of spoken Chinese for conversational level is the pronunciation and the tones and honestly it seems barely more difficult than Russian pronunciation.
To reiterate, I’m not making the case here that Chinese is the hardest language in the world or harder than other languages etc. I don’t have an opinion on that since I haven’t studied other languages (except French which is very similar to my L1 Spanish.)
I’m just pushing back on some factual inaccuracies.
…the writing system in Chinese is among the most difficult to acquire…So Will ignored it.
Well no, he didn’t ignore it. He learned, and continues to learn, to read and type Chinese characters. I’m nor sure why it’s necessary to keep pretending that fact away.
You say the grammar is more complex? It has a fixed word order.
Yes, Chinese grammar is very rich, interesting, subtle and complex. For some reason it has gained a reputation for being simple, largely because people who haven’t studied it in any depth have spread this myth. And because Chinese teachers (understandably) want to avoid putting new students off.
I don’t know what you mean by a fixed word order. The word order in Chinese sentences is quite flexible. Chinese word order is very different from european languages so relying on european constructions and word order is a common pitfall and a barrier to being comprehended by native speakers.
That’s why I recommend sentence mining as a means of overcoming this. Trying to memorise the rules which govern word order is not effective precisely because they are too complicated.
It doesn’t have cases. It doesn’t decline the nouns and it doesn’t conjugate the verbs.
That’s right, it doesn’t have these particular features common to some european languages. This has led to the myth that Chinese grammar is “simplistic” or “simple” or “easy to master” when it isn’t any of these things.
Now it probably does have something equivalent so you can tell whether it’s present, past or future but not necessarily anywhere as complex as you’ll see in other languages.
Chinese ‘tenses’ operate using a complex and subtle system of completed action markers and particles. Mastering the use of these so that you can effectively convey time/ tenses is challenging. As a substitute for overcoming this challenge some learners and teachers pretend that the 了 particle operates like the past tense -ed verb ending in English. But it doesn’t. It’s much more subtle and complicated than that.
But for me your point is moot and irrelevant. I don’t care about perfecting speaking. If I can order a beer, ask directions and tell a story about where I went to school and get my point across that’s good enough.
Those are perfectly modest and respectable goals. You should be able to achieve them within a reasonable time frame and without too much strenuous effort.
You also wouldn’t need to grapple with Spanish grammar if you just wanted to be comprehended on a simple everyday level or order a beer: “una cerveza por favor”.
However, like Spanish, if you want Chinese friends to understand your precise meaning when converying more complex information, for example relaying a story relating to past and future events it will become more challenging. Again, the higher your goals, the bigger the challenge. This applies to all languages.
As far as I can make out the most difficult part of spoken Chinese for conversational level is the pronunciation and the tones and honestly it seems barely more difficult than Russian pronunciation.
Tones are challenging because we don’t have them in English. But apart from tones I actually don’t think Chinese pronunciation is especially challenging.
I think Chinese people learning English have a harder time than English speakers learning Chinese (assuming we have a firm grasp of tones) because English contains a wider variety of phonetic components and many of these don’t exist in Mandarin.
Anyway I hope what I’ve written has clarified a few misconceptions about the Chinese language. Let me know if you have any more questions. Happy to help 
OK so you’re willing to be reasonable sometimes. Cool.
To reiterate, I’m not making the case here that Chinese is the hardest language in the world or harder than other languages etc.
To a casual reader it certainly seems that way, though.
Well no, he didn’t ignore it. He learned, and continues to learn, to read and type Chinese characters. I’m nor sure why it’s necessary to keep pretending that fact away.
He mostly ignored it then. Since he focused primarily on speaking and listening at the beginning. If he had the characters in anki along with audio inevitably with repetition he would have remembered some of the more common characters anyway.
That’s right, it doesn’t have these particular features [conjugation, declination and cases] common to some european languages. This has led to the myth that Chinese grammar is “simplistic” or “simple” or “easy to master” when it isn’t any of these things.
Let’s agree on not “mastering” but getting to communicative stage.
From what I have googled, it is not as complex as other languages to get to intermediate.
Tones are challenging because we don’t have them in English. But apart from tones I actually don’t think Chinese pronunciation is especially challenging.
OK cool it seems we are partially in agreement [pronunciation is likely to be barely more difficult than Russian]
I think Chinese people learning English have a harder time than English speakers learning Chinese (assuming we have a firm grasp of tones) because English contains a wider variety of phonetic components and many of these don’t exist in Mandarin.
I actually spoke to an old Chinese guy this morning at length. In his opinion English is incredibly difficult. But ironically he speaks it really well and learned it as an adult. So it may not be that it’s actually as difficult as he thinks but because he doesn’t have a frame of reference. I bet Chinese would find Russian way more difficult than English.
Anyhow end result, I still don’t believe spoken Chinese will be substantially more difficult (if at all) than Russian. My opinion is that writing systems overcomplicate the learning of a language. But time will tell. I’m not about to drop Russian just to be able to prove it.
My prediction if I just did my method with no modifications:
(i.e. I didn’t try to speak or read and didn’t learn to produce or clearly recognize tones):
I would be roughly the same as where I am with Russian after a year with the same time spent. If I tried to speak I would screw up the tones but otherwise my pronunciation would be way better than that of most people who try to learn it using traditional methods.
This won’t happen, however, because I will modify my method by learning tones and doing IPA up front for a couple months before I get into it. So in reality my prediction is that after a year I can speak and understand at intermediate level and my pronunciation will not be horrible. We can wager if you like. I plan to start January 2023.
I just want to share some quick info with you guys:
- Experimental Methods in Language Learning / Acquisition Research
- This Wikipedia article on “deliberate practice”:
Practice (learning method) - Wikipedia
Yes, “deliberate practice” may be necessary and not sufficient
(keyword: “Matthew effect”). but that can also be discussed, studied,
and analyzed.
In short:
We need more stuff like this in SLA, not less
- with resorting only to vague feelings and dubious conclusions: “I feel competent, therefore I’m competent”. This is “Dunning-Kruger pure” and, esp. when it comes out of the mouths of beginners and intermediate learners, often devoid of any substance.
- with emotional verbiage à la “revolution, outliers, never seen or heard of, bla bla bla”
- without applying any critical and analytical thinking
- without any tracking / stats / data
- without any testing
etc.
Nice WE to y’all
Peter
That’s great to hear! Thanks for listening
My prediction if I just did my method with no modifications:
(i.e. I didn’t try to speak or read and didn’t learn to produce or clearly recognize tones): I would be roughly the same as where I am with Russian after a year with the same time spent.
I’m not sure how good your Russian is so I can’t comment. All I’ll say is that tones are said to carry roughly the same amount of information as vowels in English. So here’s what you would sound like after a year messing up the tones:
A weed luk I boar plus.
Do you think the barman would be able to guess from context that you’d like a beer? Could you? Perhaps, perhaps not.
All I can say is that I hope your’e able to order a beer in Russian after a year.
This example is a bit biased because russian or other grammatically complex languages have different learning curves for speaking than say chinese or english.
“All I’ll say is that tones are said to carry roughly the same amount of information as vowels in English. So here’s what you would sound like after a year messing up the tones:
A weed luk I boar plus.
Do you think the barman would be able to guess from context that you’d like a beer? Could you? Perhaps, perhaps not.
All I can say is that I hope your’e able to order a beer in Russian after a year.”
Instead of one wasting time practicing conjugating verbs, gender, or cases they spend that time on the harder part pronunciation in this case. So one would not butcher give me a beer that bad in chinese or english.
Gender/case/conjugation/subjunctive systems take a very long time to master but just like pronunciation systems take a long time to master.
spanish example: me gustaron ordenar un cervezeria para favor.
english example (perfect pronunciation): I like beer thank you. (this person is trying to order with this statement)
if one messes up pronunciation or grammar context has to do the heavy lifting in any language.
@michilini: I’m not sure how good your Russian is so I can’t comment. All I’ll say is that tones are said to carry roughly the same amount of information as vowels in English. So here’s what you would sound like after a year messing up the tones:
A weed luk I boar plus.
Do you think the barman would be able to guess from context that you’d like a beer? Could you? Perhaps, perhaps not.
All I can say is that I hope your’e able to order a beer in Russian after a year.
You have cherry picked the piece I said I wouldn’t do in order to build a straw man. Obviously a joke.
I hope you enjoyed it.
@hagowinchun:
This example is a bit biased because russian or other grammatically complex languages have different learning curves for speaking than say chinese or english.
Of course it’s not completely an apples to apples comparison.
I’m making a back of the envelope guesstimate based on the following:
- Strip out the writing system - we’re just doing speaking and listening
- The ridiculous grammatical complexity of spoken Russian is roughly equivalent to Chinese tones plus wierder pronunciation in Chinese plus zero cognates in Chinese plus simpler grammar (than Russian).
- We’re not immersing. We don’t get either a Russian or a Chinese girlfriend.
If we hold these 3 things constant I believe that the effort is roughly equivalent and perhaps even favoring Chinese as being easier than Russian not more difficult.
Somebody:
Hey Peter! What’s u…
Peter:
(ULTRA)READING WHILE LISTENING!!! I mean, what? Actually it’s not correct because:
- Bolded Title:
- bolded text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text
- text text https://link you absolutely have to see before you’re ready to understand Peter’s point______.com text text bolded text text text text text text “(ultra)reading while listening”
- Bolded Title:
- confirmation bias confirmation bias confirmation bias confirmation bias confirmation bias confirmation bias confirmation bias confirmation bias confirmation bias confirmation bias bolded confirmation bias
- Book you have to read before you’re ready to understand Peter
- Book you have to read before you’re ready to understand Peter
- https://link you absolutely have to see before you’re ready to understand Peter’s point______.com
- https://link you absolutely have to see before you’re ready to understand Peter’s point______.com
- Bolded Title:
- confirmation bias text text confirmation bias “(ultra)reading while listening” text text text text text text confirmation bias confirmation bias text text text text text text text text bolded confirmation bias.
- https://link you absolutely have to see before you’re ready to understand Peter’s point______.com
- https://link you absolutely have to see before you’re ready to understand Peter’s point______.com
A couple of nice words for you so you don’t feel like a piece of shit got lost in one of the Peter’s treatise in the comments.
Peter out, Have a nice day.
Oh i agree with you characters are a massive part of chinese not because they are hard per say but there is just a lot of them 5k for high school graduates. Also writing chinese characters is a crazy crazy time burner (thank god one doesn’t really need this too much anymore)
I agree with you completely with this
If we hold these 3 things constant I believe that the effort is roughly equivalent and perhaps even favoring Chinese as being easier than Russian not more difficult.
when speaking moving parts is a big issue if i tell you hola means hi in language a but then language b has 16 versions of hola based on sex/age/hairstyle/fingernail length. Yeah i don’t care how outlandishly hard hola is to pronounce the 16 versions in language b is harder. Chinese speaking with your 3 rules will definitely be easier.
Thank you. That made me chuckle.
@hagowingchun:
language b has 16 versions of hola based on sex/age/hairstyle/fingernail length.
Lololololol. Hilarious. And accurate.
I absolutely love the control group stuff. I’d love to be able to simultaneously get a group of people who are otherwise somewhere around the mean for demographics, skills, education (ideally twins or triplets) etc and have them each try single mutually exclusive methods to see which components had the biggest effect.
My own single example (myself and one friend) is that anki works to memorize a ton of written words. I have found that audio transcriptions of the anki cards works to enhance listening comprehension compared to just written.
lingQ solves a bunch of problems also.
watching youtube videos starting crucially with TPRS and gradually increasing complexity up to native bloggers and then TV shows also works.
For Spanish I did essentially the same thing as will, so immersion works.
The question in my mind is how to mimic the effects of immersion without immersing.