Everything is gamified

Augustine isn’t difficult to find in the social media. In fact, one would wish she didn’t make an appearance as often as she does.
But she’s hot, gamification is. She is ubiquitous, and you’ll Like her.

Rewind, April 25 2013, Namahn Belgium ( many thanks for the invitation ).
Dustin DiTommaso brings balance and insight in gamification along the lines of “Hype, Hustlers and Hope”. You’ll find presentations of him on slideshare.

Can language-learning be gamified?
Memrise thinks it can – I’m getting to the point now. Memrise uses a pretty-well-thought-out mechanism to help you remember stuff and making sure you keep remembering it. About Memrise explains it all. The passage of the fun-department is manifest: there’s points , leaderboards ( someone should point out that competing with no-lifers who continuously score 2 orders of magnitude higher than you is not motivating ), badges, the lot.
But does it work ?
Memrise is good at making you remember stuff: character to English, character to pinyin; and vice-versa. I’m afraid that’s not learning a language, that’s remembering stuff. Language learning entails much more: speaking, writing, listening, interaction. This clearly transcends ‘remembering’.

YellowBridge gives it a go as well. Its web-site features flash-cards and a simple memory game which makes you pair English and Chinese. The gamification level is mediaeval to Memrise standards, but it works. It does so because it contains the words of and is organized according to the teaching method in the class I take. It is complementary. I use it a lot to rehearse writing and character recognition, simply because an exercise fits in my breaks.

That said, the combination of two would be a very strong offer: an intelligent rehearsal method complementing the work done in class.
For now: YellowBridge, douze points.

Uneventful progress

Studying Chinese is not a very eventful undertaking. News beyond the trivial is hard to come by.

Let’s say, I’ve just listened to a Chinese text. Once, twice , thrice, fource, fice… Until I got, ehm, all emotional.

How about I’d confess stealing time at work to practice on the flash-cards. During lunch-break that is, work mustn’t get any crazier as it is already.

Maybe I’ll describe, stream-of-consciousness-style, my reaction to my weekly masterpiece handed back to me, trying to discern my studiously pencilled characters through the blood-Red-INK.

Nah. Boring.

Still

there is, sometimes

that hint of evolution, progress even,

when the masterpieces, red as they return, get unmistakably richer

when the 18th deck of cards flash successfully by

Shall we discuss the listening thing later ?

Latin versus Chinese

There’s in interesting discussion going on in last week’s editions of a Belgian newspaper – see links further down ( articles in Flemish ). An opinion article argued in favour of replacing the teaching of Latin by learning Chinese. So far, at least 3 follow-up articles contributed to the pro and contra of that idea. You must know that Latin is offered – as is Greek – as an option in high school. It is definitely one of the most intellectually challenging curricula of our humanities.

A short summary of the arguments:

The virtues of Latin education

Latin provides an excellent basis to study other languages, derived from Latin.

Because biology, medicine, e.a. use a lot of Latin terminology, it’s a good preparation for further studies in those fields

Since Latin classes do a lot of comprehensive reading, it leads to critical observation of our own culture and society

Disadvantages of Latin

Latin is a dead language. Knowing the language has no contemporary use

Advantages of Chinese

China is a rising economic power and upcoming scientific authority. Communicating with and reading Chinese first-hand will diminish communication barriers.

No doubt, China has a rich culture. Knowing about it is interesting in itself and puts ours in perspective.

Learning a very, very different language evokes very, very different thought processes which are enriching.

Disadvantages of Chinese

Chinese is rather difficult. It is questionable whether the effort required to achieve aforementioned advantages at the age of 18 or so, is realistic.

Disregarding the intrinsic correctness of the arguments, it’s interesting to see that they reveal a vision on society.

There is the utilitarian, which I can relate to, which arguments that knowing Chinese has several – useful – benefits.

Then there is another, which, in all honesty, I have more problems understanding. It states that value is not necessarily, let alone exclusively, based on usefulness. But this so out of my league.

It does make you think, doesn’t it.

http://www.standaard.be/artikel/detail.aspx?artikelid=DMF20130128_00448996

http://www.standaard.be/artikel/detail.aspx?artikelid=DMF20130129_00450363

http://www.standaard.be/artikel/detail.aspx?artikelid=DMF20130130_00451741

http://www.standaard.be/artikel/detail.aspx?artikelid=DMF20130130_00451740

Relentless teaching

I must have something Chinese-student-ish over me as the waiter nods to a door at the back of the cafe, right after I shut the front one after me. Myopic gazes trace my path as I make my way around poodles and push carts. The notebook under my arm must have given me away. Where the future is in short supply, notes aren’t worth taking.

The setting: a meeting room of an old café. Chinese people at every table, talking to blushing Westerners – feverish from concentration. Gestures meet frowns of incomprehension. Cold beer and hot tea. The tao of the student and the master is different indeed.

This China Corner is the latest initiative of our teacher.
Her students and native Chinese acquaintances get together every month to talk in Chinese. I pointed out earlier that listening to Chinese conversations is not my strongest point. So I take these opportunities wholeheartedly.
The beer is a bonus.

The challenge – Consonants

In the last installment of this series, I touch upon what is actually a practical problem only, but a problem nevertheless: speaking understandably.

From my childhood, I got this idea that Chinese people express themselves rather explosively and with an abundant use of ‘s’ and ‘l’ sounds. The thing is, it’s actually worse. Count the consonants having an s-sound in the first 40 seconds of 2. Pinyin (Initial Consonants : b,p,m,p,d,t,n,l,g,k,h,j,q,x,z,y,w) (*). Even my favorite YellowBridge finds it necessary to provide biological guidance. Have a look at the top row of the Initials and Finals Table. Gray’s Anatomy not included.

Getting this right will require a lot of practice. I believe it is even more difficult than speaking the tones correctly. In my opinion, this is because our own ear – and that of my fellow-students – is rather forgiving about mistakes here. However, as I have experienced in talking to them, native Chinese are left truly and utterly confused since for instance ‘zheng’, ‘cheng’ and ‘sheng’ are at least 3 different words (**).

Practice indeed.
I will be talking to my computer ( recording and playing it back ), to my Chinese colleague with whom I have lunch almost every Tuesday, to my class. And – this is new – to some acquaintances of my teacher who organizes a speak-in every third Sunday of the month. Starting next Sunday.
More on this next week.

Previous post on this topic – The Challenge – The sound of the character

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(*) 9 of of 23.
(**) It’s even more complicated ‘zheng’ alone has 17 different meanings in the first tone, none in the second tone, but 4 in the third and 11 in the fourth tone; 33 in total. ‘Cheng’ has 49 in total and ‘sheng’ has 27.

The Challenge – The sound of the character

In English, even when you see a word you do not know, you are still able to read and pronounce it correctly. There is a correspondence between the letters in the word and the way it is pronounced. There are – many – exceptions, but all in all, there is one. And we take it for a universal fact.

Not so in Chinese.
In “The challenge – A language with a complex character“, I’ve explained that the origin of Chinese characters is very different from ours. Chinese characters describe meaning, rather than pronunciation. Hence, it is perfectly possible to understand a text without being able to read it out loud.

It’s an interesting thought that Chinese, who study English, may be capable of correctly reading a text without understanding it. Note that – when was a younger man – the entire system of learning how to read was based on being able to read out loud. Expression came before understanding. Reading silently would come only some years later, and even today, sounds form in my mind when I read a text. I wonder how that goes in China ?

Now, Chinese characters have transcended the purely pictorial. Their construction is complex and subtle, and I’ve pointed out before that I have only a very basic understanding of them. They have elements which describe how it is pronounced, as shown by Gabrielle. For example:

• 妈 pronounced ad ‘maa’, or ma1 in pinyin; which means ‘mother’
• 马 pronounced as ‘maha’, or ma3 in pinyin; which means ‘horse’
• 骂 pronounced as ‘ma !’, or ma4 in pinyin; which means ‘to scold’

You see the common part in each one ( 马 ). This is somehow indicative of its pronunciation.

In all honesty, all this is not a great help when studying and I suspect there are at least as many exceptions to the rule. For instance, ‘麻’ is pronounced as ‘ma ?’, or ma2 in pinyin and means ‘numb’. The ‘马’ is entirely missing here. At this moment, memorizing pronunciations is not my biggest worry. The amount of vocabulary has only grown at a modest pace. I do expect this to change though ( the vocabulary list of our new textbook is already significantly more elaborate than the previous one ). So this will become a challenge soon.

In the meantime, I’m content to have a problem that doesn’t pose itself as one.

Previous post on this topic – The challenge – A language with a complex character

The challenge – A language with a complex character

Western written languages are based on alphabets. You know that an alphabet works as follows:

• It consists of a limited set of characters
• A word is defined by its sequence of characters, not by an individual character

Chinese do not have such a thing. Their writing system evolved from drawing pictures. A word then, is a pictogram. As a result, there are thousands of characters/pictograms. There is, however, structure in their pictograms:

• Chinese characters are often composites, where one part adds meaning to the remainder of the character. The most common are the so-called ‘radicals’. For instance
  • the radical of grass ( 艹 ) as in 茶 ( tea ) or 药 ( medicine )
  • the radical of mouth ( 口) as in 口语 ( spoken language ) or 吃 ( to eat )
• Chinese words often contain 2 characters, of which one influences the other. For instance 外 means ‘out’ in many ways: 外语 ( foreign language ), 外边 ( outside ) or even 外婆 ( mother in law, as in ‘old mother outside of your own family’ ). An excellent etymological breakdown of 婆 is given by Yellowbridge here.
• There is more logic in Chinese characters, but I haven’t figured that out yet.

Needless to say, there are a lot of characters. And, despite all the structure and logic in their formation, it is a substantial effort to master the necessary quantity to read or write any decent text.
Also, the characters are much more complex than their western counterparts. Memorizing characters requires a lot of practice. Surprisingly, complex characters are usually not a problem when reading texts. Of course, there’s the context of the text which helps, but there is more. I recognize the overall pattern of the character better than I’m able to reproduce it. This means also that reading a lot doesn’t help in writing.

I started out my first year in memorizing and writing lists of individual words – flash-card style ( as, again, in Yellowbridge’s ). That is fine as long as one’s vocabulary is too limited to write even the simplest of texts. But it is boring. Today, I write short texts or translate parts of a magazine’s article. I use a dictionary to find words I do not know. This approach is much more interesting. And – thanks to a very fine teacher – I get my texts duly corrected; see Carnage and mayhem.

I try to practice reading as well but find my vocabulary still too limited. There are still a lot of words I need to look up, which takes away the pleasure of reading.

Previous post on this topic – The Challenge – Speaking in Tones.