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So I’m learning Mandarin
In language-learning circles, I’m considered a Mandarin “heritage speaker”.
Heritage speakers have “learned a language informally by being exposed to it at home as opposed to having learned it formally in a school setting.” (What is a Heritage Speaker?)
Technically, I don’t fit the label because my real heritage language (mother tongue) is Hokkien, an 8-tone Chinese language that is considered one of the oldest in China. And I learned Mandarin in a school setting!
Basically, I was thrown into Mandarin classes during my primary school years. But I was a terrible student who spent most of my time copying homework and doodling instead of paying attention to the teacher.
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Weekend Tales #5 My ambition is to have an unextraordinary life
After I returned from my Penang vacation in April, I quickly checked my balconies. (I have two balconies, one which overlooks the apartment complex, and another which has a view of the hills and has a stunning skyline of the city I live in. I know, I’m terribly lucky!)
The one with the less stunning view had the most thriving garden as it gets most of the sun. As I was sure that most of it would die during my two weeks away, I harvested most of them to cook in Penang. There were some left, but by some miracle, the water spinach was still clinging to life, and the Brazilian spinach cuttings I had left in water bottles on the balcony table were sprouting roots, ready to be replanted.
But that’s not the only thing I found. I noticed that there were dried leaves and debris on the wooden floor. Puzzled, I looked up at the money plant hanging on the wall.
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3 Body Problem is a bit of a problem
In my last newsletter, I explained that the main issue I had with Netflix’s 3-Body Problem is the dumbing down of the book’s plot.
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Comprehensible input and creating my own Mandarin-learning curriculum
I spent the whole week trying to figure out my Mandarin-learning curriculum.
One thing I realise – as a “heritage speaker”, meaning someone who has a foundation in Mandarin due to her heritage, I have a leg up when it comes to learning.
Some language learning experts say that we should focus on listening and speaking first, then learn Chinese characters.
I agree because that’s how I’m learning Mandarin right now lol.
I spent most of my life with this HSK3-level comprehension of Mandarin, but this has helped me massively in learning Chinese characters now.
I can’t imagine grappling the complexities of tones, pronounciation, increasing vocabulary and understanding the grammar all at once!
This, btw, is a very good video about how to learn languages. This is the clearest explanation I have heard so far about the comprehensible input method.
BTW, this was how I learned English. English lessons in Malayisan schools are very basic. If you depended on them to increase your proficiency, you won’t get very far. However, I read and watched a lot of English TV. Like, A LOT.
Especially reading. I read like a demon.
And I think I’ll be doing the same with Mandarin, though I need to take care to take off the crutches – pin yin and English subtitles. For that, I need comprehensible input, which means I need to understand 95% of what I’m reading/watching.
That’s tough for the reading bits because there’s so few reading materials for those with a proficiency of 200 characters (where I’m at now).
Listening – I’ve watched dramas at 70-80% comprehension which, apparently, isn’t great, so I need to downgrade my content to simple HSK2 level stuff and really focus on learning characters I don’t know rather than “assume” and “brush off” words I don’t know.
This has been a fun adventure. Exhausting, really, but really exciting to see myself progress from just being able to read 10 characters to 200+!
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I think I read a racist thing from Canada this morning
I was browsing Substack Notes today and noticed an eye-catching graphic. The Great Canadian Darkness was one of the top 5 articles under the “culture” category, one of my favourite categories.
As a denizen of the English-speaking Internet and thoroughly exposed to the rants of North Americans and other Westerners, I more or less guessed what it was about. But even then I was floored. My initial reaction to this article wasn’t …. positive:
I couldn’t believe what I just read, and it was one of the “top culture” posts on Substack.
The writer called Filipinos “SEA monkeys”, claims that Indian people who get into govt jobs only do so cos they cheat through diploma mills and says Chinese people are purposely poisoning the west with drugs.
The worst part were the people agreeing with the writer in the comments.
The eff did I just read?
That’s why I never took the hullabaloo over Nazis on Substack seriously because such racist toilet paper exists on Substack and people 👏 them. 🥴
PS: May need to reread it again to understand it better because I found it so hard to finish it due to people being called monkeys and such 😵
After taking a breather, I listened to this article using text to speech …
On the one hand I appreciate that I get a peek at the ennui besetting the working class (I assume) in Canada.
There’s also a part of me that finally appreciate having an example of “the negativity in the West” Singaporean geopolitical commentator Kishore Mahbubani talks about. Some parts of me are even empathetic to the melancholy about one’s country, having most of my life lived with the “Malaysia no hope” message. (I no longer think that, but that took me moving to Australia and realising Malaysia is pretty fab in many ways.)
Yet, I’m hugely disgusted by how the writer depicts minorities and foreigners in this newsletter. I’m not sure whether he’s being allegorical or honest or …
“A family of four SEA monkeys are chirping away in Tagalog…”
“… the Arab family with the creepy hijab-wearing woman”
“You watch a Tamil woman in full traditional garb scoop up a handful of curried white rice with her bare hands, bring it to her mouth, and eat it … You think there’s practically no excuse for this. It’s not simply their culture; this is objectively unhygienic, primitive, and disgusting.”
“…. smoking opioids that are mass-produced in the Chinese Mainland for the purpose of warfare against Westerners”
WOW.
BTW a lot of Malaysians eat with their hands.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here. But there’s so much hatred against non-whites in this newsletter I’m not sure what to think.
I’m sure most Canadians don’t think this way.
Do they??
Anyway, I’m not calling for it to be banned or anything. I believe that free speech is important. I’m currently reading “White Working Class” by Joan C. Williams and it’s pretty aligned with the themes in the book, the same fears, the same anger.
I think this anger needs expression, and these people need to be heard, and people need to understand why this anger exists.
One main message by White Working Class is that people feel powerless about changing their lives in a world set up to make them fail. We need to turn their lives around to create real change.
PS: Even in Malaysia we have this same tide beneath society, and the “Bangsar Bubble” (our equivalent of NY upper East side people) are pretty ignorant or ambivalent to their anger. They often call these people “stupid” and “ignorant”.
We ignore them to society’s peril.
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3 Body Problem vs Three-Body
When I heard that Netflix was going to adapt Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy of novels and that the people behind it were the ones behind The Game of Thrones my initial reaction was:
It’s not purely because David Benioff and D. B. Weiss totally ruined the best fantasy drama ever made with that shoddy last season.
And true, my trepidation has a lot to do with how little confidence I have in Hollywood depicting one of the most sensitive periods of China’s history, the Cultural Revolution. For god sake, they couldn’t even do China’s folk tales right (exhibit 1: Disney’s live action Mulan), let alone China’s history. (PS: I’ll be covering more of this topic in part 2.)
But my main concern was around the inevitable China vs West comment wars on social media and movie forums everywhere, with both sides touting their version as superior, and then the inevitable “Communist Party bad”, “OMG Chinese propaganda” and “You only like the Chinese/Netflix version cos you’re pro-China/pro-West” conversation points.
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Sweeping tombs, eating food and waving at the dead
Last night, my Chinese American friend and I were talking about how some places just call to us. Penang island is like that for me. I grew up here, and so did my parents. My ancestors have been here for nearly two centuries. It is here that I can slip into my mother tongue, a Hokkien variant only found in Northern Malaysia.
I feel like I am finally home, where nobody will accuse me of not being “Chinese enough” because I can’t speak Cantonese or Mandarin well enough.
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Have you enjoyed some Chinese propaganda lately? I did.
In January I watched the Chinese drama, Draw the Line. Some people (okay, mostly those not of the Chinese persuasion) have dismissed the drama as Chinese propaganda because it had to do with the Chinese legal system, which made me think, so because you think it’s propaganda you are not going to watch it?
To quote Uncle Roger:
Like most people in Asia and South-East Asia, I have consumed Western movies all my life.
I have imbibed the “America saves the world” message and watched American armies swoop down to save the unwashed masses of brown people in movies over and over again, either in spandex or in big planes, and I would like to reassure you that I’ve not lost my marbles nor have I turned American.
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Creating a Mandarin-learning routine for myself
Trying to come up with a Chinese learning routine for myself has been hard. My method so far has been: Will learn when I feel like it, which as you know, tends to get derailed quickly when life gets busy or hard. February was like that for me, with work becoming so busy that by the end of the working day I become way too tired to learn/revise my Chinese characters as usual.
Routines are my kryptonite. My brain rebels at them because it thinks they’re boring and on top of that I keep forgetting the details of said routine. (So that’s why I’m writing this post, to help me remember and also help me stay accountable because I’m announcing to the whole freaking world I’m doing this.)
That said, routines have been an absolute life saver for me in life. For example, in 2022, I started aiming to walk at least 5,000 steps a day. My problem has always been consistency, so having a low number felt more doable to me. Once I conquered 5000 steps, I increased it to 6000 and so on. In 2024, I now walk 7000-10000 steps a day. So, I know they work.
Determining how or what my Chinese learning routine has been more difficult.
As a “heritage” speaker, meaning, someone who has some foundation in Mandarin, I have to learn Mandarin differently from second language learners.
For example, I find the mnemonic systems by some language learning systems far too complex for me as I already know some of the words, which includes the meaning, how to use them, the tones. I just don’t know how to read the characters.
However, there are some words that are unfamiliar so I have to employ second-language-learner techniques for these words.
Having such a hybrid or mixed learning system increases the complexity of my routine.
Yesterday, I spent an hour reading the Outlier Linguistics’ Pipeline Strategy and it made my head spin a little. I know it’ll be far too complicated for my brain to follow, though I understand the logic behind it. The teachers of the course meant for second language learners to use this technique, so I understand why this technique will work.
However, on top of that, I know, just know, that learning 3-5 characters a day on a working day is nigh impossible for me. I need a day free of work distractions to learn something new, so I decided to only use weekends to learn new characters and weekdays to revise these new words.
Changing Goals
I have decided to throw away the HSK mastery goals. (Originally, I wanted to reach HSK 4 level by end of the year.) Now, I’m using this Chinese frequency list instead:
- Wikipedia 1000 most commonly used Chinese characters
- Leiden Weibo Corpus – which lists the most commonly used Chinese Characters on Weibo.
The goal is to master 1000 most commonly used Chinese characters by the end of 2024. So far, I’m at 130 characters — my progress significantly slowed in February due to work being busier.
Mastering 1,000 Chinese characters – learning routine v1
This is what I hope is my extremely simple Chinese learning routine:
Weekend, 10am: Learn a total of 20 new characters by:
- Understanding the components of each character
- Creating mnemonics for each
- Adding the characters to the Tofu Learn app
- Use the Anki deck I downloaded (maybe an extra step too many. Will evaluate but I really like the deck!)
Weekdays: Revise and remember the 20 characters by:
- Using Tofu learn flashcards – 10 minutes a day during lunch time
- Using the characters by writing them in a sentence in my diary. (Context learning) – end of day
Comprehensive input practice:
- Watch Chinese dramas daily (really not a problem for me. It doesn’t feel like work at all haha)
- Mondays (will increase frequency once I remember to be more consistent with this routine): Listening to Chinesepod Elementary & Intermediate, and writing down new words, and entering them in my flashcards.
So, language learners, what do you think? Would love to know more about your routine so that I can get more ideas/inspiration/motivation for my own routine.
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Elizabeth Tai 