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Today I'm going to talk about learning Chinese back in 1968, what I went through then, and what I would do differently today. And from that, you will see the extent to which language learning has improved and has become easier for a number of reasons. So in 1968, I was sent to Hong Kong by the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, my employer. My job was to learn Mandarin Chinese, and that's what I did full-time. So I don't remember everything. I know we had at least two-on-one instruction because I know that when I was sitting in a classroom with a fellow Canadian diplomat and I was told that in Chinese to say, "Are you going?" They say, "You go, not go," 你 去 不 去.
His reaction was, "Is that ever stupid?" He was not a very successful language learner. You can't treat things in a new language that are different as being stupid. You have to get used to them. At any rate, my next recollection is that I was struggling with a book called Chinese Dialogues, for which there was also audio, audio spoken what seemed to me very, very quickly. Now, in doing some research, it turns out that Chinese Dialogues, which was written entirely in a Romanized version like P-, what we call pinyin today, but which then was the, uh, Yale, uh, Romanization script, and
that the audio was produced eight years after the book was first published. So they published books without audio. And so my initial, uh, I think it was a month or so, was listening to this rapid-fire, or what seemed rapid-fire Chinese, struggling to get used to the sounds of the language. After that, we were introduced to characters. We were introduced to characters using, uh, flashcards, and I did a lot of writing, repeatedly, repetitively writing these flashcards. And I have described in the past how I had a, a self sort of designed, uh, spaced repetition system to learn the characters. And then we got onto books that were actually interesting.
Again, I don't remember the order, but one of the books was 20 Lectures on Chinese Culture. Again, there was no audio for this book. Teachers were supposed to create their own audio. So it's very interesting that what we take for granted today, MP3 players, carrying it all in your, uh, telephone, was not the case. We had open reel tape recorders, and you had to almost get access to a language lab in order to listen to the language, and there was far less audio, far fewer examples of things available to listen to, but that was the sort of, you know, trajectory.
And from there I went to a, a book that I have referred to before called Intermediate Mandarin Pattern Approach or something of, uh, of, of that nature, which was an excellent book. And thereafter, I went into all of the Yale in China readers, readers in literature, readers in communist Chinese literature, uh, and so forth and so on. And basically whatever I could find. I would go to the bookstores. I would search for any material I could find that had- text with, you know, a glossary after every chapter. And I would just practice writing the new words that I came across, but I had limited opportunity to listen.
I've been digging through s- just a tiny part of the material that I bought, and I bought far more than I used as part of my Chinese learning journey. So obviously these flashcards were a key part of learning how to write. I've explained that. I bought all kinds of dictionaries that I hardly ever used, but of course, I was a Canadian government employee, so they paid for the dictionaries. This was a textbook titled Selected Readings in Chinese Communist Literature. Interestingly, it was all in traditional characters, and I just underlined and underlined all these vocabulary items, tried to write them out to some extent,
uh, in my horrible Chinese characters. And there was just so much of this stuff, like One of my favorite books, Intermediate Reader in Modern Chinese. Here again, you see the same pattern, underlining vocabulary items, trying to write out the characters. Invariably, there was all kinds of grammatical explanations, which I totally ignored 'cause I couldn't understand what they meant. Mostly it was a matter of getting a hold of certain key sort of conjunctions far, ìzhěyú, búdáng far. So th- that w- those were the patterns.
I didn't ever figure out what S1, VP1, S2, et cetera, all meant, but I just exposed myself to enough of these patterns, stuck with, you know, seizing some of these key conjunctions, connecting words, and gradually through my massive input and reading, uh, the language became more and more familiar and less strange. Characters is one difficulty with Mandarin Chinese, the tones is another. And I remember that a major breakthrough for me was when my teacher gave me a cassette tape of xiangsheng, which are these comic dialogues, which I listened to over and over again, even though I couldn't understand more than 30 or 40% of it, and I certainly didn't understand the various historical and literary references.
This is Hou Bao Lin, a very famous xiangsheng performer. But it gave me the rhythm, and with the rhythm, I was able to get a sense of the tones. Because trying to read and trying to remember the tone marks for each individual word or character was simply too difficult. So I've sort of summarized that very quickly. I have described my earlier experience in learning Mandarin before, but I wanna now get into what I would do today. Today, I am … Today, we are never the same. We never step in the same river twice, as, uh, Heraclitus said. So I'm different.
I have a favorite place to learn languages, and it's LingQ, so that's where I would go. And I would not only see a tremendous array of potential, you know, learning content to choose from, and the ability to bring in content from elsewhere, but I would also find various types of functionality that would make learning Mandarin much easier today than it was back in 1968. I would start with the mini stories. I would do the mini stories in sentence mode. I can ask- our AI at LingQ or elsewhere, what are the most difficult patterns for learners of Mandarin?
And we would get a, a short list of the most difficult structures in the language. I can ask our AI at LingQ for a list of, uh, conjunctions, and that then becomes a lesson. So I can actually make my grammar questions and the answers to my grammar questions into a lesson and deal with some of the grammar that way, as opposed to the very complicated, you know, diagrams and special abbreviations that were used by my teachers in explaining grammar in, uh, Chinese, all of which explanations I ignored, and I just exposed myself to more and more of the language and, uh, you know, underlined and circled and those kinds of things. So certainly today I would look for podcasts on subject of interest to me.
I would probably, if I'm not confident that I know what to ask, say, in YouTube or Google, I would translate it at Google Translate and search for podcasts on Chinese history or, um, maybe an audio recording of something from Chinese literature or maybe geography of China or whatever I'm interested in. I would search for audio and text in that material which I can then import into LingQ. With my experience with Xiang Sheng, and by the way, over and above what I was shown by my teacher back in 1968, subsequently I have maintained my connection to Mandarin and particularly, you know, some 20, 30 years ago by, you know, when I was in China buying CDs of Xiang Sheng, CDs of the famous
classics of Chinese literature, CDs on Chinese history, and I would just massively listen to these. Now I think if I could find text that corresponded to that audio, I would probably try to import that into LingQ, or I would simply import the audio and let LingQ create the transcript, which may not be 100% accurate, and I would then continue to use LingQ in conjunction with a lot of listening away from the computer. The big thing that has changed compared to when I studied Mandarin is obviously the access to digital text, the ability to look things up, the ability to ask AI for grammatical explanations when I want them on questions that are of
interest to me, the portability of audio, the ability to be anywhere listening to whatever I want, and then to come back and read that same material, looking up words and saving the words with all the additional functionality. One app that I would certainly buy if I were learning Mandarin today is Skritter. Uh, we can export our saved links, a link into Skritter, and there you can practice, you know, with your hand on your iPhone or your Android, tracing the characters, the stroke order. And there's a number of functions at Skritter that are tremendous in terms of, you know, uh, reviewing your characters and getting to know them better.
It, it, it's worth exploring. So that's certainly one of the apps that I would use which would make learning characters a lot easier than it was back in 1958. Just as I bought more dictionaries than I needed, I would probably buy more apps than I need in order to explore different ways of learning Mandarin, because the one thing that hasn't changed from when I was learning in 1968 in Hong Kong and what I would do today is that I have to find my own resources, and I definitely would recommend that to anyone, regardless of the language.
Find content of interest. Find apps that work for you. Explore the language. Take the initiative not only to, you know, learn the language and spend the time with the language, which you have to do, but also to find all the resources that can help you learn the language. Basically, so that's what I did back in 1968, which is almost 60 years ago, and, uh, what I would do today. This video was triggered by a comment from one of my, uh, listeners commenting on my video about learning slow. He or she said, "That's not what you did for Mandarin Chinese." So I wanna point out that when I learned Mandarin Chinese, I was paid for by the
government, but I didn't spend my time worrying about how quickly I would learn. I spent my time making sure that I was active, that I was finding resources and content of interest to me. In other words, I took the initiative. But, uh, I was mostly focused on immersing myself in the language as much as possible, but not expecting to learn it in any sort of record time. And the more you immerse yourself, the more active you are, the more you take the initiative, the faster you will learn without having necessarily the goal of learning as fast as possible, three months, six months, nine months, whatever it might be.
Thank you for listening. Bye for now
