Natterings From Nepantla

International Mother Language Day: What is your native language? How many languages do you speak fluently or near-fluently? How many languages besides your native language have you studied?

My native language is English and I've never managed real fluency in any other. As for ones I've studied, settle in, this may take a bit...

French - My grade school included French as a standard subject for the lower grades, though as best I recall it mostly involved learning lists of words and starting over every year. I retained very little of the vocabulary or grammar, but the pronunciation did stick with me. Tried picking it up again with Rosetta Stone a couple years ago, and still need to get back to it because all the good up-to-date information about medieval Africa seems to be available in it and not in English.

Mandarin - A small amount of formal exposure when I was 8 or 9 in a summer-school class. Again, very little of it stayed with me, but for some reason figuring out stroke order for writing Chinese characters did. Study currently ongoing again since December of 2021.

Latin - The middle school grades at my school subjected students to Latin instead, in a more organized manner and picking up at the start of the year where the previous one had left off. Mostly this has been useful for deciphering fancy words and scientific names.

Spanish - In high school, I got the standard (at the time) choice of French, Spanish, or German. I went with Spanish on the grounds that it was the likeliest language to have a chance to use in real life. I have, in fact, managed to use it briefly on a couple occasions. However, the next language I learned reorganized my brain somehow, with the result that I can still understand a fair amount when reading, but can't form grammatically correct sentences anymore.

Japanese - So in college, I wanted to take a new language to help fill out my breadth requirements, and since I'd done the practical thing in high school, I wanted to learn something totally different this time. The only non-Indo-European language on offer at that particular moment at that particular campus was Japanese. I got through three years of it, then fell out of practice as I hadn't become a big anime fan yet.

Sanskrit - Then there was that one time when there was an intensive class in Sanskrit available during summer term and I decided why not. Suddenly the Latin ablative case made a whole lot more sense. (It's the original Proto-Indo-European ablative case, plus the intrumental and locative cases, all collapsed together. In Sanskrit they're still separate sometimes.)

If you were to include every language where I've gotten hold of a book and learned a few words from it, this could be a much longer list.

Minus a few days, actually, but work has kept me too busy to feel like posting.

Today I made it to the end of the vocabulary introduction exercises in HelloChinese!



Which is of course not the same thing as learning all the vocabulary yet; I need to keep doing the review exercises and there's a bunch of auxiliary material yet to go (note the incomplete circles).

Around the time of my last post, HelloChinese veered into a lot of office vocabulary that I'm sure is useful to people who are trying to learn Chinese for serious business reasons but was tedious for me to wade through. The last couple weeks, though, have been dominated by common sentence patterns, which feel a whole lot more useful to me.

I have been to the Chinese-language section at Powell's a couple times now, and it doesn't appear to carry any Chinese science fiction. Poking about online has pointed me to one possible Chinese bookstore which may or may not still exist way off in southeast Portland.

Today's random word figured out from the Chengdu Worldcon site: 会员 (huìyuán), "member".

I'm still on track to make it through the HelloChinese vocabulary lessons by the end of the year. Which will be fine and dandy for mundane information, but I need to also start learning specialized fandom jargon. I've been making myself a list of terms to look up or ask around about. So far, roughly organized by category:

Basics: fandom, fan of (person/work/franchise), support (the entity you are a fan of), fan fiction
Organized fandom: fan fund
Convention functions: bid, bid table, con committee, dealers' room, registration, con suite, room party, art show, panel discussion, program item, program track
Convention infrastructure: convention center, hotel, function room
Convention people: con committee, staff, member, membership, volunteer (noun), volunteer (verb), attending, supporting, virtual (attendance or membership)
Worldcon: Worldcon, NASFiC, WSFS, WSFS Business Meeting, Hugos, Hugo ceremony, Hugo finalist, Hugo winner, Hugo loser
Fanzines: perzine, newszine, fan editor
Filk: bardic circle, "pick, pass, or play", ose, chaos circle
Furry: fursuit
Genre categories: space opera, portal fantasy, military sf, high fantasy, fat fantasy, YA, children's
Gaming: RPG, LARP, Eurogame, tabletop, boardgame, video game

Plus there is probably jargon specific Chinese fandom.

Finding out that there's a very active feed of news on the Chinese side of the Chengdu site has already gotten me started discovering the Chinese equivalents of some of the above.

What else do I need to add to this list?

Duolingo has changed its interface. Instead of letting you decide for yourself when to go back and do another run through a lesson, it now has a single path through where it will decide when you get your spaced repetition. The spacing is much shorter, and I'm now running into a something I've seen people complaining about before, where one starts just memorizing the practice sentences rather than really processing the language.

A bigger problems is that more differences are emerging between what Duolingo and HelloChinese are teaching me. They've had a few different words for the same things before now, and after consulting some online dictionaries it looks like Duolingo's vocabulary is more Taiwanese, where HelloChinese is more mainland Chinese (not surprising as it turns out to be based on mainland China's tests for foreign-language students). But now I've seen a couple of notable differences in allowed grammar. Maybe those are just regional differences too, but I think as a newbie I need to stick to one grammatical model, and it's mainland Chinese I need to understand, so HelloChinese it is.

The time I've been using at lunch to practice on Duolingo, I can use to start exploring the other features of HelloChinese, or trying to find videos to watch to practice hearing Chinese. Today I went to YouTube, typed in 科幻大会 (science fiction convention), and found that the only relevant content was about the Chengdu Worldcon itself. Just 科幻 (science fiction) got me to this channel, which specializes in talking way too fast over sfnal footage. I have no idea if it's doing movie synopses or parody videos or what. But after watching one and understanding practically nothing it was saying, I did somehow pick up that 飞船 might mean spaceship (confirmed later at Wiktionary). So I learned something after all! But I still have a very long way to go.

I am oscillating between "Oh no! Less than a year!" and "I started with about 20 months to go, so I've still used less than half of my time!".

I am continuing to use both Duolingo and HelloChinese and have hit the point where they're having differences about vocabulary and grammar. Minor ones so far, probably no impediment to making myself understood, but I wonder if they're working from different regional dialects, or one is more about formally correct language and one is more about capturing how people are more likely to actually talk.

This might be answered if I can start understanding actual spoken Chinese. Not having been able to get any specific recommendations, I finally just typed "科幻" (science fiction) into YouTube and started selecting videos at random. As I expected, I can't make any sense of the narrations yet. But supposedly it will help.

One thing that is starting to make a difference is practicing speaking with HelloChinese. Now that I've been doing that for a couple months, I'm finding it getting easier to form unprompted sentences when I'm out for a walk and trying to work in a little practice describing what I see to myself.

I've also started to notice that when watching the ending credits of anime, my eyes have started being drawn more to the kanji, trying to decipher them.

Making steady progress in Duolingo. I have made it onto the top rank of leaderboards not so much from increased effort as from things getting less competitive as summer hit. I'm still trying not to respond to the gamification too much, but that's at least one "goal" it will stop bugging me about.

I forgot to mention in my last update that I'd come across guardian_learning, which started off as a community for fans of a specific Chinese sf franchise but has transitioned into a more general Chinese learning community.

At the Reno airport, heading to Westercon, I came across the first Chinese sentence I have been able to understand in the wild: 您需要帮助吗？("Do you need assistance?") Okay, so it was on a poster with the same words in six other languages including English, so it is not like it was useful to be able to read it, but still! I understood real-life Chinese! Perhaps this effort is not entirely wasted!

I have also reached the point where, instead of only recognizing characters from previously encountering them in Japanese, I am recognizing characters I only knew in Chinese when I bump into them in Japanese text. On a soda can, for instance, I was able to read that it was 10% fruit juice (果汁).

I finally picked Hello Chinese back up this past Monday after reaching acceptance with the fact that I'm not going to be able to nail every pronunciation exercise perfectly. Ironically, the pronunciation exercises seem much easier now and I am actually nailing them on the first try more often than not. Go figure.

As of yesterday Duolingo said I had 90 consecutive days of studying Chinese. (Technically 91, but there was one day when Duolingo was down for maintenance.)

Duolingo claims I know 538 words now. I'm not sure I believe that.

The grammar continues to surprise me by how well it matches English. For instance, where you say "Chinese teacher" in English, many other languages require you to rephrase it to "teacher of Chinese" or at least do something explicit to turn the word(s) for the Chinese language into a modifier. In Chinese, you take the word for the Chinese language and stick it in front of the word for teacher and you're done.

The one area which is significantly different is word order in questions, and even that has a parallel in informal English. In Chinese, questions other than yes-no questions are phrased the same way as a statement, only with a word replaced with something that means "this is the thing I'm asking about". This is different from proper English, where we say "What are you looking for", but it perfectly matches the colloquial English "You're looking for what?".

I did not keep up with Hello Chinese for more than a few days. I still need to start regular speaking practice of some sort.

As you know, Bob, in 1957 China embarked on a sort of spelling reform, creating simplified versions of many Chinese characters. Taiwan, to differentiate itself, still uses the older forms in all their baroque glory. Japan, meanwhile, borrowed the Chinese writing system a while back and performed its own milder simplification. So there are three versions of Chinese writing out there, though at least the simplest characters are usually the same across all three.

In Japanese the character for "eye" is 目. You can kind of see how it evolved from a pictogram of two lids and the eyeball in between. The character for "to see" adds a couple lines to show that the eye is looking at you: 見.

One of the first Chinese phrases I learned in Duolingo was 再见, which is being translated as "goodbye". In later lessons I have realized it's more along the lines of "see you soon", as I encounter those two words separately. 见 turns out to mean "see", which means that it's the equivalent to 見... and now I can't see 见 without thinking of an eyeball getting stabbed.