Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Be an Amateur Translator

At the risk of converting this blog into a poor man's Sinosplice, here are a couple of other tips for the Chinese language learner. If you, like me, find the dialogues and passages in your Chinese textbook dull and uninspiring, hit the web. Chinese newspaper articles often aren't much better, but there are plenty of other sites with interesting essays and articles on a variety of subjects. This happens to be one I like- a site devoted to cultural issues in China.

First, choose an article, regardless of length. You won't be reading all of it at once anyway, so give yourself plenty of time to delve into the text. If you're a beginning or intermediate student, focus on one paragraph per day. Give yourself the following two tasks: first, use your dictionaries to translate the paragraph into modern, idiomatic English. This entails not only learning the meaning of each word or phrase you encounter but also rendering them into something resembling decent prose. Should you be unable to understand a particular sentence, leave it in question marks and ask a tutor or friend to explain it for you.

Second, write down the pinyin (with tone marks) for each character you encounter. Having done this, read the paragraph out loud (while looking at the characters), preferably with a Chinese friend there to guide you. Insist on perfection- remember, speaking with incorrect tones means speaking incorrectly. Since you'll only be working on one paragraph per day, don't worry if it takes you several repetitions before you're able to read the passage fluently. Most likely, your brain will attach a tone to a particular character and you'll be able to remember it in the future.

If this process seems slow and interminable, don't worry- after a few weeks you'll find that you need to check your dictionary less and less often, and at that point you can increase your daily study to two or three paragraphs.

Finding a suitable article shouldn't be hard: if you're a sports nut, read about sports. If you're a politics junkie, crack open a newspaper. If you're into movies, then read about them in Chinese. This will give you the vocabulary and phrasing you need to talk about subjects that interest you in Chinese.

If you're an advanced student, you probably won't need to go about this process so methodically. Nevertheless, you can never be "too good" at Chinese.

I'd be curious to see if anyone else has tried this method and can add to or refine some of the points I've made. It works for me!

UPDATE: A friend of mine who works as a Chinese/English interpreter came up with another good tip: watch 5 minutes of TV (preferably the news or another program in which proper Chinese is spoken) and actually repeat, word for word, what the commentator says, even if you have no idea what the words mean. Doing this will do wonders for your ability to separate what seems like an endless stream of rapidly spoken Chinese into discrete words and tones. After 5 minutes, you'll probably be too exhausted to continue or will have to explain to your roommate why you were just talking to the television set.