David Moser writes about Why Chinese is So Damn Hard.

I'm currently displaying that variety of insanity known as "Hey! Wouldn't it be cool to know Chinese?"; I should have known I was vulnerable after the debacle of "Hey! Wouldn't it be cool to know classical Japanese?"

And I think he just might have a point--something I'm reluctant to admit, considering I'm so ready to defend the peculiarities of the Japanese writing system. But while people faint at two different alphabets plus a couple thousand characters, I think it works quite nicely, in a rhythm of content words and functional words or verbal endings marked by hiragana, katakana, and kanji. In Chinese, you have a wall of text. And that makes it excruciatingly hard to jump in and read materials that are above one's level... if you can't make out at least the large majority of the characters, you can't push forward anyway. Dictionary lookup takes forever. (So too with Japanese, but for a long time I stuck with manga, annotated on the side with furigana to mark the pronunciations of words, so it was easy to look up words phonetically).

So the Chinese writing system is hard. But one thing my linguistics professors drilled into me is that a language--linguistically speaking--is the spoken language, and the written language is just a more-or-less flawed way of transcribing it. Mandarin Chinese, the spoken language, shouldn't be all that hard. And this is part of the rationale in some methods of teaching Japanese, for not teaching even hiragana in the first semester, but doing everything orally (hopefully not with romaji). In my case it's certainly true that I have to learn words as spoken words before I have any hope of retaining them as kanji compounds.

The problem is, unless you live in a country where the language is spoken, it's awfully hard to get enough aural learning materials. (This assumes, of course, that you don't have access to classes. Those are ideal, but at the moment I'm on my own). You can get language tapes, which take you up to maybe a low intermediate level, and you can order CDs, and you can listen to internet radio, but overall your resources are a lot more limited. It's easier to find books, internet texts, and so forth. As of now, I don't even get TV in Spanish--though local cable offers two Spanish channels in basic cable, and I'm getting hooked up soon.

There are other advantages to reading--it's faster, it's much easier to look things up in the dictionary because the words stay put, it's easier to find something that caters to your interests, and the vocabulary can potentially be more varied. (If I learned all my Spanish from Buffy, I'd be able to say very little except "I love you," "I'm sorry," "Let's kill it," and "high school.") But it's much harder with Chinese.

So I'm proceeding with language tapes on my iPod, which I dutifully transcribe with a dictionary, and easy readers from the school library. I'm following the annoying proscribed path of study, with "Where is the restaurant?" and "My name is..."--but it's giving me enough characters so that, by the time I'm finished, maybe I'll have enough basic knowledge to try tackling a real text with a dictionary. Also, I'm going up to Montreal this week, where I can pick up some manga and Mandarin CDs.

I'll update when I have a better idea of how it's going.

Dictionary dependence

One of the Livejournal language communities brought to mind recently how much people have the tendency, when composing in a language not their own, to just look up a word in the dictionary, assume they have the right meaning, and not go any further.

In French class (and this was a fairly advanced class), "Les gens que je pends dehors." The people I hang (as in 'by the neck, until dead') outside. The person in question wasn't talking about mass executions, but "the people I hang out with." How can you go to French class for four years without a whack on the head with the "don't translate idioms literally" clue-by-four?

It's not even idioms, all the time. Mixing up the word for the introduction of a book with the word for the introduction of two people to each other; writing "altavoz de español" (Spanish loudpseaker) to mean a person who speaks Spanish; writing "is it hard [as in "diamonds are hard"] to read inside Spanish?"

I'm sympathetic, you know. I don't have native-speaker intuitions in any of the non-English languages I speak, and any time I write an essay I certainly make a couple howlers, except maybe in French. But how hard is it to realize that there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between words in English and words in other languages? I probably have more of an advantage than I sometimes realize, having learned to speak two languages by the time I was eight, because I was able to internalize that. You just can't expect the words to be the same. Example sentences and clarifications in dictionaries help. Google helps surprisingly much. Etymology and learning other languages helps a little, depending on the language--you get a lot of mileage out of this in Romance languages, anyway. Back-translation also helps--you find the word you want in the English-X side, and then you look it up again in the X-English side to see a (usually more extensive) English definition.

But the most important thing is to internalize the expectation that things may be different.

Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionaries are sold separately, and I recently realized that I haven't used my E-J dictionary very much at all. Granted, I certainly have in the past, when I had to write essays for school. But the thing I realized, sooner or later, was that I was a lot more likely to write good sentences if I stuck to the words that I already had seen in print and knew how to use. (On the other hand, there's a lot to be said for writing sentences you think are fun, whether or not they're any good. My high school Japanese teacher thought I was so interesting, or possibly deranged).

More on reading

There are very few resources that tell you what you should read when you are studying X, either in the form of general principles, or a specific reading list. Both are important; you need the general principles because books go out of print, they can't be found in your library, or maybe because no one's bothered to make a list for Armenian or Tamil. Specific reading lists are good because as a foreign language learner, you're not familiar with genre classifications, popular authors, book reviews, and the like in the same way that native speakers are--and it's very time-consuming trying to determine, in a language you don't speak all that well, what a book's about. You can default to the authors everyone has heard of, but then you end up reading something by Natsume Soseki, or another of the famous Japanese authors from before the writing reforms, which still take an amazing amount of effort for me to read.

Japan-blogger ButterflyBlue posted a list of ways to tell if a book is readable in a foreign language. I think that these are a great starting point.

A list of my own would go something like this:

1) Choose a modern book, because language changes.
2) Don't choose fantasy or SF, because you'll spend all day looking up "entmoot" only to realize it's a made-up word. Or, in the case of magical realism, you may well look at the sentence you'vejust read with no idea whether you understood it rightly or not, because if you understood it rightly it would be weird.
3) Choose within your own limits for bleakness. What I mean by this is: in my senior year of high school, when I was having some personal issues, I began reading Murakami Haruki's Norwegian Wood. I got about 2/3 of the way through, and by then it had racked up enough bleakness and pessimism that I just could not go forward. Consider that you'll be spending several times as much time reading the book as you would in English, so you'll get through the depressing parts that much more slowly.
4) Corollary to 3: choose genre fiction or popular fiction over literary fiction. Not only is the prose easier, but they're also usually happier.
5) If it's a language with a lot of regional variation, pick a region and go with it. You can drive yourself crazy trying to pick up the peninsular Spanish dialect(s) plus the Cuban, Mexican, Chilean...etc... dialects.
6) In the bookstore/library, try reading a few paragraphs with a dictionary. That'll be enough to give you a good idea of the difficulty level. Why with a dictionary? I once brought home a book that looked easy in sentence structure, with a fair number of words I didn't know, but that was to be expected because I was just starting out. Turned out a lot of those words were some kind of slang that I couldn't find anywhere.
7) Interest trumps everything. Unless you have a burning desire to read The Tale of Genji in the original Japanese, then it's a lot better to read something you're interested in than something you aren't interested in.

I just finished reading my first novel in Spanish-- Like Water for Chocolate. It was far from my first attempt. It does break my rules, insofar as it's magical realism. Two books I'd attempted before, and not finished, were Isabel Allende's The City of Beasts (part of a Young Adult trilogy) and the Spanish translation of the first Harry Potter book. I know exactly why I didn't finish them, too. The City of Beasts had a mother who was dying of cancer, and I'm sick of YA books where the mother's dying of cancer--it seemed to pick up after a while, but it lost me because I read so slowly. As for Harry Potter, I'd read it in English. The 1/3 or so of it that I read taught me a lot, but I had no burning need to find out what happened next.

Let me mention, while I'm on the subject, the Leer en Español series. It's a series of graded readers, going from level 1 at "less than 400 words" to level 6 at "less than 2500 words." I'm not sure how much of a story you can tell in 400 words--I started at level 3--but they're reasonably authentic and interesting texts, either original or adapted from known literary works. Definitely not a bad choice if you're learning Spanish.

Reading and decoding

Firstly, I've found a rather amusing site on Japanese kanji.
Kanji with really long kun-yomi, kanji with the highest stroke counts, kanji that look like they're upside down.

I want to look at reading material from a position of "I can just barely start decoding," first of all. I've often heard that if what you're doing is "decoding" rather than reading--if you have to look up every second word in the dictionary and you still have a very weak grasp of how everything goes together in a sentence--you shouldn't even bother. I'm not so sure about that. I'll happily agree that it's not good as your sole method of learning a language, but... well, here's what happened with me.

I was fifteen, sixteen years old, and I liked Sailor Moon. And one day I saw a Sailor Moon manga at the local comic book store, and I bought it, and at that time my sister and I still had that adolescent naivete that says that summer is a perfect time for starting impossible projects. So we got a dictionary, and a grammar book, and we started painstakingly decoding it with absolutely no knowledge of Japanese. But here's what happened. First of all we learned the hiragana. And then we started to learn the katakana. And there were a couple of kanji that kept coming up again and again, so I started to recognize those too. The pictures kept me following the story, and by the end I had a slight, very slight, grasp of reading in Japanese. At the same time I was getting textbooks from the library and working through them, and I doubt I'd have made any progress at all otherwise. Japanese can be such a difficult language to learn that you feel like you can't read authentic texts even after struggling for three years, and if I had thought that to be the case I would have just given up. Somehow, reading, and looking everything up in the dictionary, gave me enough sense of the story for me to have a sense of achievement and mastery.

On the other hand, there's French. I was brought up Anglophone in Quebec--I had a year and a half in France, and my English schooling had partial French immersion until I moved to the U.S. when I was twelve. Then, when I started high school, I was enrolled in French, mostly because it was easy--I didn't at that point have any particular linguistic inclination.
Year 3 of French was textbook dialogues and endless verb conjugations and I think maybe we read one poem.
Repeat the above for year 4. I think at the end of the year we read Le Petit Prince.
And the thing is, even though I was functionally bilingual at 8 or 9, my French is pretty poor now. For one thing, I largely have the vocabulary of a 9-year-old. This is what happens if you wait on reading authentic material until you've already been slaving through it for four years. French is hard, I'll admit, because fiction is mostly written in a tense that doesn't exist at all in spoken French--one can make an argument for not reading it based on that. But I think that the curriculum just doesn't allow for really challenging students to go beyond their boundaries. When I was taking French, no one ever suggested to me that I ought to be doing anything more than copying over my verb conjugations. (I refuse to blame the teachers. I had a kick-ass French teacher--and some who weren't so good).

So I'm highly in favor of jumping in anywhere you're able to and seeing what you can understand.

I've been studying Spanish for maybe a year, and I'm reading a novel. For adults. Actually reading, not decoding, though with frequent dictionary lookup. Partly that's because Spanish is so closely related to French, but I think it's also partly because, from the first day I started learning Spanish, I wasn't afraid to muddle through things.

Vocabulary in context

Most language pedagogy at least pays lip service to how you need to learn vocabulary in context and without translating from your native language. "hikouki means airplane" is not a great way to get a word to stick in your head. It's better to imagine an airplane, and, in your head, label it 'hikouki.' Better still if you can imagine yourself flying in an airplane, invoking the flight attendants giving you the safety spiel and the plane's vibrations and the kid in back of you kicking your seat, and know that that is a hikouki.

It works even better if you've got some kind of definite emotional response.

And that's why I find it really helpful to read novels. If you can't afford to get on a plane and spend a year overseas, then you can still wrap a fictional world around you. And if it has vivid images, and things going on that you really care about, then you pick up the words. One of the novels I've been reading in Spanish is the first of the Harry Potter books--and when I hear the word 'espejo' (mirror), in my mind I see Harry standing in front of the Mirror of Erised, the mirror that reflects what you want to see. When I hear 'cebolla' (onion), I think of the first scene in Like Water for Chocolate, which certainly uses onions vividly. And what this means is that when I hear the word, I don't think automatically of the English translation. I can think about what I'm hearing in terms of meaning and images, rather than just trying to translate it. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is a good thing.

Pop music

I've been listening to Japanese pop music since I first started learning Japanese--I was an anime fan, so I got to hear the theme songs every time I watched an episode, and it was easy to find lyrics online. After a year of self-studying, I talked to a teacher to see if I could place out of Japanese 1, and she said my pronunciation was quite good for someone who'd been self-studying--I can only credit that to singing "Cruel Angel's Thesis" at the top of my lungs more times than I'd care to mention.

The thing about language tapes is that you can only listen to them for so long. They're kind of boring and don't have much variety. But music, ah... if there's a song I like I can listen to it time and time again. I'm lucky enough to have an iPod, so I've loaded a lot of foreign music onto it, and I listen to it while I'm at work. I find it really good for getting down the sounds of the language in my head.

It does have to be pop music at first, I think. It's harder to make out the lyrics when you're listening to rap or rock. Pop tends to have very simplistic lyrics, but at first, that's a good thing. It's nice to be able to catch phrases and verses and know what they mean.

Some language-specific recommendations:
In French I like Patricia Kaas, Les Nubians, Serge Gainsbourg, Edith Piaf. (Okay, I know these are WAY obvious, but I learned most of my French before I got interested in music at all).
In Spanish, La Ley, Enanitos Verdes, and maybe Mana--Mana's kind of cheesy, but it IS fun to sing "Eres tu ma religion."
In Japanese, Megumi HAYASHIBARA, Maaya SAKAMOTO, anime theme music. I like Luna Sea as well. Shiina RINGO writes fantastic lyrics, but she often uses obscure words and archaic grammar, so I wouldn't recommend her to beginners.

Fun with Google

As I've said, my Spanish dictionary isn't exactly all that. But I don't really have the cash for a new one, and I can compensate pretty well thanks to the internet.

My absolute favorite trick is image searches. If you're trying to look up any kind of concrete noun, then you can simply do an image search on it and see what comes up. One of the recipes in "Como Agua Para Chocolate" included "pithaya," which I couldn't find in my dictionary. Turns out I couldn't find it because it's more commonly spelled pitaya. But when I looked up pithaya, I found enough images to figure out the definition: a dragon fruit.

For anything that can't be clearly defined in an image, I try to do phrasal searches on things like "X means" or "X is," in English or in the target language; the most common identifier-phrase in Japanese is とは, and that tends to get me pretty good results.

One more trick with Google... the "do native speakers say it this way?" test. There's such a wide corpus of text out there on the internet that if you enter a small piece of a sentence, and it's grammatical and not absolutely outlandish ("colorless green ideas sleep furiously"), it's likely that it'll turn up. On the other hand, if it does turn up, it doesn't mean for sure that it's grammatical. It may work only in a specific context. But it does give me confidence to use sentence forms that I might otherwise feel anxious about using.

On Dictionaries

If you're doing things the way I do things--jumping in utterly unprepared into whatever native materials you can find--then you'll need a good dictionary to start out with.

If you're learning one of the popular languages, like French or Spanish, then limited-vocabulary readers won't be too hard to come by. But they tend to be too boring to bother with anyway. Books written for native speakers are going to draw from an immense range of vocabulary.
For example, I'm currently reading Laura Esquivel's Como Agua Para Chocolate. This is a book that's heavily centered around cooking, food, and the kitchen, so a lot of specialized terminology comes up--and it's terminology that I can't find in my Langenscheidt Standard Spanish Dictionary, which is by no means a bad dictionary. The pocket dictionaries that I had before, before I was fully committed to Spanish, were pretty useless.

So, don't skimp on a dictionary and say that you'll buy a better one later--not if you intend to jump in at the deep end. When in doubt, get a "college" or "unabridged" dictionary; you'll want to spend $30 at least, in general.

Here's a quick trick if you're comparing dictionaries in a bookstore: in one dictionary, flip open to a page and find two words that are ten words apart. Find those words in the other dictionary and count the words between them--in this small sample, does one dictionary have more words than the other? This won't always be useful, because some of those words will be obvious derivatives, but it's a rough guide.

The other thing that you want to look for in a dictionary is cross-references for tenses of verbs. You should have enough imagination and basic knowledge of grammar not to need your hand held for every conjugation, but lots of languages have a few very irregular verbs. My dictionary directs you to "ir" (to go) and "ser" (to be) if you look up "fue," which is the past tense of both. I was very grateful for that when I started out, although thankfully I find myself needing it less these days.

Buffy, la casavampiros

The language I'm currently most interested in studying, mostly for professional reasons, is Spanish. Now, it's been a hard road; you can't use guerilla tactics as easily when you're learning for professional reasons. You just don't have the passion. So, every so often, you've got to throw some gasoline on the fire.

I've got a Netflix subscription, which is the only way I can watch TV since I don't have cable, so every couple of weeks I get three or four episodes of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer in the mail. And I turn on the Spanish dub.

(Yes, James Marsters is sexy as all get-out with that British accent. It's a sacrifice I'll have to make for now).

I listen to the Spanish while I watch the English subtitles; I'm not advanced enough yet to just listen to the Spanish dialogue, and besides, Joss Whedon's dialogue is snappy in English and loses something in translation. But I get a lot out of it:

-I know how to say "vampire slayer" (it's "casavampiros"). Witch is "bruja," but I learned that from Harry Potter.
-I get a feel for the rhythm of spoken spanish, and the pronunciation.
-I get a feel for the kinds of small interjections that Spanish conversation uses: de acuerdo for "okay," bueno, vaya, that sort of thing.
-The vocabulary's limited and dead simple, but what little there is gets drilled into my brain until it goes from my recognition vocabulary to my productive vocabulary (that is, words I'd actually use in a sentence).
-And, of course, I never have to make myself watch Buffy. It's worth having a mix of painful and pain-free studying options, so that you have something to do even when you'd rather stab something than learn more Spanish.

You may not be a geek like me, but lots of DVDs (especially for TV shows) have a Spanish (and sometimes French) dub on them.