 And we are live. Welcome to another episode of China, Hawaii, and you. I am your host, Andrew Zimmer, and we'd like to say aloha and welcome back to our series on climbing the Great Wall of Chinese. This is going to be the first episode that I have ever done where it's going to be a solo show. And most of our shows up to this point had all of our shows has been interviews where we kind of get at somebody's get somebody's experience pick at their brain to try to learn something. But today, I'm really excited to tell you that I'm going to be taking the show on my own and sharing some of what I've learned about Mandarin Chinese. We're getting really excited to show you the presentation that I've gotten together and I'm going to kind of introduce you to some principles that I wish somebody told me before I started. So, if we could get the presentation, please. All right. So, I've titled this a rocket ship lesson on Chinese, and you'll notice here, but on the side. It's the name is by Andrew Zimmerman and my Chinese name is I shan it means quiet memories of the mountain. I tend to really like that name. Next slide please. Okay, so my name is Andrew Zimmerman as you probably know, I am bilingual in Chinese and English, I achieved this in the span of about two years. I hasn't been interested in passing before that but when I first got to China, I could barely get myself some noodles. But, you know, by the end of it I was, I remember at the end of it I was explaining to people in taxis, why Biden pulled us troops out of Afghanistan, all in Chinese. So very, very complicated topics I was able to do. And I did this all through immersion, and we will talk about immersion learning a little bit. But I think it's a really, really valuable thing. And I think it's even more valuable than in some cases talking to people in real life. So let's go to the next slide please. All right, so I have a couple of slanders before we start. I cannot make any promises on timeline so I did it in two years I can tell you that I can't tell you how long it'll take you. It's going to depend on your availability, your maybe previous experience or maybe you had some childhood experience with Chinese growing up. You know, some people believe that when you're older that slows down the language acquisition vice personally I don't actually believe that older adults are at significant disadvantages and language acquisition and I'll talk about that more a little bit too. But I think that you should definitely pursue it regardless of your age. But the other side of that coin is that I have nothing to sell you. All right, I'm going to make that very, very clear. I do not have a product. I'm only here because I believe that Chinese is a really valuable skill. And I want people to pursue it to the largest ability can we pull the slide up one more time. All right, and I want to make one more disclaimer, which is, I cannot sell you on Chinese and what I mean by that is, there's a lot of people that will talk about why you should learn Chinese, and we've given we've talked about some of those already right. It's a great emerging market. It's, you know, largest number of native speakers in the world depending on how you measure it. There's tons of places that you can go with these Chinese people over the earth right there's a lot of things that you can do. But at the end of the day, I'm not really interested in selling somebody on why they should learn language X language why. And the reason that I say that is because learning any language requires an extremely high amount of self discipline and focus on to this thing for a span of years, right. So I'm cautious to try to sort of influence somebody's dreams from the external side because I think for any amount of success in Chinese you need to have at least some kind of internal motivation. So I don't really want to make necessarily make it my job to try to do that. Having said that we'll move on to slide number three. So the purpose of today is I cannot teach you I want you everybody to know I cannot teach you Mandarin half an hour. I would be wonderful if I could. I would probably make a lot of money but but we're not going to do that today. When I can tell you is I can tell you really important principles on how to learn it. In other words, this is going to be a presentation that's centered around what I wish somebody told me when I first started. I have taken very, very few formal Chinese education classes. Most of it was just watching YouTube videos and babbling what I could into in, you know, menus, like trying to read off of a restaurant menu, maybe talk to a taxi driver massage lady. Most of these things were really organic in this way. And there were a lot of embarrassing moments that I think I've talked about before but you know I have very minimal formal education. But the good news is I don't think that you need it. And we're going to talk about why in a minute. So let's get through these principles first and then we'll talk about how to do it. Next slide please. Okay, so first and foremost, the very first thing that a lot of people think about when they think of Chinese is getting through characters. Chinese is well known for having something like 80,000 recognized characters depends on what scholar you ask, but these can be really really intimidating. And it's easy to wonder to yourself how on earth am I supposed to learn these. The answer, as I say in here is one bite at a time and be patient with yourself, you will get there. I have books in my house that are entirely in Chinese. I'd love to show you the awesome time. But the good news is, every single Chinese character has a corresponding was called opinion pronunciation. So it's basically just how you would pronounce here. I don't know if people can see the, if we could pull up the slide one more time. As you can see in this, this is the dictionary app that I use called like a, on the top, I have a sentence, what a朋友, it means my friend, what means I suffered character, what means like a possessive usually. And then朋友 means your friend, you can see all this on the right side. This is my favorite dictionary app as I said, but you can see that all of the characters have very, very easy, easily pronounceable opinion equivalence. And so in this way, it makes getting characters relatively easy. Next slide please. Now the other piece of good news, that actually means that writing is really easy. Software can usually guess the correct character that you're trying to do. Very occasionally, you'll need to search through a sea of characters that have the same opinion spelling. But usually that's not such a big deal. Remember, if you have any doubts about what your correct character is, you can always check a dictionary before sending a message. There's nothing wrong with that. And even if you make the wrong character, maybe someone will get what you're trying to say anyway. The last thing I want to mention is that are very occasionally you will not know what the, what the correct opinion is to look up a character right. And so you'll have to manually draw that. And fortunately, these apps have drawing features so you can draw a character easily from a TV show. Next slide please. Okay, I want to talk about one or two very important misconceptions before you really kick it off. As I've said here, often we'll hear that learning like people should learn languages just like a child does. And this is because in our culture we have a common belief that children naturally have some kind of linguistic superiority when it comes to language acquisition. And this is not true. There's a categorical difference in how adults learn languages and how children learn languages. We want to kind of utilize the strengths that we have while trying to get around the weaknesses. The biggest reason that we shouldn't try to learn languages like children is because we're not children, we're smarter than them. Under the right circumstances researchers have consistently found that adults are better language learners and children. Another factor is that we have significantly less time than children, children when they're, you know, from let's say zero to five. All they have to do their only job is to, you know, learn a couple words of their whatever their native languages so they can communicate with their parents. This is, this is not something that we have in modern society. You know, overwhelmingly people have to work, people have family obligations. And so we need to be a little bit more precise and how we spend our time. We can't just expect 10,000 hours of Chinese will get it for us. The third reason why I think that it's important to split this is because we already have an English map of the world. In other words, you already in your mind have some rough map of how you understand the world. Have used the English language to map that understanding into something that you can into words that you can say, right. And so the thing is children do not have an internal map of the world. You know, children probably don't even understand the concept of like gravity, right, there's there's some some very simple things that adults can articulate why things happen children have no idea right there's still articulated in figuring out what kind of situations will make them will make them learn or make them develop or even get some basic physiological needs that. And so what we should do is we should use this already existing map of the world that we have an English and use it to map on to our target language. And the last thing that reason that I want to kind of separate how children and adults learning Chinese is because children, when they're learning Chinese, have the advantage of they're already fluent in Mandarin. And therefore, when it comes to writing, you know, everybody always wonders, oh, how can you learn to write three four 5,000 characters. The thing is, it's actually not that difficult for them because mentally, they already have associations of what every character is. And so I would submit to you, if you took all of the English language, and we was spoken it was still the same, but you began replacing words such that we're not necessarily phonetic, but they were replaced by a symbol. It's actually not going to be as hard as you think it is because you are, as I said, you already have this mental association of what English isn't and so it's something where to happen such that the spelling of words were changed or, you know, we replaced it with symbols. So it's actually very difficult for people to adapt to their time. Okay, there's one other thing that I want to talk about. So now that we've talked about opinion, which is wonderful for Chinese learners, because you know it makes all of these characters comprehensible. It's very tempting to rely on pinion entirely, and to skip learning all these thousands of characters I understand completely that these characters are very very daunting, people don't want to do it. There's really big problem with this approach, which is basically how are you going to reinforce what you know. Now, if you live in the United States, I know we live in Hawaii but if you live in the United States, your point of contact with people around you right in other words the people that you normally communicate with are overwhelmingly not going to speak Mandarin Chinese You can take a sort of communicative approach. These are these things have been tried by the military before where instead of, you know, having people read books and watch movies or something, they just talk. They talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk, and they would require words this way. The reason I don't like this approach is because I think it's not sustainable for the vast majority of people because your point of contact through a foreign language, most of the time is going to have to be some kind of media form. And the reason it's going to have to be a media form is because a media form is something that is consistent, you know, all you have to do is you have to load up Netflix you have to open your foreign language book. And there it is there's your foreign language stuff right whereas if you want to talk to somebody that speaks Japanese or Chinese right that's probably not in your house. So there's a good chance that you would need to go to maybe a restaurant if you need to go to some kind of cultural center, maybe we need to hire a tutor. But if you want to have content you want to have, you know, just some kind of experience with your target language, be it movies, books, magazines, what have you. These things are very, very accessible right. And I think that they're really really good. But here's the thing. When it comes to keeping Chinese fresh or keeping your target language fresh and continuously reminding yourself of what these words are right, because you have to remember, language learning is all about learning and forgetting words. I have forgotten words and Chinese hundreds of times right and I'll look it up and maybe it's time to go there forget it. I look it up again and forget the thing is, and this is my advantage. When you learn something the second time, it tends to stick a lot tighter than it did the first time. And the reason that so is because your brain is a really interconnected web of memories right people tend to think of your brain that memories is like a filing cabinet. But really your brain is your brain's memories are all about association. So one technique that people will often use when they're trying to remember things is they'll try to connect it to something that they already know, or they'll maybe connected to an experience they were having. And so when you're trying the time that they learned that thing right these these these wet this web of memories is very very hard to understand in some ways, but by making these mental connections with the characters. And sort of seeing them on TV, you know in books, whatever. They're much more equipped to have better recognition of these characters. And so you have to accept that you're going to forget and relearn words a lot of the time, and the way to make that sustainable is with media content. It's not with talking to people, at least not at first. I don't I'm not so I'm not to be clear I'm not opposed to talking to people. I just often think especially in the beginning stage is not really the most effective way. Okay, so next principle, tunnels. We've talked about opinion, we're going to talk about tones. Chinese is a tonal language. There's four main tones in standard Mandarin, which is what I speak is most common one dialect. The first one is flat. Second one is rising. Third one is dipping. And third one is right excuse me the fourth one is falling. So to give you an idea of what that sounds like it would sound something like ma ma ma ma. I'll say that one more time. Ma ma ma ma. You can hear in each of those four. There's all there's a change in how my voice rises falls. As you're seeking when you're first learning Chinese, you will need to live calculate as you're talking to make sure that your tunnels are correct. However, you will get to the stage where intuitive hearing falls. So in other words, many of the words that I know in Chinese, I actually can't tell you what the tonal is right. I don't, I don't think, for example, I think I don't think of a character and I say, Oh, there's force tunnel. Oh, that's first tunnel. What I think of is I just know how it sounds because I've heard the word so many hundreds of times. And you will develop an intuitive grasp of what the word is supposed to sound like. I heavily recommend to the largest extent of your ability, kind of shadowing or mirroring, you know, podcast or a movie, even if you don't understand it very well. Just sort of getting yourself used to the phoneticism of it. Do you pull the slide up one more time please. Now, okay, one last thing, getting the wrong tonal can mean anything. So sometimes it will mean that people still understand you. Sometimes you'll be completely incomprehensible. Sometimes there's a couple cases where you can even insult someone by accident. The most common one that people point to is the term for ma and ma means respectively a mother and someone's horse. So you could call somebody's mother a horse if you use the wrong tonal. But I think people usually won't get mad at you for that. Next slide. Okay, so the next principle that I want to talk about is sub radicals on the right is a rep the most commonly actually it is most complicated Chinese character in all of existence. It's called young young young. This is 54 strokes if I'm not mistaken. And you know the overwhelming majority of Chinese people cannot write this character, even people that have lived in China their entire lives. I actually can write this character. And the reason that I can write this character is because I didn't want to learn writing at first. So what I did was I learned the hardest character. And then whenever people would ask me, can I write in Chinese, I would draw this character and they would say oh wow, you speak you must write fluently Chinese. When the truth is I probably couldn't even write my own name. So, let's take a look at this character it's very very overwhelming now I understand that for most of you you probably don't speak any Chinese and that's okay, but I want to kind of bring your attention to something. Within the second, the second bullet point that I have here. Notice that I write all components here either exist as their own characters, or they have sub radicals. Let's take a look at the first one that I have listed again. Can you find again in the biang biang man character on the right. How about time, which is the second character, you can probably see that on the lower right left. How about you, the third one, you can see that one on the left. How about the fourth one, she, you can see that one on the bottom. Now, sometimes, there also have what are called sub radicals. So for example, the strokes on the very top is also the is also a component of, and which is what I have here on the third bullet point that's the first character, you can see that the roof is the same. And so what you need to do is you need to make mental associations and say, ah, that roof character, I've seen that before, and that's how you start to memorize it. In other words, you have to, as I was talking about with the web, you need to integrate how to draw these characters into wider spheres of what you are now. In fact, what I think was really cool is the year on the left. That's the, that's, that's the one, the third character in the second bullet point. That's the one that we learned earlier from, that's actually just to us. So as you can see, there's a really large interconnected system of Chinese characters. In other words, you're not having to start over. You're not having to individually memorize 234,000 5000 10,000 characters, you can often very much rely on an already existing mix from maybe even just something as simple as 500 characters and you can expand that out to 1000 2000 often just using kind of recycling and reshuffling characters that you already know. Excellent. Okay, now here's my favorite example. There is three characters here that you can take a look at the three characters on the top are all pronounced jump. So the first one is jump, second one is jump, and the third one is jump. Now the crazy thing here is, they all have different meanings. So the first jump is usually associated with some kind of formal thing. So, if somebody says, John should kaiser, that means something is formally started. There's other use meanings of jump, for example, john say means that something is happening right now, but we'll get to that in a minute. The second one refers to some kind of official documentation. So for example, John do means that you have like some proof or evidence or something. And the third job is referring to an illness of some kind. And now, some time ago I was talking about schizophrenia on the show, and the Chinese equivalent for schizophrenia is精神分裂中, and精神 means like someone's vital bodily energy. So, schizophrenia means like to separate. Right. And then john is the same kind of john here. It's like referring to some kind of illness. So schizophrenia in Chinese literally means energy divided almost which I think is quite appropriate. Now the thing is, this is important to know, none of these characters, if I just said john to a Chinese person, they wouldn't know what which john that I was referring to right because they're exactly the same. And the tonal is the same. However, and if we could pull up the next slide please. What you can do is you can use the second character the thing that you say next, and people will understand. So for example, as I said, don't die. That means something's happening right now. Right. So that means the first character you can see don't die. The second character, the same kind of jump that we just talked about. That is not something you can mix with that. And the same thing with the third one, which was talking about illnesses. So when it comes to official documentation or illness, you can't mix these don't die together. And therefore, it's really important to know entire words. So if you don't want to know just individual character mean, it's really important to sort of integrate these into a larger sphere of your knowledge. Next slide. Okay, now this one you really want to want to take a close look at. This is a common, commonly known Chinese poem that was written a couple of years ago by a Chinese linguist, and he was a sign language analyst. You know, if you, the meaning of itself is, you know, it's talking about lion eating poet, and how he lives in the cave. But, and it's a comprehensible poem. But if you had somebody read the characters out loud, it would just sound like as I say in the bottom. It would just sound like. And I've even dared or challenged Chinese colleagues to read it and they overwhelmingly couldn't. I thought that was pretty funny. But the reason that I have that here is this is another reason why it's very important to go into characters you can just rely on opinion, because as it happens. Opinion will often involve sharing different characters that have the same pronunciation with different meanings. And so it's important that you know what the character isn't that's going to give you a clue as to what this is talking about. And you will get the characters was time I promise you can take a long time but you will get them. Next slide. All right, so now, now we've talked about the principles here. How do we learn Chinese. Well, I'll tell you this. The first thing you want to do is as we've talked about is my dictionary app is my dictionary of recommendations, PLE CO highly recommend. Take a look at it. And what you want to do from there is just dive into any available Chinese content. So, some of the singers that I recommend, you are Jay Cho and who six six or she would call it Julio. Those are some of my favorite singers the thing I like about songs is people tend to listen to the songs many times over. And that kind of gives you this sense of, Oh, this word I've heard this word before right and it gives you kind of a familiarity with that. If you want something a little bit more. How would I say it wants me maybe a little bit more down to earth and in terms of how people talk Netflix has tons of TV shows my favorite one is the Kings avatar. Take a look, even if you can understand it. We would be surprised how much you can follow in the given TV show just by just by watching people's faces watching what happens on the screen. Screenwriters know that you're supposed to show not necessarily tell most native Chinese content. In fact, almost all of it has Chinese subtitles, and that's in large part because they know that it's easy to sort of let a character slip. It's maybe not clear which character they're talking about so all of it comes with subtitles hard coded. What I would definitely say though is you want to be cautious of TV dramas involving age in China. These things are really cool. No question it's kind of like getting an Eastern Lord of the Rings, right, but you want to be cautious about that because many times in ancient Chinese dramas they talk completely about how they were able to how modern people would talk and so you don't necessarily want to spend time learning how people don't talk anymore right you want to sort of learn how to talk to people today. So I would definitely recommend to large extent of your ability, watching as realistic TV shows as you can so things like family shows, maybe Disney cartoons if you can find them. You want to stick away from like, you know, a heavy action movies or, you know, like I said, dramas that take place with thousands of years ago. All right, excellent. And with that, I want to wish everybody conch if I tie, which is what you can see on the right. I want to wish you as well this year happiness, prosperity, and I will also add two things now our modern day. I hope that you are able to learn Chinese successfully, at least to some extent, or any language really but this has been Chinese focus. And I also wish you safety in this time of COVID-19. Thank you very much for tuning into China Hawaii and you, I'm your host and sermon, and we will see you in two weeks.