Memorization

Ah, the good ole technique of memorization. How I missed thee. I feel like I’m back in school cramming for an exam. Learning Chinese consists of a number of activities. The first is learning to make new sounds in a variety of ways. Flat and high tone, rising, falling and my favorite (heavy on the sarcasm) the falling and then rising (third) tone. This is enough work on it’s own. The sounds required to speak Mandarin Chinese are not exactly the same as those used in English, so lots of practice is in order.

The second activity is memorization. If you want to read and write Chinese you have to know them. Unlike other languages (even Korean!) there is no alphabet. No duh! What this means is that you must memorize how the character looks, what it means and how to say it. Sprinkle in differing ways of writing the character (Traditional versus Simplified), various meanings depending on the context in which the character is used and sometimes variations on the sound used to speak the word and you’ve added plenty more work on yourself.

All of this just for the basics! I haven’t even touched on the next activity, which is learning how to assemble the characters into proper and logical Chinese grammar. There is one advantage in the Chinese language where there are no verb tenses; the meaning of a verb is derived from the context in which it is used.

This makes me dream of the old days of learning Spanish in school. I took 6 years of Spanish and was even a member of the Spanish club for years in high school. There was a good amount of memorization and learning, but nothing to the degree required for Chinese. It’s too bad that my Spanish is so bad I can barely communicate the basics anymore. Use it or lose it. Well, I lost it.

BTW there are plenty of memorization tools out there. I’m still using ZDT regularly to help with my learning. I’m pulling characters out of my text books and organizing them into lessons. I’m pretty good at recognizing characters and figuring out what some basic phrases mean. The only thing that ZDT cannot do for me is to help me practice writing the characters. I do this on the weekends using a notebook and pencil.

Time to get back to work. I have another 10 characters to memorize. Soon I’ll be able to read, speak and understand more of the text in the book.


6 Responses to “Memorization”

  1. jessie Says:
    October 5th, 2006 at 7:46 am

    at this rate you’ll be communicating with your in-laws over thanksgiving dinner. go you!

  2. Shaun Says:
    October 5th, 2006 at 8:55 am

    @jessie

    Thanks for the encouragement, but the things I’m learning from the start are very basic. I can say various phrases and random works like “Hello”, “Landscape”, “Volcano”, “Train”, “America”, “China”. Not much conversation material just yet.

    It’s a far cry from the random words I already know and use regularly “See you tomorrow”, “Thanks”, “Make coffee”, “I’m full”, “I already ate”, “Do you want to eat?” and “I have to pee”.

    And always some of my favorites “Big ass”, “Bubble butt”, “Damn”, “Crazy”, “Screamer” (usually said when someone is yelling a lot). “Sly like a fox” and “Are you brain damaged?”

    Most of what I know is from hearing phrases and words repeatedly when with my wife, her sister and their mom. After almost 7 years I’m bound to pick up something. Not to mention I can usually say any number between 0 and 10,000. I don’t usually need any numbers higher than that. This comes in especially handy when Sue and I want to talk numbers without others knowing what we are saying. It doesn’t work as well when we are in Chinatown though.

  3. jessie Says:
    October 5th, 2006 at 1:49 pm

    so you really know all of the important phrases then. all you need now are “your daughter’s pregnant and I’m the father”, “no honey, that doesn’t make you look fat”, and “mom, will you babysit?”

  4. sarah Says:
    October 7th, 2006 at 9:12 pm

    hehehe.
    good luck with the chinese.
    and if you ever want to brush up on some spanish, let your good ole cousin know….i rreally need some practice myself. in fact, i think i’m going to hook up with the spanish club on campus at work. they welcome the entire community to join theirr weekly meetings and i really have lost a lot of spanish skills in the 3 years since i was in spain. i need to practice!

  5. aline Says:
    October 10th, 2006 at 7:53 am

    Good luck! :)I feel like learning Chinese all over again. I miss my childhood days.
    Don’t forget to watch some Chinese movies and listen to some Chinese songs. That’s how I learned Chinese when I was a kid.

  6. Shaun Says:
    October 11th, 2006 at 9:44 pm

    @sarah: I thought about hitting you up for a refresher, but I think I’ll embarrass myself more than it’s worth. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to use my Spanish and I think it would take some time listening and interacting with some fairly open people before I got the hang of it again. I can’t believe I took 4 years of Spanish in school and I can hardly remember how to say the basics.

    @aline: Thanks for the encouragement. I found that if I keep myself imursed in everything Chinese learning it becomes a little easier. I’m always on the look out for characters I know and phrases I can pick up from conversations.

    We get to watch movies once in a while. I enjoy watching them even though I know very little, but after about 6 or 8 hours I get bored and have to find something else to do. The last movie we watched was some where around 32 hours long.

    It may get easier though. My wife, Sue, has mentioned getting Chinese TV for our kids. She gets to watch movies, the kids get to watch some Chinese cartoons and other stuff. It’s a win-win! We’ll see. Maybe next year we’ll break down and order it.