Category: Learning

Spanish in Quarantine

Having just finished my first Spanish novel of 2021 (in eleven days, or according to my library reading app a mere 7 hours), now seems like a good time to take a look back at my Spanish learning saga.

The arrival of COVID-19 to South America in March 2020 disrupted the travel side of this travel blog, but in terms of my acquisition of Spanish as a third (?) language, the subsequent and ongoing quarantine has been something of a blessing and a curse.

One of the advantages of backpacking while learning a language is that one gets to arrive in a new hostel every few days, which means that one gets to meet new people and go through the routine “getting to know you” conversation. This conversation of “Where are you from? Where have you been? Where are you going” can quickly become tedious if repeated too often. On the longer trips this ritual can reveal the superficiality of all one’s interactions and heighten the inherent loneliness of travel. However, when taken as an excuse to speak in the target language, it is a perfect practice regimen for improving fluency.

This daily practice was dramatically cut off when Argentina went into lock down. All the other opportunities to engage with local inhabitants also went out the window as one’s world was reduced to a home and a grocery store. When I parted ways with my roommates to live alone, I must have gone three months without speaking to anyone in person (other than the pro forma “tengo una bolsa” or “gracias” of the checkout line).

On the other hand, given the gift of time on my hands, I have consumed more Spanish content in the last 8 months than I could ever have imagined, both reading voraciously and justifying the roughly $5/month cost of Netflix that I haven’t been factoring into my travel costs. Having just finished my first Spanish novel of 2021 (in eleven days, or according to my library reading app a mere 7 hours), now seems like a good time to take a look back at my Spanish learning saga.

Early Exposure

Having spent most of my childhood (excepting the times in Germany) in San Antonio, Las Cruces and El Paso, I was definitely exposed to Spanish at an early age. However, at least as late as sixth grade, my ignorance of the language was total. I recall thinking the Jesus‘s I heard in the school halls were calling out to an Olympian (to be fair, I was really into Greek mythology) and I also remember hearing qué as the letter k. I may have accidentally participated in a bilingual “Who’s on First” routine more than once.

Notably, when the time came to choose a foreign language, I picked German in high school. I rather conspicuously did not want to learn Spanish whether it was a germ of xenophobia or merely a defense mechanism to preserve my identity against the Spanish-speaking host culture. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to learn something when one is both obsessed with Mexican food and every other radio ad includes some Spanish.

When it came to university, I didn’t even consider taking a Spanish class, but discovered that the library had a set of Pimsleur (or Berlitz) CDs. I went through those without really learning anything, but that was when I decided that I should maybe try to get fluent in Spanish at some point in my life.

Reemergence

Years later in the fall of 2017, I was sitting at a cafe in Taidong, Taiwan and not feeling particularly motivated to work on my dissertation. I don’t know how it occurred to me exactly, but I decided I should maybe try to learn Spanish. At the time, I was at a plateau or pinnacle of my Chinese, not needing to actively improve my language skills as I was literally swimming in Chinese academic papers. I had used to enjoy studying Chinese, but I stopped studying the language when I started grad school. So, maybe part of me was yearning to learn something new. In any case, I downloaded a pdf of the Foreign Service Institute’s ancient Spanish textbook and committed myself to Duolingo.

It took me about three months to complete the Spanish tree on Duolingo, after which I switched to Japanese for a couple months, then redid Spanish when the app completely redesigned the tree and structure of the course. If it weren’t for a particularly boozy weekend last August, I would have maintained a streak on the platform for these past three years. Of course, finishing the PhD was always the priority, and maybe ten minutes a day of some Spanish translation exercises wasn’t magically going to make me fluent.

Immersion

It didn’t take me long after arriving in Buenos Aires in October 2019 to realize that Duolingo was not going to be sufficient. Between reviewing lessons and completing new lessons they had added since I last focused on Spanish, I had maybe enough to keep me busy for a month or two. I had spent the week before my flight intensively reviewing and maybe had a notion that I was could be a competent elementary level speaking. Unfortunately, I was disabused of that fantasy when I couldn’t understand a word of what anyone was saying. To be honest, I still don’t know what porteños are saying half the time. So on top of the daily practical experience as already described above, I needed to seek out additional resources.

Lingvist

I had plenty of time to kill in the hostel for the first week while waiting for the airline to find my luggage, so I found a second app–Lingvist. It’s a straightforward vocabulary-focused app, using cloze items (the fancy pedagogical term for fill in the blank) to teach upwards of 5,000 words. It’s good to have example sentences provide context for the vocabulary items while forcing the user to conjugate. It’s bad that each conjugation was apparently listed as a separate word, so “to eat” must have accounted for 5 out of the 5,000 items. I could never make sense of the ranking of words. The app implies there is an ordering from easy to difficult, but the reality seemed to contradict that. After a one-week trial of the full featured app, I put up with the limited-feature free version for a while before springing for a 3-month membership so I could blow through the entirety of the (European) Spanish and (Latin American) Spanish modules, plus the bonus grammar and reading quizzes.

ANKI

ANKI is a popular, general purpose flashcard app with fully customizable parameters for spaced repetition. I found a 10,000 card deck of the top 5,000 most frequent Spanish words (1 card Spanish to English, 1 card English to Spanish). I really don’t like flashcards, so I only worked on it sporadically and never finished getting all the way through the deck.

Podcasts

It took me a couple weeks (or basically my second stop) to realize that Youtube might be useful. In Rosario, I watched several compilations of Spanish Listening exercises from SpanishPod101‘s extensive library. That reminded me of SpanishPod, which apparently no longer exists as a business, but is completely archived on the internet. I find it useful to have short, easy to understand dialogs playing in the background on bus trips or whatever to familiarize my ear and memorize language chunks.

Meanwhile, in my actual podcast app, I am subscribed to News in Slow Spanish (Intermediate–Latin America and Advanced-Spain), The Spanish Dude!, Yabla, and Duolingo. Of course Duolingo has their own podcast for telling bilingual stories of the Spanish speaking world. Yabla is a paid video platform of graded Spanish content with bilingual subtitles that releases free videos via the podcast. The Spanish Dude is an American gringo who talks more about learning strategies and sharing his experiences learning Spanish. News in Slow Spanish is pretty self explanatory but also functions as a free podcast advertising the company’s paid platform.

Reading

It was also the hostel in Rosario where I discovered one of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series in Spanish translation on the book swap shelf. I suppose that counts as the first book I read in Spanish. I’ve been looking for the others in the series ever since and perusing the book shelves of other hostels, but never found anything worth investing the time with a dictionary to read. Hostel book exchanges tend to be a weird mix of Swedish novels, pulp fiction, and technical manuals.

A lot of my early reading was mediated through Duolingo, which has multimedia stories available for some of their languages. It’s not a particularly fun way to read, as the stories appear one line at a time with audio narration and the ocassional pop quiz question to see if you are paying attention.

By the time I reached Salta, I was starting to Google “online Spanish textbook” and “Spanish learning resources,” which lead to finding two graded Spanish readers on Project Gutenberg, dated of course, but enough to keep me busy for a month or two. I also found Practical Spanish to be quite useful with just a number of readings sorted by beginner, intermediate, and advanced.

Video

Though I tried to watch a couple of Pedro Almódovar films in the early stages of my trip, it was the poking around on Youtube that resulted in more substantial rewards. As recommended by some list of resources, there is a short sitcom (only about 10 episodes) called Extra en Español about an American in Barcelona. It’s a cheesy, but written with simpler Spanish and spoken slower because the target audience is learners of Spanish. Similarly, there was a telenovela called Destinos that uses almost only English in the introductory episode and builds with purely Spanish finale.

I had managed to work through most of the resources listed above by the end of 2019, and the combination of approaches paid rapid dividends. After two months of solid studying, I felt about as fluent in Spanish as I was in Chinese after two years. Not perfect, but comfortably fluent in most situations.

In January 2020, I had a flurry of reading in Cordoba because I stayed first at a Selena hostel where my dorm was next to the hostel library (yes, a whole library) then I stayed in an Airbnb with an absent host, who happened to be a kindergarten teacher. At the hostel, I read an illustrated abridge version of Around the World in 80 Days. In the airbnb, I read at least 100 kids books, which isn’t that many considering many of the books were 20 pages long with one sentence per page. Children’s books are challenging in their own way because the names of so many types of animals and fairies don’t really come up in adult-focused material. In the month of traveling between Cordoba and Mendoza, I made a habit frequenting cafés, where I could enjoy a coffee and the daily paper, which I could work my way through without having to look up so many words.

Quarantine

As the lockdown was going into effect, I snatched a young adult novel from the hostel’s paltry book exchange. The Two Marias is an Argentinian coming-of-age story about a girl who is reading the diary of her great-grandmother’s voyage from Italy. The diary is in Italian (with a few words changed into Spanish and an Italian-Spanish glossary in the back), so not the ideal reading material, but still technically my first Spanish-language original book. When we peeled off from the hostel into a house, I discovered my French roommate had a stack of choose-your-own-adventure books in Spanish (all translations of original English). I think I read three of them before moved into my own apartment and lost access to that treasure trove.

The first house had a Netflix account attached to the big screen smart TV, and apart from group viewings of 80s action films, I rewatched Extra en Español with the German to encourage his Spanish learning and watched the first two seasons of Money Heist (La Casa de Papel) with the Frenchman for pleasure. That’s also when I started to watch the original Colombian Ugly Betty (Yo soy Betty, La Fea). So, when we moved into a second house with a smart TV but no Netflix account, I decided it was worth setting up my own account.

Netflix

Apart from the two aforementioned shows (finishing episode 335 of Ugly Betty at the end of June), I have watched a lot of Spanish content on Netflix including both limited run sitcoms like Psiconautas (Argentina) and The Neighbor (Spain) as well as more Colombian telenovelas like The Good Bandit (63 episodes) and Bolívar (still only half way through the 60 episode program after four months).

The more impressive feat is the amount of cinema I’ve watched.

TitleDate WatchedYearCountry
Lusers6/27/20202015Arg/Chile/Peru
Esperando la carroza6/4/20201985Argentina
Pizza, Beer, & Smokes10/30/20201998Argentina
Caida del Cielo8/21/20202016Argentina
Mi Obra Maestra9/12/20202018Argentina
So Much Love to Give9/9/20202019Argentina
Attitude Test6/21/20202016Chile
No estoy loca6/11/20202018Chile
Mujeres arriba7/5/20202020Chile
Loving is Losing9/27/20202018Columbia
Santo Cachón7/3/20202018Columbia
Si saben cómo me pongo ¿pa’ qué me invitan?10/29/20202018Columbia
Feo pero sabroso6/17/20202019Columbia
Death Can Wait7/9/20202020Columbia
Instructions Not Included10/11/20202013Mexico
Elvira I Will Give You My Life but I’m Using It9/13/20202014Mexico
Grandma’s Birthday7/5/20202015Mexico
Warehoused9/5/20202015Mexico
El tamaño sí importa10/14/20202016Mexico
Macho10/19/20202016Mexico
No Manches Frida9/6/20202016Mexico
Un padre no tan padre7/8/20202016Mexico
¿Cómo matar a un esposo muerto?10/15/20202017Mexico
Ana and Bruno12/15/20202017Mexico
Camino a Marte10/16/20202017Mexico
Malacopa1/1/20212018Mexico
Ni tú ni yo12/19/20202018Mexico
ROMA6/6/20202018Mexico
Como caído del cielo6/30/20202019Mexico
Grandma’s Wedding7/10/20202019Mexico
Grandma’s Last Wishes12/30/20202020Mexico
Mutiny of the Worker Bees6/20/20202020Mexico
Don’t Call Me Spinster10/28/20202018Peru
How to Get Over a Breakup6/14/20202018Peru
Sí, Mi Amor8/5/20202020Peru
Off Course9/20/20202015Spain
Spy Time4/26/20202015Spain
For Your Own Good9/17/20202017Spain
The Bar9/22/20202017Spain
Thi Mai10/20/20202017Spain
Jefe9/27/20202018Spain
Superlopez7/18/20202018Spain
Yucatán10/4/20202018Spain
<abbr title="With Jean Reno speaking Spanish">4L</abbr>9/23/20202019Spain
The Platform5/9/20202019Spain
I love you, stupid7/7/20202020Spain
Whisky12/21/20202004Uruguay
Porno para principiantes6/13/20202018Uruguay
<abbr title="Will Ferrel learned Spanish for this role">Casa de mi Padre</abbr>7/4/20202012USA
Spanish films watched on Netflix. You don’t need to bother counting, there are 49 films listed.

Subtitles

I should note that I am not at a listening level where I can turn off the subtitles. I watch some things with English and some with Spanish. I like the variety and I think it helps to do both. With Spanish subtitles, because they are for the hearing impaired, you get extra vocabulary telling you about creaking doors, the names of songs, and [engine starting]. With stronger reading skills, I can use my eyes to support my ears in order to understand what was said. On the other hand, with English, reading is so fast and effortless, I can actually focus more attention on what I am hearing. Plus, the sometimes idiomatic translation expands my understanding of the subtleties of language use.

Of course, I’ve probably watched ten times as much content in English, but the nice perk about Netflix is I can turn on Spanish subtitles and practice reading while bingewatching which ever show.

Literature

It took moving into an Airbnb with a (small) collection of books to get me reading again. From that shelf, I read Siddhartha, The Hobbit, and Prince Caspian in translation at which point it occured to me to look up Spanish language books in my library app. I had looked periodically beginning in October, but didn’t hit the magical point of literacy + competency to find things worth reading. Apart from a smattering of kids books, I read several substantial YA books (100 pages, zero pictures) and The Magician’s Nephew. Unfortunately that was the only available book in the Chronicles of Narnia, but the entire Harry Potter series was available and that kept me busy from July through December.

BookReading Time
Sorcerer’s Stone9:38
Chamber of Secretes10:32
Prisoner of Azkaban13:42
Goblet of Fire23:15
Order of the Phoenix31:45
Half Blood Prince19:17
Deathly Hallows25:42
The Harry Potter Series in Spanish

Meanwhile, I inhereted the Frenchman’s library of books (which were originally borrowed from one of his Argentinian friends) via some sort of tontine, and can add a couple more Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books and a R.L. Stein book to the reading list.

All told, it’s a lot of reading, and while I may still have doubts about my fluency, I can confidently claim to be literate in Spanish. Strangely enough, with the one exception mentioned above, every book I read was translated from English into Spanish. In other words, I hadn’t read any actual Spanish literature. I had picked up and put down Cien Años de Soledad, but ultimately decided I needed more reading practice with the more accesible YA lit.

2021 will be different. I am done with the second hand works. It is my resolution to make this the year of Spanish Literature. While most people wanting to read more aim at a book a month, my goal will be 16 novels. Since I can check out books for 3 weeks at a time, I should be a little faster than a book a month. As mentioned at the beginning of this novelistic blog post, I’ve already finished my first book, Laura Esquivel’s Como Agua Para Chocolate in a week and a half. I don’t expect every book to be so short, but after the later Harry Potter novels, long books aren’t so intimidating. Nonetheless, I’m going to leave Garcia-Marquez for later in the year. I believe my next book will be Isabel Allende’s La Casa de los Espíritus and the final book should, of course, be Don Quixote. By that time, I think I can close the book on Spanish, and start seriously working on language #4 (unless it’s time to go back and read the Four Great Classics of Chinese Literature).

German

After four months of dabbling in Korean and Japanese, it is time to put myself to the ultimate language learning test–German, my first foreign language, the one that convinced me I was thick as a brick. A full accounting of my experience to date with the language would fill a library shelf, but I will still try to sketch the highlights below.

Study Experience

I spent much of my early childhood in Germany. I have no basically no memories of the first time we moved there, but I can say with some certainty that I was too busy learning English to also pick up a second language from the wider environment. I was in elementary school the second time we were stationed in Germany, so I was in a good cognitive state to pick up a little of the language. In terms of formal education, the DoD school only had a single weekly class covering bits of Germany history and culture as part of the elementary school curriculum.

Years later in high school when I finally had to take a foreign language, I selected German. I coasted for the first year, then due to various scheduling quirks had my second and third years under self-directed study. This meant, I mostly used German class to do my math homework, and otherwise did the bare minimum to get the credit.

Since then, I’ve occasionally seized on the idea that I want to bring my latent German up to a level of fluency, which has involved various books, websites, and podcasts. Of course, this was interspersed with equivalently sporadic attempts to learn Spanish and Arabic, so I never maintained a consistent study schedule of German for more than a month or two. Despite often meeting Germans while traveling internationally, I’ve always hesitated to speak. It has long been a theory that all I need is an extended immersion in a German environment to push myself. So, either this is going to bear out or I will be facing my self-delusions.

Study Plan

The good news is that I have a wealth of materials to work on while in Germany.

  • German: Step by Step. A physical book I picked up 12 years ago at a discount book store. I look forward to finishing a reread so I can trash the book.
  • Duolingo. As one of the first languages on the platform, Duolingo has both a long and detailed course for German, as well as a set of audio-visual stories.
  • Lingodeer+. As long as I decide to keep paying the monthly fee for this app, I have the three-pronged vocabulary review (written German to English, spoken German to English, English to German), the grammar training, verb conjugation training, and quizzes specializing in prepositions and der/die/das.
  • Podcasts: I have a number of podcasts for German long ago downloaded and processed. Two series (Audio Tutor and My Daily Phrase German) are basically just audio-phrase books that I can throw on while taking a nap, while a much better produced progressive series (Warum Nicht) is worth a close relistening. (During one of my graduate work German study spells, I listened to these a lot…to the point that I can recite lines from the dialogs easily). Warum Nicht has accompanying pdf worksheets as well.
  • Foreign Service Institute Textbooks. If I’m really getting desperate for linguistic content, I also have digital copies of the textbooks used by the State Department.
  • Media. I don’t have much in the movie department, but I guess it is finally time to watch the series “Babylon Berlin.”

The bad news, is that this is almost too much content to plow through if I am only actively studying an hour or two a day. As I only intend to spend about a month in Germany, I’m going to have to limit the tourism and really study hard.

Reflections on the Learning of Japanese

Six weeks in Japan (and about 1-2 hours a day) was enough time to lay down the basics of Japanese. My pacing for Duolingo was perfect, allowing me to max out the crown levels by the last day. The other app (Lingodeer Plus) would have needed 100s of hours more to fully “max out” all the available content. Altogether, I feel content with what I was able to achieve.

  • Alphabet: My reading of hiragana and katakana, which were shaky to begin with, are quite strong, and I am confident it will persist in my long term memory. Oddly, I have the feeling that a handful of letters are waiting to surprise me if I were to test myself at some time in the future. I did notice some symbols are very common, while others rarely show up. It would be interesting to see some statistical analysis.
  • Kanji: Though there are lots of differences in the form and choice of characters to express concepts in Chinese or Japanese (for example 自行车 vs 自転車 or 我 vs 私), I don’t think I was ever tripped up by them, accepting everything quickly and naturally. On the other hand, I can only confidently read aloud the kanji from the vocabulary items I learned. Every kanji has a number of readings that is highly context dependent.
  • Vocabulary: It is an interesting question of how much vocabulary one should study when one only wants to learn a little bit of the language. I certainly ended up covering more words than I was expecting, and dutifully copying them into a notebook to practice kanji/hiragana. However, I don’t think I ever encountered too many “I really don’t need to waste effort memorizing this” kind of words.
  • Grammar: I think my favorite aspect of Lingodeer Plus is the Grammar Tunes game that requires the user to determine if a given sentence is grammatically correct or not. Each lesson covers 2-3 grammar points, covering everything from sentence order, the use of particles, and conjugation of verbs. In terms of single sentences, I think my (reading) comprehension is probably quite strong (for an elementary speaker). My preference for the grammar exercises wasn’t necessarily the grammar aspect, but the means of reviewing vocabulary in context.
  • Speaking: Overall, I did not have too many opportunities to really immerse myself in Japanese conversations. In the daily routine, “hello”, “thank you”, and “excuse me” are generally quite sufficient. When asked if I could speak Japanese, I would always demur. There were times when Japanese people attempted to make conversations with me, but after guessing “Where are you from,” any additional discussion would involve the use of a pocket translator. The one time I had an extended immersion in a Japanese conversation, where it wasn’t solely focused on me, I did my best to listen and follow along, but it was overwhelming and a little dispiriting.

Reflecting on the process of learning Korean and Japanese over these months, it is clear that one can learn a lot in an isolated, academic way, but that there is still a huge gulf between the language as written in a textbook (or app) and actual communication in real life. With Chinese, I was getting into conversations much earlier and more frequently than with either Japanese or Korean. Perhaps I was younger and more motivated then, or perhaps a key difference is the presence of a “ladder.” I wonder if the key to my rapid acquisition of Chinese, was spending those early critical months with another learner of Chinese in multiparty conversations. It might be easier to learn a language when it is being modeled to you in a simplified form. Conversations are less daunting when there is a “coach” there handling the main work and providing on-the-spot support and the opportunity to join in. I did meet quite a few foreigners living in Japan who spoke good (to my ears) Japanese. I would have to move there to make the contacts and build up the relationships in order to have more of those “bridged” experiences.

I did lose my motivation to learn Japanese in the last couple of days, simply because I knew I was leaving and wanted to switch back to Korean. On the plus side, it was reassuring to know that most of the Korean was still dormant just under the surface after focusing so exclusively on Japanese for six weeks. I think with periodic review I can maintain the bulk of the linguistic block I built up. In the future, I still want to travel more of Japan and learn more of the language.

Learning Japanese

I intend to learn some Japanese during the 6 weeks I travel here, though I should state at the outright my goals are very modest. I would be happy achieving an A1 level.

The last time I came to Japan, I spent the hour or so while I was waiting in the airport in Bangkok for my flight to Osaka to bookmark and download some Japanese phrases and commit “nihongo wa wakarimassen” (“I don’t understand Japanese”) to memory. I was fine with just the handful of courtesy phrases and found it easy enough to navigate using my knowledge of hanzi to interpret kanji on signage.

At some point however, and I remember it was in Nagoya, I decided I needed to learn Hiragana and Katakana. So I looked around online, found this wonderful website. I spent one night cramming Hiragana, one night cramming Katakan, and the rest of my trip practicing. I didn’t really pick up much else of the language other than figuring out some English loan words (like hotel, beer, and tomato).

Fast forward to the winter and I’ve finished the Spanish language tree on Duolingo and was looking for something else to work on. Duolingo just launched Japanese (beta) and I thought it would be good to refresh the letters (of which I’d forgotten almost half). I worked on Japanese exclusively while in Nepal, completing the tree in a month. I kept trying to keep the skills strong until they switched over to crown system, so I redid some of the earlier lessons until I decided to focus fully on Spanish again.

My Current Plan

I don’t want to bother with podcasts or a textbook this time around because I don’t want to fall too far down the rabbit hole of spending all my time studying instead of traveling. I have (had) 2 modest goals. Finish the Duolingo lessons, maxing out all the levels. Go through Level 1 Japanese on Lingodeer (averaging 3-4 lessons a day at first to get a good start).

Regarding Lingodeer, I completed the first couple of lesson on my last day in Korea, but as soon as I landed in Japan, I realized they completely changed their business model to put all the content behind a paywall. Ironically, I had considered purchasing a membership, but I’m now so annoyed that the issue is a non-starter for me. The company’s excuse is that they need money to build new content, but that doesn’t make sense. They are charging people who want to learn Japanese (or Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish, or German) to build lessons in another language that they don’t necessarily want to study.

I did already pay for Lingodeer+, which has vocabulary and grammar drills for Japanese, so I can make do with that. Based on my work with it in Korean, it appears to cover all the same knowledge points of the main lessons (because, honestly, why rewrite their database when they can just repackage it), so with a little patience I can reverse engineer all the knowledge. The issue, however, is knowing when to stop. With 100+ lessons introducing 20-30 words each, this might be exactly the rabbit hole I want to avoid. Or I just learn Japanese. I guess there are worse things in life.

The fact of the matter is that it does not seem even remotely necessary to learn Japanese to travel around. English seems even more widely spoken than the last time I was here, and I suppose with the Olympics coming up in 16 months, there must be an ongoing push for internationalization. Still, I really want to get enough Japanese in me so that I could exercise some cross-linguistic comparisons among the three languages that have had so much exchange and mutual influence over the past 2000 years.

The Mountain

First there is a mountain.
Then there is no mountain.
Then there is.

— Zen Poem
(also lyrics from a Donovan song)

As I am plugging along in Korean, learning hundreds of grammatical points and 18 different ways to express the future tense through nearly indiscernible differences in conjugation, I come across the following:

Credit: Talk to Me In Korean

You start off learning lots of adjectives (aka descriptive verbs) in their “infinitive” forms all of which end in the 다 (da). 예쁘다 (yeppeu-da) means to be pretty, and one can imagine on the streets of Korea there are plenty of occasions to say so. However, it couldn’t possibly be right to go around saying things in the infinitive form (“to be pretty”) when it would be more appropriate to say “she is pretty” or “you are pretty.” Of course, there are a whole host of considerations for how casual or polite you want to be and additional subtleties that could be added to indicate that this is new information to me (e.g. I’m just discovering this).

And then I come to the lesson on a “narrative” form where the conjugation ends up exactly the same as the infinitive. So, it would have been fine to say 예쁘다 (yeppeu-da) all along as long as I wasn’t speaking to myself.

The path to enlightenment is long.

Korean dictionary launch

If it wasn’t already apparent that I am crazy, this should settle it. I’m about a month into cramming Korean into my brain, and I’m already building a dictionary. It’s a work in progress and more importantly its part of my process for retaining vocabulary.

I don’t have the patience to sit and attempt to memorize vocabulary lists. I don’t mind copying a vocabulary word here or there, either by hand or into the computer, but I also recoiled at the idea of just writing a character or word 50 times in a row (as is standard among Chinese learners). I always found flashcards to be a mixed blessing. Whether physical or digital, its a lot of work maintaining a deck–adding new items and removing items you are confident about. Something about the randomness seems suboptimal.

On the other hand, I am willing to take the time to engage with large volumes of vocabulary items while performing a variety of menial tasks–copying from app/pdf worksheet/textbook to paper, typing into computer, sorting and collating lists in Excel, removing duplicates, finding typos, etc. There is something immensely satisfying to discover that some words that stubbornly remain in the peripheral of my vocabulary have actually shown up across multiple sources. The clouds parts, the sun shines through, and the word catches on fire under the laser focus of attention.

I think there is something to say about the wisdom of the crowd. If you try learning a language from any given source, there are going to be tons of words that raise eyebrows for their seeming impracticality. However, once you start averaging across multiple sources, you can identify the truly widespread and common words (through a sort of low level manual corpus analysis). I actually wrote a paper taking this idea as a hack for estimating age of acquisition of characters among Chinese native speakers (I should probably dust it off and finally get around to submitting it to a journal). On the other hand, its interesting to see which words are completely glossed over because its assumed you already know it. However, there is a messiness to the merging process, as I’m not working off of official vocabulary lists.

The cool thing is I finally have a rough estimate of my vocabulary in Korean, under 1000 words. Of course, there is the entirety of Duolingo’s vocabulary to be integrated as well as additional lessons from the current three sources (TTMIK, Lingodeer, 新标准韩语).

Ultimately, I’m hoping to use this dictionary as a basis to design some newbie learner resources.

My Chinese Learning Story, Part 3

Read PArt One
read Part Two

As I reflect on my experiences learning Chinese (especially within the context of trying to cram Korean into my brain), I keep remembering new details to add.

So, I do consider myself self-taught, but that isn’t 100% true. I did have lessons with private tutors (though for only a single session and three sessions, respectively), and I did take a semester of Chinese lessons at Shenzhen university on my way out. I saw the first tutor because she was pretty, but she was a terrible teacher. The second was because I was prepping for the HSK 6 and wanted some targeted help on my writing. She bluntly told me I would never pass the HSK 6, so I dropped her and passed by a wide margin. I did prepare for the spoken portion by chugging a flask of erguotou.

I had finished a year of formally teaching at a international high school and while transitioning to “the next phase,” I enrolled at Shenda on a lark. After years of bumping into students studying formally and being amazed at how sucky their Chinese was, I wanted to get some first hand experience. I was placed into the highest level classes (“Business”), but dropped out after two weeks, not because it was too hard, but because it wasn’t the right learning environment. Firstly, the class was too small, the pacing too slow, 3 out of the 4 teachers had thick regional accents, and one of the teachers who also happened to be the dean constantly talked a bunch of BS about the CCP.

The “Advanced” class was a lot more lively and I got along with the teachers better. Again, I had access to a library full of textbooks, and worked heavily on those. So, the main take away was high-volume self study, working on pronunciation with some friends, and a bit of writing practice with homework.

Around that time, I “graduated” to my first literature in Chinese — a collection of short stories by 三毛. After leaving Shenzhen, I spent six months on the road, couch surfing and staying in hostels. At one point I picked up a martial arts novel by 金庸, but I never got into it. I had a textbook or two with me, and I recall spending hours going through a database of short news articles on my computer while training myself on word segmentation. [Chinese is written without spaces between words].

I stopped “studying” Chinese when I began my PhD at Beijing Language and Culture University, but I was attending graduate courses taught in Chinese and working my way through textbooks written in Chinese. I was proud and defensive of my Chinese level. I joined a speech competition at the university in my first year and was shocked to not win.

I had basically hit the pinnacle of what I could achieve in Shenzhen, and I was expecting Beijing to magically infuse me with a flawless accent. As I poured myself into written, academic Chinese, my spoken ability actually declined significantly. It probably didn’t help that my social circle in Beijing was mostly anglophone.

I started reading literature again, alternating between original works in Chinese and translations of world literature, including Norwegian Wood, Love in a Time of Cholera, Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, 《三体》（全集），《复眼人》、《活着》、《酒国》、and some book about a code breaker whose name I cannot recall.

I am extremely fortunate to have been the 大师兄 at my research group and had a classmate who helped me edit a few conference papers. Though in the end, when it came to writing the beast of my dissertation, some sections got native speaker edits, but most of it was entirely on my own. The defense committee made noises about it not being perfectly written, but there wasn’t exactly anything I could do about that.

So, what’s next for my Chinese? I don’t have any interest in performing and 相声, singing competitions, or dating shows (though in my younger days, I may have fancied the attention). I would like to continue expanding my vocabulary, especially along the literary lines. The highest possible achievement I can envision would probably be to publish some poems or 随笔 (informal essays) in Chinese.

HSK

This may be the coldest take on the internet, but the HSK (standing for Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, i.e. “Test of Chinese Level”) is a flaming pile of garbage. In general, language proficiency tests are a good thing. Schools and companies need them to make sure the entering students and workers can effectively communicate in the language, and learners of languages can set the test as either a benchmark of progress or a concrete external motivation. I have plenty of friends in China who often speak vaguely of needing to sign up or study for the HSK 4. It also seems to be level 4, which indicates a decent level of proficiency but not crazy about it.

Having taken both the old HSK and the new HSK, which at this point has completely replaced it (so no hopes of “HSK Classic” coming back), the main problem with the HSK is that it is skewed too low. This is readily encapsulated by the follow slide from a lecture:

Vocabulary sizes for “equivalent levels” of various language proficiency standards

Because the HSK divides into 6 levels (which, I’ll admit makes more sense than the 3 test — 11 level system of the old version), China insists on it corresponding to the Common European Framework (the A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 levels). This is complete bullshit. In truth, a level A2 speaker of Chinese would have a decent chance of passing the HSK Level 4, while the hardest test only corresponds to the borderline between B2 and C1.

So why produce so many distinct, super easy exams? The official dogma is that foreigners (outside of China) only spend a couple hours a week studying the language and it would be too discouraging to have to study for two years before being good enough to take the test. The truth is its all a scam. The HSK is quite pricey, and by having a separate test for each level, a potential test taker is going to be sucked into taking the exam multiple times over the course of their study.

So, should you take the HSK? If you want to, why not. But I would steer clear of the first three exams. The level six may seem daunting, but it is really not. They use the same voice actors for the listening section as every textbook in China, so they speak slowly and clearly in perfect Mandarin. The reading section questions are so easy, that you can figure out the answer without even reading the passages, and finally, though it is hard to write a full essay by hand without being able to look up how to write some characters, you have ten minutes to read the passage you are tasked with summarizing, so you can cram the essential characters.

Korean Learning Progress

It’s been almost a month since I formally announced my plans to learn Korean, so now is as good a time as any to check in on how the mission is coming. I’ve been averaging several hours a day (usually most of the morning and a bit more in the late afternoon or evening) on Korean.

Apps

I’m two lessons short of finishing the tree on Duolingo, but it will be some time before I max out all the lessons to get all the “crowns.” Duolingo recently introduced a weekly leadership board, so that competitive element (to progress into the next league) has kept me motivated to do extra lessons everyday. Overall, I’m a bit bored of Duolingo.

I completely worked my way through one app called “Infinite Korean,” which drills up to 10 vocabulary items organized around topics (transportation, food, clothing, etc.) with a simple premise of picking the correct answer before the falling meteor hits the ground.

I’m also 85% through Korean on Lingodeer, which I think I might wholeheartedly recommend. It does look like it is designed by professional language teachers with more use of textbook style grammar exercises and a very systemic step-by-step approach. Each lesson is a little bit easy because it focuses on 4 sample sentences that just keep coming up with different tasks.

Podcast

I’ve barely started Level 3 of Talk to Me in Korean because I am not spending hours everyday out and about. It looks like it goes up to level 10, and 1441 unplayed episodes in the podcast feed, I’m certainly not going to run out of content.

Textbook

I’m really hating the Chinese-Korean textbook I brought with me, and instead of doing a lesson a day, I’m only covering one chapter every couple of days. I need to review more and go through the audio at least a dozen more times. The textbook is good because I am reading more than a sentence at a time.

There was a Level 1A Korean textbook in a bookcase at the hostel. I devoured that in a couple days (as it was 90% review for me). It’s also the textbook I’ve pushed on the other newbie learners in the hostel.

Life

I’ve definitely reverted into my natural state of introversion, getting by with minimal verbal interaction. It doesn’t take much Korean to order an americano, especially when the barista asks you “hot or iced” in English, and when shopping at a mart you just look at the screen with the total and hand over money.

I’ve got the Naver Korean-English dictionary app on my phone and if I am ever sitting around anywhere (such as a restaurant), I like to look up any words I see.

I’d guess that I “know” somewhere between 500 and 1,000 words by now, but I actually want to get a lot more precise. I’ve been thinking about starting up a database in an Excel file, much like I did with Chinese. I’ve been copying vocabulary into a notebook, but it is very disorganized with lots of repetition of words. I do pull it out occasionally to review a page or two, but not enough. I think I might wait until I finish the two learning apps, but it will be good to build a master list of vocabulary for a number of reasons: review, typing practice, identification of common words, a more precise count of how many words I know (or at least should know at this point), and a basis for a possible integration of Korean resources into my Chinese database.

Though Korean is turning out to be harder than I thought (in terms of so many rules and exceptions to rules regarding grammar and pronunciation), not only am I still confident of my ability to leave here a fluent speaker, but also a teacher of Korean. I’m already planning a mini-textbook on learning how to read the Korean alphabet.