English LingQ 2.0 Podcast #20: Learning Chinese with Luke Truman (2)
So there was like, you know, it was, uh, things like that, but I kind of stumbled my way through a bit forgetting sometimes, some of the, some of the, um, radicals or sorry, the components, the wrong way around and stuff.
Um, but in terms of recognizing characters again, I, I don't really use any sort of online system now. So I don't track any of that, but I can read most, um, novels now, as long as they're not too archaic in the language they use. So some of the older books, there's this really popular novelist from Hong Kong called Jin Yong who writes a lot about martial arts novels and because they're quite old in the way, like it's set in historical times, they use a lot of weird language that kind of is sort of half classical Chinese. So it'll, as long as it doesn't go to that sort of, uh, language attempt to be okay now. Um, yeah.
Elle: Wow. I can't, I just can't imagine writing. It's an amazing accomplishment, I think, to be able to just write.
Cause I feel as though a lot of people who, uh, study Chinese, you know, Cantonese, Mandarin, or Japanese, maybe don't go down the path of learning how to write the characters because, um, it's really involved, takes a lot of time and maybe we're not, you won't really need to, to do it ever, you can just use... You're on your computer or your phone.
So, um, that's a really, it's a really cool skill.
Luke: I completely agree. It's not that practical and you forget them really quickly, but it was kind of fun. So I enjoyed it.
Elle: Well, it must totally help... I mean, you say impractical, I guess kind of, but it's, it must help with other aspects of learning the language.
I mean, you're writing it out, so that's also reading and, you know, yeah. It helps for sure. I enjoyed that aspect of learning Japanese for sure. But when you said 1500 and the fact that, you know more than that to write out, that just blows me away. I think I could write like a hundred when I stopped studying Chinese characters, Kanji.
I mean, I'm very impressed. So then after Cantonese, did you move straight on to studying Mandarin or was there, or were there any languages in between?
Luke: Yeah. So I was planning a trip to Mexico with my family so I... and there was also a few Spanish dramas I wanted to watch. So I thought, you know, let's just try and learn Spanish for a little bit.
So I gave myself a kind of timeline of half a year to try and see how far I could get. And I just basically used similar methods to Cantonese. Um, and just started really trying to just immerse myself as much as I can. Um, I used LingQ a lot for Spanish, which I found brilliant. I really like the feature of being able to import YouTube videos and then having the audio just so easily transferred into my phone in the app and just having a playlist of all the things that I've downloaded and going through on a system like that.
It's really easy to look at words. So, and with some... When there's a lot of cognation, I can at a relatively early stage jump into really interesting but short content and just do a lot of intensive work with that. I'm not, that's what that I found really enjoyable. So I did that for about half a year.
Elle: Hmm. Excellent. And then you moved on to the Mandarin. Okay. Right.
And so how, how similar are Cantonese and Mandarin?
Luke: Uh, well, the, the, the biggest overlap is obviously the Chinese characters are the same and this is always a complicated thing to explain, but effectively, um, standard written Chinese, which is basically based off Mandarin is the formal, um, written language in China, in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
And that is the same, obviously you have the traditional simplified character split, but in terms of the grammar and the word choice, it's the same across all of them. And it doesn't matter if you speak Taiwanese, it doesn't matter. You speak Cantonese or Hokkien or Shanghainese or Mandarin, you write the same way.
And that's kind of how Mandarin's worded. So it's based off that. Um, with Cantonese, you can read it out colloquially as it's spoken, but that's really rare and only really seen in things like maybe in YouTube comments or texting or comic books and stuff like that. There are some novels, but they're rare.
Um, so that's the biggest overlap. And then I guess the other bigger, biggest overlap is just in terms of, you know, vocabulary. So a lot of things sound really similar to, if you take a common word, for example, like "ni hao" in Mandarin means "hello". In Cantonese, you can pronounce it "ni hao". So it kind of sounds close enough that you can kind of guess, and that helps, um, really speed up the ability to improve your comprehension by quite a lot.
Um, the things that always tripped me up is the endings of words. The "ao" sound and "oo" sound almost seems to be a one for one swap. So if it's an "ao" in Mandarin, it's an "ou" in Cantonese and vice versa. And it just seems to like swap you around. So for example, I don't know, "head" in Cantonese, his ... and in Mandarin it's ...
So if you're trying to swap between the two, it's almost for every word, it's just kind of like the inverse with enough exceptions to trip you up. Yeah.
Elle: So do you find that you get, you get tripped up a lot when you're, cause you're actively, your language right now that you're studying and really immersed in is Mandarin., right? And so do you find you're often using the Cantonese?
Luke: Yeah, I mean, when I was in Taiwan for like the first I did four semesters there and I think on my first day in class, on semester one, two and three, I had different teachers and then the teacher said on day one, "wait, do you know Cantonese?" And they said that basically every semester until my last one, when I got a bit better with fixing my weird accent.
Um, so they could obviously tell where the way I pronounce certain words, wrong that it was kind of more towards the Cantonese pronunciation. Um, for example, the word for time is ... and in Mandarin, it's ... so I'd always say ... and kind of have that "ow" sound in Cantonese when it should be ...
and I do that a lot and that would be the most common one. You can probably click on any of my Mandarin-speaking videos and see a remanence of it there still. Um, so yeah, I find that quite confusing, but I have gotten a lot better now. Um, I do still make mistakes, but it's, it's less of an issue now.
Elle: And for anyone listening, who maybe is on the journey studying, uh, Cantonese or Mandarin, or is thinking maybe they want to give it a go because it is, it's a scary thought. I think, especially coming from an English as a first language point of view, um, it's... people say it's a very difficult language to learn. They both are. Uh, do you have any tips for anyone who is thinking about maybe starting that journey of learning to read the characters or just, just learning Cantonese or Mandarin?
Luke: Yeah. I mean, I guess, um, with a lot of these things, I kind of think sometimes we're our own worst enemy. So like one quote I really liked by, I think it was Mohammed Ali says, um, it's not the mountains ahead that wear us out it's the pebble in our shoe, you know, stuff like that. I think we feel like that a lot of the time, we spend so much time worrying about how hard it's going to be, that if we just
started and got going, you know, it would start progressing quicker than we thought. And then as soon as you start progressing, when you feel that, you're going to be motivated to carry on. So it's kind of that, that first bit before you feel any tangible progress, it's the bit that you most likely to give up in.
So I feel like if you can just get started and feel some progress, then you're going to be motivated and want to carry on. At least that's what happened to me. Um, And when I didn't feel progress by using inefficient methods, then I did give up after like a week or two. Cause I thought, well, this is pointless,
I'm not getting anywhere. Um, I think the big thing for me is don't be so worried about what you can and can't say to begin with, because like you said, it's, there's, the sounds are very different. The tones are very different. The characters are very different and it's all very new and a fun, it takes a long time for me to get used to.
So I think just, regardless of whether you learn characters or not. I feel like putting a big emphasis on listening at the start is very useful. Um, and with the characters, I did use a book called Remembering the Traditional Hanzi by James. Hiseig which, he has a Kanji version, which teaches us, like, I think or the Joy of Kanji, which is something like 2000.
The Mandarin one was 1,500. I don't think it's necessarily. Actually, I don't think it's necessarily relevant to learn that many characters in one go in the start at the beginning because it is quite dry. So unless you're really a big like Hanzi nerd, then maybe you don't do that. I think there's lots of really good courses out there that teach you the fundamentals of how characters work with only a few hundred.
And then once you kind of get that basic knowledge, you can just move on. So, you know, once you understand that, okay, well, on... Most of them are sound plus meaning. So you have a sound component of the character that tells you roughly how it's pronounced and you have a meaning that's, you know, so for example, it might be ... which is the one for copper.
You've got the gold bit on the right. And the one that looks kind of like a cave, it was HiSeig, it was a cave and that, and it's pronounced ... as well. So, you know, that's the sound, that's the meaning. Most characters are like that. And once you kind of get used to that in your head and you know what the basic elements are, it's a lot easier.
So there were a few courses out there. You can try that with, there's um a book that Vladimir Skultety wrote which teaches about 300 characters. He had a PhD in Chinese characters that, that I've heard really good things about that. There's Outlier Chinese. I did a course also about 300 characters, long with that.
Again, he's got a, I think a PhD in Chinese phonology and lots of crazy stuff. And I've got an interview with him on my channel and he's his, knowledge on Mandarin just completely blew my mind. It's like, he's a very smart guy, so his course is very, very good as well. So just picking anything like that and just
getting a basic idea of what they are. And then just trying to jump into just reading. And when you first get started, preferably something with audio is better because then you can, if you can kind of try and pair up the audio and the characters and not kind of put so much strain on your brain to recall sounds that you may or may not be able to remember.
Elle: Right.
