Mandarin Vocab 4: 专辑

gravitycollapse — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 08:02:14 +0000

So, just like everyone else, I failed. I did not stick with my resolution to post a new Mandarin word every day or two. However, I have been making a slightly more concerted effort to improve my speaking, and hey, it’s still 2009, so I can come back to it.

I’ve been enjoying www.google.cn/music, which is the first officially sanctioned (by the idiotic music labels) free music download service I am aware of. Note to those outside China: you’ll need a Chinese IP address to download stuff. But, for the most part, it’s pretty well done, and it’s been a great way to discover Chinese music, in particular, though I’ve also used the service to download a bunch of western stuff, too.

The only headache, on the Mac, at least, is that the MP3 files’ ID3 tags appear to not be Unicode-encoded, which mangles all the Chinese, so there’s some work to be done to properly tag the Chinese music that comes down.

All this made me realize that I did not know the word for “album” (in the music sense), so it’s a good opportunity to do some further study.

The previous narrative has been abandoned (I’m sure you’re sad not to know what happens with the 震动棒), which kills part of my plan to reinforce the learning by using the words twice, but maybe a new one can start.

专辑
zhuān jí
(record, music) album
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2009 Resolution: learning Mandarin (for real)

gravitycollapse — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:35:17 +0000

I’m endeavoring to attempt something never before achieved in the history of mankind: make a New Year’s resolution, and stick to it. Given my desire, it’s apropos that I write this on the first day of the lunar new year, since the resolution for 2009 was: learn Chinese, like for real.

“For real” means expanding beyond the lazy, expat-level of everyday, common Chinese I’ve been stuck at, for a while now, being one of a plethora of lazy Americans living in Beijing or Shanghai. It means actually having a damned vocabulary, for one, and it means taking more than a token a swipe at learning some lingo, and some words that don’t appear in the everyday Chinese dictionary.

In order to learn something, to really learn something, it takes commitment, it takes repetition, and it takes curiosity. The intellectual curiosity is not the problem for me; it’s the commitment and repetition I’ve had trouble with. Also, you absolutely have to make it fun. Well, technically, you don’t. You can sit there and force – no, torture – yourself by having your head buried in books, but you’ll have two undesired end results: (1) you’ll be bored; and (2) it’ll be less efficient. So, I’ve decided to make it fun. When things are fun, the learning just comes.

So, I’ve started out by learning a word a day and putting it on Twitter, with a twist: I’m going to create a narrative out of it by re-using the previous words en route to learning new ones. Along the way, I’ve found that Twitter is not enough, because of its paltry character limit, and that I need to introduce some new words and sentence structures at the same time. It’s a fun challenge, and of course, this being me, the sentences will be absurd. (But therein lies the “fun” for me. If I have to learn how to say “Where is the pharmacy” one more time I’ll shoot myself.) This whole artificial construct should create enough repetition for me to actually learn the concepts I set out to learn.

And, given that it’s so public, maybe it’ll give my friends some entertainment, so they can laugh at my pathetic progress as time goes along. Laughing at people is always fun, after all…

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Mandarin Vocab 4: 专辑

2009 Resolution: learning Mandarin (for real)