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Sunday, October 2, 2011
All parents will want this! e-flashcards for the Chinese Language!
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Saturday, October 1, 2011
ChineseforSmartKids : Chinese for kids | Mandarin for kids
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Chinese Secrets to Fatty Liver and Obesity Reversal
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Learning vocabulary
Once you have got to grips with the fundamentals of a language (pronunciation, orthography and basic grammar), you can concentrate on learning vocabulary. This is probably the most important and time-consuming part of learning a language. Below are a few techniques to help you with this task.
Associate the familiar with the unfamiliar
Try to find word or phrases in your L1 which sound like and if possible have a similar meaning to words in your L2. Build mental images or draw pictures based on the connections. For example, the Spanish for "ice" is hielo (m), which sounds like yellow. To remember this word imagine yellow ice. This is an enjoyable method because many of the associations you think up will be silly, absurd or bizarre.
Genders
To remember genders try picturing a Spanish-speaking region, divide it into two and place masculine nouns on one side and feminine words on the other. In the case of ice imagine the masculine half covered in yellow ice.
If your L2 has many genders, imagine a large building with many floors, assign a different gender to each floor and place words on the appropriate floor according to their gender.
Avoiding language mix ups
Associating words from each language you learn with places where they are spoken will help you to avoid getting your languages mixed up. For example, if you're learning French and Spanish, imagine a map of Europe and place the French words in France and the Spanish words in Spain. Alternatively you could imagine a map of North America and place the Spanish words in Mexico and the French words in Quebec.
Testing and revision
To ensure the words stick in your memory, test yourself on them at regular intervals. If you learn some new words in the morning for example, check that you can still remember them later that day, the next day, a week later and a month later. If you find some words hard to recall, try thinking up different associations for them. You may need to try several different associations before you find one that works.
Learn related words & phrases
When learning the word for hand, for example, try to learn related words, such as parts of the hand; actions of the hand; other parts of the body, and things you might wear on your hands. Also try to learn words with the same root and phrases which include the word hand.
As you learn more words you will start to spot connections between words. The more words you learn the easier you will find it to guess the meanings of new words.
Learn words in context
Learning long lists of unrelated words is boring, difficult and doesn't help you much when you come across those words in a different context. If you focus on learning words in the context you're most likely to find them, you're more likely to recognise them when you encounter them or need to use them again.
When learning food words, for example, think about when you'd be most likely to use them, i.e. when cooking, eating, shopping, etc, and learn other words related to those situations. Then try constructing sentences using the new words. Good dictionaries contain examples of usage which you can use as models for your own sentences.
As your knowledge of your L2 improves, using a monolingual dictionary is a good idea. This helps you to understand words through their meaning rather than relying on translations into your L1.
Practice reading as much as possible
A great way to build up you vocabulary is to have a go at reading books, magazines, newspapers or comics written in your L2. Ideally look for reading material covering topics you find interesting. When reading, try to guess the meanings of any words you don't know and then check them in a dictionary to see if your guesses were correct. You don't have to look up every unfamiliar word as long as you can get the gist of the text.
Online foreign language newpapers, magazines and other news sources
Online literature and audio books in many languages
Dual-language books, which are also known as parallel texts are a good way to get into literature in foreign languages. They usually have the original language on one page, and the translation on the opposite page. This safes you the trouble of looking up words in a dictionary.
Reading comic books, like Asterix and Tintin, is an effective and fun way to improve your reading comprehension and vocabulary. The pictures help you to follow the story when you can't understand all of the dialogue. The dialogues in the Tintin books tend to be longer and more serious than those in the Asterix books, which are full of puns and jokes.
A good way to expand your vocabulary is with the TeachMe! or Rosetta Stonelanguage courses. The TeachMe! courses are available for most of the major and minor languages of Europe and are very reasonably priced. The Rosetta Stonecourses are available for 26 languages from Arabic to Welsh. They are quite expensive but include a large amount of material, and are effective and fun to use.
Pronunciation and listening comprehension
Some tips on learning how to pronounce foreign languages and on improving your listening comprehsion.
Why good pronunciation is important
Learning how to pronounce a foreign language like a native speaker is difficult but not impossible. The better your pronunciation, the better people will understand you and the easier you will find it to understand them.
Tuning your ears and practising listening comprehension
Before you start trying to speak a foreign language, spend some time tuning your ears to its sounds and rhythms. You can do this by listening to the language as much as possible via the radio, TV, movies and native speakers in your neighbourhood. There are online radio stations in a wide variety of languages.
When you first try listening to your chosen language, you'll understand only a little or nothing at all, other than perhaps the names of people and places and the odd word, unless you're learning a language closely related to your L1. You may even find it difficult to believe that what you're listening to is a real language that people are able to converse in. However if you continue to listen to your L2 as much as possible, you will gradually become familiar with the the sounds and rhythms of the language and start to be able to pick out words and phrases. Eventually you'll be able to understand most if not all of what you hear in your L2.
There are a number of things you try to help you understand radio and TV broadcasts:
- Rather than just listening or watching at random, find out what programmes are on and choose one that sounds interesting. In this way you will have an idea of what the programme is about.
- Set yourself goals, for example when listening to the news try to work out the main points, names, dates and times.
- Brush up relevant vocabulary before tuning in. For example if you're planning to watch a cooking programme, revise food words first
- Even if you can't understand very much at all, try to identify word and sentence boundaries
- If possible listen to the news in your L1 first, then when you listen to it in your L2 you'll already be aware of the mains stories.
- Don't try to listen to or watch too much in one go: if you're finding it a struggle, take a break and/or do something else.
Listening to songs in your L2 is another way to improve your listening comprehension, especially if you have the lyrics written out so that you can follow them as you listen.
Learning pronunciation
With your ears tuned to the sounds and rythmns of your L2, you'll find learning how to pronounce the language less difficult.
If your language course includes a recorded pronunciation guide and exercises, listen to them until you have internalized all the points, but don't try to learn everything in one go. Beware of pronunciation guides that compare the sounds of your L2 with your L1. This can be misleading as the sounds, particularly the vowels, are often different.
Alternatively or additionally you could try finding a native speaker to help you with pronunciation. Ask them to speak slowly and to enunciate each word clearly. Then try to mimic them. Pay attention to the shapes their lips make, and also to their posture and any gestures they make.
Pimsleur language courses are very good at teaching you pronunciation: when introducing new words they break them up and teach you how to pronounce each syllable. Rosetta Stone courses are also good for learning pronunciation: they include the facility to record your voice and to visually compare it with a native speaker's voice.
Once you've got to grips with the pronunciation of your L2, you need to learn how to map the sounds to the written form of the language. This is fairly straight forward for languages like Italian, Spanish and German, which have consistent and regular spelling. Other languages, such as English, French and Danish, present more of a challenge with their irregular and somewhat chaotic spelling. Learning a language written with a different writing system adds an extra level of difficulty.
Better pronunciation through song
If you enjoy singing, try learning some songs in the language you're learning. This is a fun way to improve your pronunciation and vocabulary. You could also try learning to recite poems and stories. Listening to songs in your L2 is an enjoyable way to improve your listening comprehension, especially if you have the lyrics written out so that you can follow them as you listen.
Learning a bit about phonetics and phonology will enable you to pronounce your L2 better. A good way to start is to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which can be used to represent all the phonemes of human speech and is therefore a reliable guide to pronunciation.
If you take the time to familiarise yourself with the IPA symbols, the phonemes they represent and how to pronounce them, you'll find this knowledge invaluable in your language learning. Particularly because the IPA is used to indicate pronunciation in some dictionaries and language textbooks.
In some cases you may not be able to hear particular phonemes, but you can be sure that you're pronouncing them correctly if you have your tongue, lips and teeth in the necessary positions and if your breath is moving in the right direction.
There's a good online introduction to phonetics and the IPA at:http://www.unil.ch/ling/english/phonetique/table-eng.html
Human speech uses a total of over 800 different phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language. Babies can hear all possible phonemes but quickly develop a preference for the phonemes of their native language(s). Children tend to be very good mimics, an ability which enables them to learn foreign languages with a native accent. When learning foreign languages in later life, most people find it difficult to hear and pronounce phonemes not present in their native language. This is why most adult language learners have a foreign accent.
If you're learning a tonal language such as Chinese or Thai, you need to find a way to associate each syllable with the appropriate tone. One possible way to do this is to imagine a series of shelves, each one representing a tone. To assign tones to shelves you could number the shelves and/or imagine them having the shape of the tone contours. Each time you learn a new word, picture the word together with the thing, action, quality or whatever it represents on the appropriate shelf.
Here's an illustration of how this works for Mandarin Chinese using the tone contours:
In some tonal languages tones can change for various reasons. For example, in Mandarin when there are two third tones in a row, the first becomes a second tone. This process is know as "tone sandhi". You could incorporate these tone changes into the shelves with a series of snakes and ladders: the snakes indicate a higher tone changing to a lower tone and the ladders indicate the opposite.
Alternatively you could picture a building with one floor for each tone and use stairs/lifts for tone changes, or a town with separate districts for each tone and bridges and tunnels between the districts for tone changes.
Friday, September 30, 2011
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Chinese Symbol World - Tattoo
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Thursday, September 29, 2011
AppleChineseOnline Mandarin Chinese learning ebooks
AppleChineseOnline is a professional Chinese learning website. It provides high quality sound embedded color text ebooks and free audio programs for self-study learners of all levels.Ebooks include pinyin,grammar,dialogues,characters,proverbs,etc.
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