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Okay, so I'm really, really excited to be talking to John Fotheringham today. John,
you are a writer, a blogger, an author, entrepreneur, traveler--
Crazy person.
Yeah, all-around crazy guy. I mean, you've done just--Thirty seconds on your website
has shown me you've done a lot of things. So, why don't you kick off and just tell us
a little bit about you and your background.
Sure. Well, I studied linguistics in university, which I didn't actually stumble upon 'til
my third year in. I'd been studying industrial design, of all things, and then I took a linguistics
101 class and a Japanese 101 class and got hooked, and decided to basically start over
my third year in, which luckily my parents and people I care about were supportive of.
And that completely changed my life. Changed the trajectory. And then after I graduated
from university, I went to Japan for two years. I taught English the first year. And then
for the second year, I worked for the local government doing translation and interpretation.
And then, after that, had a chance to go to Bangladesh, of all places, and I spent six
months there. And then, after that, I ended up in first China and then over to Taiwan.
And that's where I did most of my Mandarin learning.
Ok, cool, so we're going to focus on Mandarin today and we're gonna get into some depth
about that. And, the conversation is going to be essentially how to go about learning
Mandarin. From my perspective, Chinese is--I mean, I know a little bit of Cantonese, but
Chinese has always had this sort of aura of being a really foreign, really different,
difficult language to learn. And, my experience tells me now that those kinds of tales about
languages are rarely true.
Right.
So, hopefully we're going to dive into it and clear up some misconceptions and people
some idea of how it might go about it.
Happy to help.
So, let's talk about your Mandarin story, then. How--give people an idea of how you
started with Mandarin and how you found it as an overall process.
Sure. My primary focus in school was Japanese, but as part of my linguistics studies, I did
have to pick a second foreign language and so I did dabble in Mandarin in university.
I think I did one quarter of actual Mandarin classes. Most of it was more of a linguistics
study of the language, which, ironically, I don't think helps very much. You hear a
lot of people online saying, "if you don't study the formal components of a language,
if you don't study in a classroom, if you don't have a teacher, then you'll forever
be speaking, you know, a pidgen form or a broken form of the language. My experience,
having been in academia, but also an independent language learner, the independent side is
actually, I think, much more rewarding and much more effective for actually learning
how to acquire and be able to use a language. Now, if later on--
And, what would you get from that time in the university, then? Is there anything that
you took from it?
A lot of it was what not to do. And that was also true of my Japanese studies. I think
there were a lot of stark examples of how traditional language education fails. I mean,
when you spend all your time studying for a test, when you try to cram things in your
head through rote memory, you may remember it the next day for the test, but then two
days--"pooof", it's gone. Whereas the strategies I've been learning since then have really
taught me that it's more about be more intelligent about how we use our adult brains to learn
languages. We're not children. You know, there are some similarities between first and second
language acquisition--I think adults are actually a lot better or, at least, faster--maybe use
that word--at language learning if we do it the right way. And, what is the right way?
Well, there's many we'll get to in this interview, I'm sure.
Yeah. So you had a little primer in Chinese--
Correct.
--and then you kind of went off the radar for a few years and ended up in China.
Well, yeah. So, I focus on Japanese for a couple of years, but then yeah, when I finally
got to China, I mean, I had very little to go on. I was basically starting from some
scratch in terms of speaking.
Okay.
I did have the advantage that I could already read most of, at least, the majority of the
characters that crossed our work in Japanese and Mandarin. I could already read, know the
meaning of, and write--pronunciation, of course, is fairly different. So, it really was basically
starting from scratch in terms of being able to understand and speak.
So, you turned up in China and you started studying, like, straight away?
Correct. On my own. So, that was, you know, other than Japanese, which I had much more
academic background in, with Mandarin, it was much more starting from scratch. That
was really my first, what I call, self-guided immersion experiment.
Okay.
Where it was me--granted, I was in a Mandarin-speaking country, which is obviously a huge advantage.
One of the things I talk a lot in my blog and in my guides is that that's not necessary.
It's advantageous, of course, but it's not necessary. You could create a Mandarin environment
no matter where you live using Skype and YouTube and podcasts and other things.
Yeah, okay, so listen let's dive right in now and tackle this question of Chinese being
hard to learn. Is it or isn't it? Which is it?
Ah, yes.
Yes, it's hard to learn.
Yes, both. Yes, it's not. And, yes, it is.
Okay, right.
You know, I hate the word "difficult" when it's applied to languages, coz I--First of
all, I think it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think Mandarin's going to be hard,
it will be. And I think there's really no point in that, you know. I don't want to gloss
over the challenging aspects of the language, or any language for that matter. There are
going to be parts that are challenging comparatively.
So, in what ways is it easier or more difficult than another language?
So, let's get compare with English. You know, that's both of our native languages, so...
Grammatically, it's quite simple, and I use the word simple carefully here. Part of what
makes Mandarin easy is also, later on, what makes it a little more difficult. The grammar
patterns are very simple. There aren't verb conjugations, for example. You know, instead
of saying, "I drank coffee yesterday," you would say, "I drink coffee yesterday." So,
the tense, the - all that -is done with adverbs of time, not with actual changes to the verb.
So, from the get-go, that's actually a huge advantage, I think. There's much less to learn
from out of the gate to be able to communicate. But, down the road, when you get into more
complex constructions, it can get a little bit trickier because a lot of it is based
on context instead of actual, you know, overt grammar patterns that, if you know those patterns,
then you know it's what they're saying, if that makes any sense.
It does.
Okay, so in the beginning, it's an advantage. In the long run, it can be a little bit of
a challenge.
Ok, cool. So listen talk a little bit about tones, then. Tones of the Chinese, because
it's something that people who haven't learned a tonal language find a little bit scary and
confusing.
Absolutely.
How difficult or easy are the tones to acquire?
Again, I think it has to do with your attitudes towards them. If you think they're gonna be
hard, they will be. But I think a lot of it has to do with how you go about it. And, the
way that tones are usually taught in school or in traditional textbooks is you learn the
tone of each and every character, each and every syllable in the language. And, as you're
speaking, you try to remember, "oh, is this first tone or second tone?" You spend a lot
of time in your head trying to think how something should be pronounced. And, I did that in the
beginning and it hardly ever works. You're simply not understood. You know, people will
sort of--you see their eyes squint a little bit and see the gears turning, trying really
hard to think about what you're saying. Whereas later on, I figured out a much more effective
approach is just record a small snippet, you know, whether it's a word, or phrase, or a
complete sentence, and then imitate the complete phrase as closely as you can, not trying to
think, "is this third tone? Is this fourth tone?" You'll get that later. Eventually,
you'll figure out, okay--
And is that because the tones you might learn on an individual word change when it comes
to a full sentence?
Exactly. There's actually two points to that. One is yes, in practice, there are a lot of
tone exceptions and I talk about them a little bit in my guide, but trying to memorize all
those rules, I think--you know, take a quick peek at 'em just so you have, you know, a
basic understanding of them. But, you're not gonna be able, in practice, in speak, in an
actual speech to be able to use them on command. There's just too many exceptions and rules.
Third tone, for example if there's two third tones in a row, the second one... I'm sorry,
the first one changes to a second tone, called "tone sandhi". First tone, for example, for
the word "yī" ("one"), sometimes it changes to second tone or fourth tone depending on
what comes after it. There's all these little exceptions.
Yeah, coz, you see, when I hear these little rules, like you just explained, this is when
my eyes start to gloss over.
Right, exactly. So, that's why I don't like to intimidate learners by focusing on all
those things. I don't want to say "ignore them" but if you focus on learning those word
in context, you'll be able to pronounce them correctly. So, how can I say it? Instead of
trying to say, "Okay, I need to learn the word 'one' is first tone in this case, and
second one in that case"--no, no. Just, this word don't think of it as even two characters
like "yī" (一, "one") and "gè" (個・个, "thing"). Just think of yīgè (一個) as
a word. Instead of "one" and "thing", it's one word, "one thing".
Sure. And this is also not the same as advising not to learn tones at all because I've seen
people--you see that advise cropping up from time to time.
Correct, correct.
How do you go about that?
"Just ignore tones." Well, and I think people--I don't think I explained it necessarily that
well but people may misinterpret what I'm saying as saying, "ignore the tones." And
that's absolutely not the case. You need to get your tones as accurate as possible to
be understood and understand people. But, the way to get there is through imitation,
not through thinking in your head what the tone is of each and every character.
Okay. So, it's like having an awareness of it, but then dealing with it in a bigger picture
sense.
Exactly. So, I was saying there the two things. There are many tone exceptions that there's
no way your conscious brain is going to keep up with. But your ears can. So, that's one.
And the second point is that when you are trying to apply your conscious knowledge in
speech, you're going to speak too slow and chances are, you're going to misspeak. Whereas
your imitation will always be much more accurate.
Ok, great. So, the other big part to Chinese, obviously, for someone who hasn't come across
a language with a Chinese root before is the whole issue of writing.
Sure.
And I've got my own thoughts about writing, but let's deal with the question first about
whether or not you need, as a beginning learner of Chinese, about whether or not you need
to write Chinese characters or not.
Sure. This is a very common question, but it's an important one. And, to be honest,
I think there are compelling arguments on both sides, whether to start characters from
day one or to hold off a bit. I, personally, I think it's better to start them earlier
on. I think you're going to need them eventually if you want to have any chance of being a
fully fluent/literate speaker and reader in the language. So why wait?
Let's start with outlining those two arguments, then. What are the two possible approaches?
One, learning the writing. And one, not. What would be the arguments on both sides?
Okay. So, the argument of learning characters whether from day one or eventually is that
you open yourself up to a much wider pool of authentic content. Yes, you can find materials
written in Pinyin, but usually they're extremely boring, they're extremely stilted.
The English - the Romanisation?
Yeah. So, the standard Romanisation of Mandarin is called Hànyǔ Pīnyīn (漢語拼音・汉语拼音).
And there are actually five or six different phonetic systems that have been used in the
past are still used in various places.
Yeah, it's the same in Cantonese.
Yeah, but that's--it's a bit of a mess. But the standard one in mainland China and also
now in Taiwan, more recently, is the Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, which just uses English letters
to write Mandarin words. The advantage of that is from day one, since you already know
how to read and write English letters, you can start understanding how Mandarin is pronounced
and have a way to write it down--have your tutor write it down for you. But, again, you're
just limited to anything and only written in Pinyin. Whereas if you had learned the
characters, then ANY material, any, what we call, "authentic content" that was created
for Chinese-speaking children, or blogs, or news stories, or manga (Mànhuà, 漫画)
all those things become then in your wheelhouse; things you can use to learn. Even if they
are a little bit beyond your level, you can at least look at the title, for example. "Oh,
I know that's the character for this--
Okay
--that's the character for that."
So there's the theory, but then I guess the main thing that comes to my mind having been
through that process in Japanese, for example--I mean, Japanese is a bit different because
then you've got two other scripts that are used in the language itself--I guess the big
question is that if you--I mean, it makes perfect sense that if you learn the characters,
if you learn to read and write Chinese, then it opens up a whole world of written language
to you. But the question is what happens before you get to that point if it takes you, say,
two years to build up a decent amount of Chinese characters, what about the argument that that
time could be better used by just using the Romanisation and just hammering vocabulary
and getting as much as you can done that way?
Sure.
It's kind of a trade off, isn't it, between time--
It's to an extent. And that is the other compelling argument. I agree that anything you do is
going to take time and energy and learning characters will require commitment. I will
say, if you go about it in an adult-friendly way--my favorite is what's called "imaginative
memory". That was a method that was popularized by James Heisig in his Remembering the Kanji
series, which he later made a version for Mandarin, as well. Using that strategy, you
can actually learn at least the reading and writing--I want to be clear here--the reading
and writing of all the most common three-thousand characters and probably--let's be a little
bit liberal--let's say, five months.
Three-thousand characters in five months?
Yes.
Okay.
That's the reading and writing of them. Now, learning the pronunciations-
...and that's how much time? How much study time would that be?
I would say if you commit an hour a day--thirty minutes to an hour a day--
Okay.
--that that should be doable. You can do it in less time if you're super-motivated and
have a lot more time to put to the task--
We'll put a link to that--
Two year to five years...
We'll put a link to that in the notes, as well, so people can find that if they want
to.
So that's just a little caveat to that. I don't think it's a matter of "wasting" two
or three years trying to learn characters that you could've learned to speak. I think
because if you do it in the right way, it doesn't actually take that much time. For
me, I think you might as well start learning them along side learning vocabulary and grammar
and all those other things.
Okay.
But yes, it is a choice. And if your goal--it all comes down to your goals. If your primary
focus is "I want to go to mainland China or Taiwan and I just want to speak with people.
That's it." If that's your primary goal, then yeah, maybe you can hold off on characters
for a while.
So, in a way, it does come back to goal, doesn't it? If you're kind of learning for a short
trip, you've got one set of things that you need. Whereas if you were in it for the long-term.
You know, if you've married a Chinese girl and you're moving to China--
Yeah. But even I think the short-term/long-term dichotomy isn't necessarily a good fit for
that either because, for example, if I were to go Taiwan or China right now, if I had
never been, one of my primary goals would be to eat. They have such good food and a
lot of menus, and especially in Taiwan and in parts of China, they have no Pinyin on
the menu. There might be pictures, sure, on some restaurants, but a lot of times it's
just a menu and it's all Chinese characters.
Okay. So, the place you did the whole thing of "do I need to learn to read and write?"
It's not as simple a question as that. It needs to be...
It's more nuanced.
Yeah.
Like all things.
I've got a question from Lucas, who says--well, I imagine he's sort of beginning--he says,
"I'm trying to learn Chinese but writing beats me. So, I just want to learn how to speak.
And then, when I've got a good speaking level, I can try writing."
Yeah, fair enough.
What would you say to him?
I say fair enough again and back to what we just discussed. But, he already has his goals
in place. I'm not going to argue with his goals and try to convince him otherwise. Let's
stick with where he wants to be. So, he needs then just to spend as much time every single
day as possible listening and speaking. Listening and speaking. And, a lot of people fall into
the trap--especially in this new, media-based way of language learning, where they just
listen-listen-listen-listen. Which is great--it's a lot better than just reading 'coz that's
what's people used to do. You know, they'd spend five or ten years just reading a language.
Then they'd go to that country and couldn't even order a cup of coffee. You know, we all
know that common downfall. Even if you are using more modern methods and technologies,
you still gotta make sure you're actually speaking and applying what you've learned.
So, I guess also you're touching on the fact that, let's say, if it's the case for Lucas
that maybe he's tried the writing thing and for whatever reason he's finding it really
hard. I mean, this is another important point, isn't it, that you've got to play to your
strengths. So, if something's really irritating you and really bugging you, I mean, it's crazy
to carry on with it.
Yes.
Or in the short term, you've got the energy--
Yeah.
--to do a certain thing, then play to that strength.
Or, crazy to carry on using the same method or material.
Well, yeah.
And that's something I've learned the hard way. You know, I'll buy a book or a material
or even download a podcast or something, and I'll think, "oh, I should do this. I know
this is good for me." And I'll force myself through it and eventually realize, "you know
what? This is boring. I don't like the host of this podcast. His voice annoys me." Or,
"I don't like the way she sounds," or, "I don't like the way this book is written."
And I've learned just to put things aside, delete them, and move on coz there's such
a wide pool of stuff. There's no excuse to do something that's boring or uninteresting
to you.
Yeah. I can really relate to that. But, what I think is also interesting is also just putting
something aside for a couple of months. It can be enough that you can come back to it
with a completely different viewpoint with the work that you've done since.
Right. Yeah, maybe it was too difficult; that's a lot of times the case, I think, is materials
are bit too beyond your current level, and it just requires you to look up too many words,
really, to get the flow of it, for example.