Upper Intermediate Materials Suggestions

Language Learning Chinese
21

Anyone who starts a business is probably in it to make money. The unfortunate reality is that the beginner market is where the money is. A lot of people do just have an “initial enthusiasm” and will drop out after the excitement wears off. The higher you pitch your educational materials, the fewer students there are to buy it.

However all Taiwanese need to be trained from nothing all the way to full native fluency so THEY must have a nice big range of materials to take them there. We have to develop our Mandarin to the point where we can move out of the “Learn Chinese using English” market and tap into the mainstream “Learn Chinese using Chinese” market.

Personally I’m in the market for a decent Chinese-Chinese Dictionary targetted at primary school Taiwanese children. Any recommendations?

Also IronLady, do you have a URL where I can get a word frequency list? I’ve seen a few character lists before but not word lists.

22

[Warning: the following post demonstrates my ego problem again.]
Doesn’t http://www.geocities.com/hao520/research/ have some frequency
lists? More importantly you will learn how to detect counterfeit
pinyin schemes.

As far as teaching materials and making money, my pal who lives 20 km
W of me, approached me with another one of his miracle deals: I was
supposed to go around hawking his English lesson books, thus spoiling
my back to the woods relaxed image, etc. I told him that as I am a
firm believer in the GPL http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html
I wasn’t going to promote anything that he wouldn’t be willing to,
say, put on a website, and thus not impede the info flow…
Anyway, that shut him up. By the way,
http://www.stallman.org/saintignucius.jpg
http://www.stallman.org/saint.html
are the man behind the GPL

Another aid to learning Chinese is to develop a snob attitude, like
me, where as one does not hang out with English pals all day.
Actually with my new and improved repeller personality, I don’t even
hang out with the wife all day. Ok, and if you get one of those make
sure she’s Made In Taiwan. Check the label.

Also, nobody has diclamed my theory that if you listen to, say,
Newsradio AM 657 [Taibei] all day, you won’t hurt yourself. By the
way, they are not allowed to screw up their Zh/Z, Ch/C, Sh/S.

One slip of the dial, however, and you’ll be listening to a commie
station, a few hours of which and you will become a zombie-robot.

Anyway, in order to boast and brag here, I have altered my “snob”
definition, so that indeed I use English, but it is only silent
typing. The audio portion of my life is all Chinese, except for calls
from my pal 20 km west of here. Anyway, the last thing I would do
would be to listen to ICRT or VOA… I force myself to get all my news
via the local radio. [Infact I hardly turn on the TV.] However, as
can be seen on
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=jidanni

23

Years ago I found novels with zhuyin on the side for the Chinese middleschooler market. My advice to someone who was in no rush to learn Chinese would be to concentrate on speaking and accumulating every-day speaking vocabulary. After about 2-3 years of doing that by being immersed in Chinese for a good part of the day (ie working somewhere where you may not always use Chinese with your co-workers, but you are actively trying to understand what is being said around you), I would get a private tutor or a language exchange partner and have them help me choose materials at a third or fourth grade level in an area that was of interest to me. The material would have to have zhuyin so you could remember the pronunciation. I would then have the tutor record a portion of the material (how much would depend on how often you saw that person). Then I would try to understand the material myself with a dictionary. Anything I didn’t understand, I would ask my tutor on our next meeting to explain to me. I would ask my tutor to use only Chinese in explaining vocab. Even difficult concepts can be conveyed in simple language, albeit in a general, unprecise way. For example, if I couldn’t find “a fu han” in the dictionary, my tutor could say in Chinese ‘“a fu han” is the name of a country; americans are fighting there now’.