Pinyin confusions

Pinyin is a system for transcribing the sounds of Mandarin Chinese into the Roman alphabet. It is used wherever a transcription of Chinese is needed (street signs, city names, people’s names) and also but not exclusively as an input method for Chinese in computers and other devices.

Since the pronunciation of Roman letters in the many languages that use them differs from language to language, when Pinyin was created, it wasn't possible to design a system that would be universal for every language using Roman letters. Pinyin, even though slightly based on the English pronunciation of Roman letters, is an artificial and a fairly neutral system of Mandarin transcription.

However, this neutrality also causes confusion. There are only approximately 400 syllables in Mandarin Chinese. They consist of two main sections – initials and finals. When using Zhuyin, another system for Mandarin Chinese transcription, these sections are represented accurately, with most initials and finals having their own unique symbols. In Pinyin however, this is not the case when it comes to syllable finals. Sometimes the same finals are written in a completely different way and sometimes two different finals are written in the same way. This can cause confusion, because students might not initially realize that syllables like wo, shuo and po for instance share exactly the same sound.  

Finals that are written in a different way, but represent the same sound*:

Wo, Shuo, Po - rhyme with 我 (Wo)
Dui, Hui, Wei, Shei - rhyme with 累 (Lei)
Wen, Dun, Shun - rhyme with 文 (Wen)

Finals written using the same letter but represent different sounds:

Ci, Shi - rhyme with 日 (Ri)

VS

Bi, Li - rhyme with 一 (Yi)

Xun, Jun- rhyme with 雲/云 (Yun)

VS      

Shun, Dun – rhyme with 文 (Wen)


Shu, Chu, Zhu - rhyme with 五 (Wu)

VS

Xu, Qu, Ju - rhyme with 語 (Yu)

Inspired by mnmlist.com. I tried to write this post in no more than 4 paragraphs :)

* as pronounced in Taiwan

Top 5 things to observe in order to learn languages successfully

There have been several popular articles and books written about the importance of Motivation in Language learning, Best Language learning techniques, Top 10 most important reasons for learning a foreign language or ways of becoming a successful language learner. On my blog, I usually write articles that are quite specific and are often aimed only at a fairly narrow audience. I usually talk about various different aspects of Mandarin Chinese and other languages, which might not be that interesting to everyone, so I thought I could try to work a bit on topics that are more general just to make my blog more diverse.

I tried to keep things as simple as possible and asked myself the following question: If I had to choose only five things that would sum up all of my language learning strategies and have these five things in mind during my language studies, what would they be?  As you can imagine, this was quite a complicated question and even after giving it a lot of thought I realized that naming only five was still very challenging. 

I had to turn the question around a little bit. In the end I came to the conclusion that in my experience whenever something was going wrong in my language learning process, I was neglecting one of the following:

Motivation

Input

Output

Consistency

Review

Motivation

Whether it is your daily study routine or the sheer reason for which you are learning languages, motivation is the key and probably the most important factor in order for you to achieve good results in a relatively short amount of time. The easiest way to learn anything is to become completely fascinated by it. It has been said many times before and I completely agree that if you love what you do then a) you can spend as much time doing it as you want without feeling bored or tired b) the time you spend on doing what you love doing is not work c) if you study something you love you will remember things much faster and although speaking a language is a skill and only being able to remember something fast will not automatically make you speak the language well, it helps an incredible deal.

A lot of people talk about talent when it comes to language learning and while it is important too, it is the drive towards the language of your interest that is decisive in the long run. Even a talented person will achieve his goals slower, get bored soon and will end up being frustrated when studying just for the sake of studying or keeping up with a study plan

Being and staying motivated especially with more difficult languages is not an easy thing to do. Inevitably you will get into a situation where you’ll feel down and feel as if you’ve hit a wall. Here are some things can help you be and stay motivated:

1. Genuine interest. As a basis, choose a language that you are driven to and are genuinely interested in, everything else will be much easier this way.
2. The will to learn more. Find something that makes you want to learn more of the language: a will to be able to flawlessly communicate, be mistaken for a native speaker, the ability to read books, understand movies, write articles in that language, be better than others, impress your friends or the general public (if that’s what helps you) ect.
3. Visit the country where the language is spoken. Go to the country where the language is spoken as soon as you can. Finding out that you can communicate your thoughts in a whole variety of situations with no help in a new language can be a huge motivational boost.
4. Fight procrastination. If you suffer from procrastination, separate your study time into smaller time units (10 minutes), set up deadlines (try to finish a lesson/book/word list say by 4 pm), invent a task that you need to do that day that is more important than language learning (say look for a job), try to force yourself into doing it, but since you are procrastinator, you will avoid that new task at all costs and will probably study languages instead. Be impulsive and do only what you feel like doing at that very moment, but always try to do something. You can find more useful tips on how to fight procrastination here.
5. Create a study log and frequently record yourself speaking in the foreign language to monitor your progress. Often when you’ll look back at your levels from 5 months ago you’ll be surprised at how much you've learned, which in turn will give you a little motivation to boost.

Lots of input

As simple and easy as it sounds, in order to learn how to speak a language, you really do need to be exposed to it, learn it from someone/somewhere and that somewhere will not be a textbook. Textbooks are a great way to get you started and help you understand the rules of a language if you can’t figure them out on your own, but they will not teach you how to speak.

1. Read or listen to something you understand. It has been said before and is something I fully agree with, that you need to read or listen to something that you can understand, in order to learn language patterns more efficiently. If you listen to something you can understand you will be able to get into the minds of the speakers and realize how to produce the language structural patterns on your own more efficiently.
2. Quantity. Naturally the more input you have, the clearer the patterns of a language become to you so reading and listening to as much material that you can understand is the key. This is often a problem in the beginner stages and will probably require you to create your own study dialogues or ask your native speaking friends to record them for you. You can either work on the same material over and over to internalize the structures that are in it, or work on new material every time which is something I prefer, since you are pushed more to give that little extra effort to understand something you never heard before.
3. Read more. By far the best way to improve your speaking skills is reading. If you compare reading to pure listening or echoing (a simple technique where you repeat everything you hear word by word simultaneously with the material you are listening to), the advantage of reading is, that when you vocalize everything you read (either orally or in your mind only), making that extra effort in producing the sounds, spending a little more time and focus on each sentence will help you consciously and subconsciously make associations in your mind between sounds and meanings, structures and meanings, situations and expressions ect.
4. Listen to political talk shows. To perfect your language skills, listen to news or political talk shows preferably with several participants, so that you can learn from them not only how to speak on your own (monologues, direct replies to questions by the participants) but also how to talk to someone else (listening to the participants interact).
5. Try to repeat or simultaneously translate what you hear. Listening to something in a foreign language that you don’t quite understand can be tiring and it can be a challenge trying to stay focused. In this case you can either repeat what you hear along with the speaker or try to simultaneously translate the material you hear. In both cases, you’ll be forced to keep paying attention to what you are listening to much more.

Lots of output

Again as simple as it sounds, speaking a language is a skill as any other and to become good at it you need to practice it. Most language learners are learning their foreign languages outside of the country where these languages are spoken so finding someone to talk to on a regular basis can be a challenge, especially with more exotic languages. Luckily with modern communication this problem can be solved to a large extent.

1. Online voice and text chatting. Go to websites like sharedtalk.com and find a language exchange partner.
2. Talk to yourself.
3. Practice describing one topic only. Whether talking to someone or talking to yourself, try to practice describing one topic and one topic only and do not drift away in your conversation. It might seem easy, but since you are limited in your foreign language it is actually a very challenging thing to do and the ‘drift’ is basically your brain trying to take an easy way out. Try to stick to one topic for as long as you can. An especially difficult thing to do is to describe rules of complicated games.
4. Talk without interruption for 5 minutes. If you have an exchange lesson over skype, try talking on your own for 5 minutes. It works miracles. If you are a shy speaker, somewhere by the second minute you will start feeling comfortable and realize that speaking is actually not that bad. 

Consistency

I heard a gymnastics coach say once that if you skip one practice, you’ll need one week to make up for it. If you miss an entire week’s worth of practice, you’ll need a month to make up for it and if you don’t practice for an entire month, you can start all over again.

As with learning anything, without being consistent a lot of your effort will be put out in vain and you will feel as if you’re constantly starting over. This is especially true with for language learning before you’ve reached the so called epiphany moment. Think about the epiphany moment in language learning as that moment when you first realized how to ride a bicycle and that feeling you had when you knew what exactly to do to stay on two wheels. After having reached this point, even if you stop learning the language completely, you can get the hang of it easily should you start learning it again in the future.

The whole point of being consistent is to get to a level where the language will resonate in your mind and sentences and structural patterns will appear out of nowhere until eventually one day you will reach that epiphany moment. Here are some tips to help you stay consistent with language learning:

1. Build a habit. Even if you don’t feel like it very much, try to do a little bit of something every day, until it becomes a habit. Lack of motivation can easily extend for days and weeks and you’ll be right where you started in no time.
2. Diversify. Try to find a lot of different things that you can do in the language, read books, watch TV, talk to people, write articles, translate, read about your school project in a different language ect. Have a list of these things posted on your desk where you can see them so that when you don’t know what to do or don’t feel like learning, you’ll have things to choose from. 
3. Have at least 3 lessons a week. In my case the absolute minimum study time outside of the country where the language is spoken was 3 lessons a week without additional review. Anything less than that and I felt like I was starting over again. With more difficult languages I would consider completely leaving everything behind and going to the country where the language is spoken from day one for a complete immersion. 

Review

I see review as a way to trick your brain into thinking that something is important by going through it over and over again. Once the brain thinks a piece of information is important, it will remember it. Review techniques have improved significantly over the years and there are several great SRS programs (Anki ect.) out there that can help students better organize their reviews, but as great as they are, they are only tools and in the end the work has to be done by the brain.

Some things you can do to improve your review:

1. Create hand written word lists. Create good, old school, hand-written word lists based on your language conversations and review them every evening. I prefer hand written word lists to SRS because they are not so ‘sterile’ and I can remember words by a lot of memory aids that SRS does not provide me with (their position on the page, the way I wrote them, by the preceding/following set of words ect.)
2. Reading review. When reading, circle-in words you don’t know, pull a line to the side of the page and write the translation over there. Review every ten pages. The circles will make it easier to find the words on the page and the reason for the translation on the side of the page far from the word is that you just won’t see it right next to your word. If you can’t come up with the translation for the word, read the entire sentence it is in. Nine times out of ten, you will remember what the word means.
3. Listen to podcasts or watch recorded talk shows online in foreign languages and take notes of words that you don’t know. Pause/rewind yourself through the entire recording and then play it again. Review every evening and/or listen/watch to the same podcast over and over again.

New Youtube channel

Hello everyone, 

I have launched a new Youtube channel as a supplement to my blog, where I would like to share some ideas about langauge learning. I'm currently working on the How to write Chinese characters playlist in which you can find videos explanaining in detail how to write Chinese characters. In each video I explain how to write these characters, explain what writing rules apply to them and what details to look out for when writing them in order to write them correctly and give a little background about their structure and history. The characters for these videos were selected based on my character frequency research starting from the most frequent one. You can find more information about my character frequency study here.

In the future, I would like to do more videos like this on Mandarin Chinese pronunciation and other langauges as well. I would also like to record interviews with other fellow language learners and post them on my channel.

Hope you enjoy the channel and if you the videos useful, feel free to subscribe.

Vladimir

Chinese character frequency list - Interview articles

Abstract

In this study I tried to analyze the Chinese character composition of about 60  interview articles in two Taiwanese online magazines,  evaluate the data, produce a character frequency chart, character knowledge vs text recognition chart, do absolute character prediction calculations and compare the data with previous analyses that I have done. I sampled a total of 45 235 characters and found that there was a total of 1865 unique characters in this sample. Based on my calculations I also found that in order to recognize 100% (using the word 'to recognize' and not 'to understand' on purpose throughout the article) of any given number of interview articles, one needs to know 2084 unique Chinese characters. When comparing this data to my previous news character analyses I found, that the interview character frequency list contains much more direct speech elements than the news article character frequency one does and I've mathematically proven, that interview articles are easier to read for beginner and intermediate students of Mandarin Chinese than news articles are.

Introduction 


In the past posts I was trying to analyze the frequency of words and characters based on the data that I sampled over the period of 6 weeks from 4 section of Taiwanese news (please see the Character frequency analysis, Word frequency analysis and Character prediction analysis articles for more information). 

In my study I found that there was a total of 2105 unique characters and 5901 unique words in the 80 articles I analyzed which were separated into four sections: 國際 (international), 政治 (domestic politics), 社會 (society) and 財經 (economics). After extending my research and trying to predict, what the number of unique characters and words in any given number of articles would be I found that if these news articles were from the same 4 news sections I analyzed, there would be a total of 2174 unique characters and 8424 unique words in any given number of news articles in these four sections and a person would thus need to know this many characters and words to recognize 100% of any given number of news articles, from these for news sections.

In this post I would like to present the results of my analysis of interview articles found in two Taiwanese magazines - Cheers and 天下雜誌. I chose to analyze interviews, because they come very close to spoken Mandarin and the words and expressions used in them differ greatly from the language used in news articles that I analyzed previously.

Research method

The data analysis method and character end ratio prediction method used in this paper are the same as in my previous posts. For more information, please see Character frequency analysis, Word frequency analysis and Character prediction analysis. 

My data sampling method was slightly different in this case, since I only had to analyse character frequency and not word frequency. What I did was, that I entered as many interviews as I could find on the 天下雜誌's and Cheers magazine's websites into a text file, cleaned it up by removing any numerals, commas, roman letters ect. and produced a raw file containing 45 235 characters. I have sampled a larger amount of data for this analysis (data greater by 18,77%) than in the News character frequency analysis (38 085) and used this ratio where necessary while comparing the results of these two analyses to make up for the difference.

Analysis results

* numbers adjusted by 18,77% for comparison purposes with news article data

The first 100 most frequent interview characters

One thing you can notice right away is that the characters in this chart seem very basic and familiar, even to beginner students. This is by all means true, because we are dealing with data that comes from interview transcriptions, which even if edited for print still represent direct speech and spoken Mandarin much better than Mandarin found in news articles or books does (see 白話 for more information).

Character knowledge Vs. Interview text recognition

In the above chart you can see the ratio between the amount of characters you know and the percentage of interview text you recognize. As with my previous analyses the most frequent characters account for much more of the text than the less frequent ones do, which means that by knowing a relatively small amount of characters you are able to recognize a relatively large amount of text, but learning to recognize the remaining 5% of the text will take you the same amount of time as learning to recognize the first 95% did. 

Character prediction chart

Based on the sampled data and using the methods I used in the Character prediction analysis I calculated that one would need to know a total of 2084 characters to be able to recognize 100% of any given number of interview articles. The 'Total sample' row represents the total amount of characters in my interview article data sample. The 'Unique' row represents the total number of unique characters found in this data sample. The 'Unique estimated' row represents the estimated total number of characters necessary to know in order to recognize 100% of any given number of  interview articles. The 'Estimated at' row represents the amount of characters in which the Unique estimated characters would be found. This means that based on my calculations, after having read Interview articles that would contain a total of 82 803 characters, you would not encounter any new unique characters. This estimation is only a mathematical calculation and serves for orientation purposes only. Please see Character prediction analysis for more info.

News and Interview data comparison

The most interesting part of this study was the comparison of results between the News article analysis and this analysis. Following are the results from the News character frequency analysis from my previous posts:

The first obvious thing you notice is, that based on the Interview articles data sample, there were only 1867 unique characters found in the interview data compared to 2105 unique characters found in the news data, which is interesting, because the sample for the news analysis was smaller by almost 20%. The reason for this will be explained the later in this article. 

The first 100 most frequent news characters

The first main difference when comparing this table with the interview frequency chart is the lack of typical direct speech elements: personal pronouns 我 and 你/妳 missing, verbs used for describing feelings and opinions, typical direct speech conjunctions ect.   

As you might notice, the number of times that unique characters occurred in news articles is lower than the one of the interview articles (e.g. News: 的=737, Interviews: 的=1826). This is mostly due to the fact that I sampled more data in the interview articles analysis. Its influence on the character frequency order is relatively small, since we're dealing with two completely different sets of data. In other analytic operations, where this change would have caused major result differences, I adjusted the calculations by 18,77% (difference in the amount of sampled data between the two analyses) in order to make up for the difference.

News and Interview character knowledge Vs text recognition

Based on the above chart and some other calculations I found that, you need to know less characters in order to recognize a greater percentage of interview articles in Mandarin, than you need to know in news articles in Mandarin in the beginning stages of your studies (at the stage where the student knows up to about 1000 characters). Later on, at around  1500 characters, this advantage becomes marginal. Since interviews represent direct speech pretty well, one might imply that you would also need to know less characters or better yet, less morphemes to speak or write spoken Mandarin, than write articles in News article type Mandarin (please see 白話 for more information).

In my study, when it comes to Interview articles, the 100 most frequent characters accounted for 56% of the sampled text, while in the case of News articles, the 100 most frequent characters accounted only for 38% of the sampled text. This means, that by knowing the same amount of characters in the beginning stages one will recognize much more of the interview articles than news articles. 

Based on my calculations, your greatest advantage comes at knowing the first 87 most frequent characters. By knowing the first 87 most frequent characters from the Interview articles frequency list you will be able to recognize 52,54% of the text found in interview articles, while knowing the same number of characters from the news frequency list will only let you recognize 35,37% of the news articles text, which is a 17,17%  difference.

While a 17,17% difference might not seem like much and is a little hard to imagine when it comes to  a concept as abstract as the relative difficulty of perception of understanding two different types of texts, I tried to present it in another way and thought of contrasting two blue colors, in which one would be 17,17% less blue than the other to give you a feel of what this difference in perception looks like in another case. 

I know this example is a little far fetched, but since we're talking about the relative difference in perception of understanding two things (in this case the different perception of difficulty of news articles and interview articles paralleled with the different perception of the same color in two different shades) I thought I could try to make this parallel and see how it works. The color to the left is 17,17% less blue than the color to the right:

Absolute character estimation comparison

          Interview character estimation                                News character estimation

The above two tables compare the predicted absolute amounts of characters necessary to read any given number of articles (for more information on this research method please see Character prediction analysis ). As you can see, the predictions differ by only 90 unique characters. 

In order to recognize 100% of any given number of news articles, based on my calculations you would need to know 2174 unique characters and in order to recognize 100% of any given number of interview articles, you would need to know 2084 unique characters. 

An interesting thing that I found was that even though this absolute character prediction difference is relatively small, based on this study you would still need a lot less characters to recognize a much greater amount of data in case of interviews than you'd need in the case of news articles (only 2084 unique characters to understand 82 803 characters of interview data compared with 2174 unique characters to understand only 53 776 characters of news data). 

My explanation for this is that as can be seen in the chart above, the most frequent characters in Interviews (about the first 1000) are used much more often throughout the Interview articles and thus can cover more data. 

Conclusion

1. You need to learn less characters in order to read Interview articles than you need to learn in order to read news articles in beginner/intermediate stages of your studies.
2. Interviews are easier to understand for beginner/intermediate students.
3. The estimated absolute amount of characters for reading both news and interviews is roughly the same (news 2174, interviews 2084), the difference is you can recognize more data by knowing less characters when reading interview articles at the beginning/intermediate stages, because more frequent characters account for more of the text in case of interview articles.
4. The composition of the characters found in the interview and frequency charts are different in that in the news character frequency chart, typical direct speech elements are much less frequent than they are in the interview frequency chart.
5. I would recommend interview reading to news reading for intermediate students.

You can download the full interview character frequency list in the download section of this blog.

Basic language structures project

Listen to MP3

Podcast transcription:

Hello this is Vladimir, coming to you from Taipei, Taiwan. It‘s been a very long time since I did a recording for my podcast and it’s been quite a while since I wrote an article as well and so I decided that this has to end that I have to dedicate more time to my blog and my podcast.

There were several reasons for not writing and not doing recordings, mostly because since the last time I wrote an article which was probably sometime in March or April - since then we’ve been having wonderful weather and I just felt bad whenever I spent time inside. And another reason probably is also the fact that it takes me a lot of time to come up with an interesting topic and something that I personally think would be worth writing an article about, let alone to do a recording about and it takes a lot of time to work on the article itself, to work out the details and if it's recording it takes a lot of time to work on the recording so that it looks good and sounds good. So whenever I was out in the beautiful weather and I was thinking that should go back and work on the recordings I just sort of postponed and postponed basically until now.

But the summer is over, unfortunately, but it's a good thing for my podcasting projects. In the meantime of course I was working on some languages and was learning some languages mainly Farsi and Polish and of course because I love languages and I love to think about how they work, how we learn languages and how we can learn them faster and all these things, I came up with several interesting things that I kind of developed and some of them actually turned into small research projects. Of course I didn‘t write an article now but at least I would like to do a podcast recording to introduce one of these projects because it is a long-term thing and it will take a long time until its really finished and until I can post the results. So at least what I thought I could do is do a little recording about this project and talk about it a little bit

So basically what I did and first, I’ll give you the name - actually it doesn't even have a name because it’s so complicated so I guess what I could call it is sort of like the research off the basic startup vocabulary and lexical structures necessary for a person to speak a language at basic fluency. To give you some background about this: back when I was learning Italian and then later mainly when I was learning Polish and then Farsi I realized that I was looking, while learning these languages I was looking for the same types of structures that kept popping up here and there in the language and that the structures were very similar in all of the languages whether it was Chinese, Italian or Polish. Back when I was learning Italian I actually did a little project where I was trying to sample all the vocabulary that I was using on a daily basis in Italian but back then I should’ve extended it and I should have mapped also the expressions not only the vocabulary.

When I started learning Polish and Farsi I changed my approach from a scholastic one, which is learning a language through grammar and textbooks and basically going from simple to difficult and I changed it to a system which I guess is called natural acquisition of a language which I have used at later stages when I was learning Chinese and proved to be very successful at least for me personally I thought was it was working out really well. So when I was learning Polish I basically had a great friend online on Skype and from lesson one I was just trying to talk to him in Polish and our lessons were basically me trying to say something in Polish and him telling me how to say that without really thinking about grammar at all and just writing these things down and then reviewing them and then moving on.

So basically just to give you an idea we would have a lesson and  probably the first sentence that I would want to say was, „Well, how do you say ‚hello‘“ and then he would say, „well this is how you say it“ and I would write it down and then we would proceed, because of course ‚hello‘ is the most simple thing that you can say and one of the most basic things, but I mean even at basic stages you need sentences like „how do you say ‚book‘ in Polish“. So this is a structure right „how you say something in the language“ and it’s a very useful structure because in most languages that you learn you if you want to learn through a discussion not a textbook you are going to use the structure very often. And whether you realize it or not there is a lot in this simple sentence „how do you say ‚book‘ in Polish? “ there‘s quite a bit of grammar in there and other things, but if you learn it as a structure you just bypass all of this because of course it is how natural acquisition methods work and this what they take advantage of.

So anyway I was proceeding through the language and I was writing down these expressions and later I started learning Farsi and decided to do that in the very same way which was just find a conversation partner and to do same thing - just start talking and try to say what ever I wanted to say and write down these expressions, than one by one review them and then just continue and continue.

So what I did was basically I produced two long, well one of them is very long, the Polish list for these basic expressions from lesson 1 to lesson maybe, well at least maybe 25 or 30. So there’s a quite a bit of expressions in that list. And I have another list which is in Farsi which has up until now 291 expressions in them. And of course because I had the experience with Italian and Chinese I knew that these expressions would more or less in Polish and Farsi and Chinese they would, I would be looking for the same things and I just wanted to map them out and see how and how frequent they are and when they occur in the language learning process.

So basically when I decided that I would like to research these expressions and sort of systemize them I had two tasks: the first one was just to simply sample them - I was already doing this, I was making these lists as we were having our lessons. And the second was to come up with an organized list and I will talk about technicalities later about how this is done and why it takes such a long time.

So what I realized when I was coming up with these lists was that.. because my aim was to come up with a list of the first 1000 or 2000 expressions that people come across naturally when they start picking up a language. There is a tremendous amount of analysis that you can make with this data. For instance if you come up with data of this sort where an adult is learning a language such as Polish and Farsi and you can compare which expressions came earlier in the learning process and which came later and of course this is very independent and individual because maybe the topics that you were talking about in the first lesson required a little bit more of past tense in them, or maybe the topic required more conditional and so on so it is very individual when it comes to the order of occurrence of these expressions. But what you can do is for instance you can compare the Polish and the Farsi lists with the Chinese - which expressions came first and which came later and you can do several things with this. I realized that just because it's so individual, it‘s basically a list which relates to my language acquisition process and specifically Polish and Farsi so I had to come up with a second point of reference and that point of reference is basically a frequency list of these expressions so what I’m going to do when I’m done with this and when hopefully I’m going to speak at a basic fluency level, I‘m going to record several hours of dialogues and I will transcribe them into a written format and run an analyzer program on the data and see the frequency of occurrence of these expressions.

So ideally what I will have at the end will be two lists. The first list will be a list of occurrence of these expressions as they appeared in the language learning process - which ones came first and which ones came later in the language learning process and the second list will be a frequency list of the same expressions based on how often they appear and a pop-up in dialogues and real-life situations. And then in the end I will combine these two lists and come up with a final list of expressions based on their frequency and the order of their occurrence.

As you can imagine, this is not a very easy thing to do and there are several problems when it comes to this. Just name a few for instance the data entries themselves: if we have expression for instance „I forgot what I wanted to tell you“. This a set phrase that we use very often. When I put it as an entry should I say „to forget what one wants to say“ which would be the neutral form, or put it in the entry as I encountered it „I forgot what I wanted to tell you“ or should I.. in this case this would probably also be the most frequent one but this is not the case for every expression. Sometimes there is a different form of the same expression which is more frequent than the one that I used so the question is which one should I enter into the list. Is it the neutral form? Is it the form that is the form that I encountered the expression in or is it the most common form, the form that most people use.

Then of course, and this is a technical thing and I will talk about this later again, but when I‘ll have the two lists where the first will be the frequency and the second list will be the occurrence list, which one will have the priority when I combine them and I will talk about it later how I’ll actually do it, because I will not do it manually. I’ll have a program to do it for me.  Will the occurrence list have priority over the frequency list or the other way around or will there be a ratio of priority between them which would be 60 to 40 or 70to 30? I don't know. This is something I have to figure out and maybe I will really end up doing all of these things manually because it is just a very sensitive thing to work with for me personally to come up with a list like that, if I really want to have good results and in this sort of research I need to put in as much effort as I can so probably I will actually end up doing these things manually.

The next thing is that, well, how will I know at what time I'll have enough expressions. I set my goal to about 1000 - 1500 expressions but if for instance I will actually hit the mark of 1500 expressions and I will say: „This is enough. I can start I can start combining the two lists and I can start coming up with the end result.“ Is it really going to be enough? Are the expressions that made it to the first 1500, are they really the most important ones, or are there some that I just didn't get the chance to use and are much more frequent in real life speech?  So this is this is another problem that I will have. And then there are some certain small technical issues that are related to the frequency lists because I told you that what I will do is that I will record several hours of spoken Farsi and I will translate that into English and I’ll have a text file which will serve as a databank and which I will use with some software that will count the frequency of the expressions in there. So let’s just take the instance of the expression that I used before „I forgot what I wanted to tell you“. So this is a very long expression „I forgot what I wanted to tell you“. That‘s eight words and programs that sort of analyze word frequency, if you only want to analyze word frequency it's very easy. The program basically tells you how many times the word occurred in the text and it knows that it's a word because there is always a space key after or before this word. So whenever there‘s a space key and whatever's between the two space keys is counted as one data entry. But if I have an expression which is „I forgot what I want to tell you“ it is of course going to be much more difficult and so probably I will have to go through the text and manually sort of correct the data, for instance delete the spaces between the words, so it will form one long word and because maybe the expression will be in a different form, like I said: „he forgot what I wanted to tell you“, or „She forgot what they wanted to tell us“ but it’s still the same structure so I’ll still probably have to edit the text file so that the expressions are in their most frequent forms, so it’s going to take a long time.

There are several other things. Once I produce this list - if I ever do it - there are several other things that I will be able to do with that sort of data. For instance, once I‘ll have the data from the dialogues I could analyze how many times for instance the first, second and third person in verbs occurred. How many times I use plural or singular. How many times the past tense, future tense occurred and then many other things and this for me personally is very interesting.  Maybe there have been studies like this and probably there have, but for me personally I have never seen in a textbook mentioned how many times the second person plural is used, because I have the feeling and this is just a very personal feeling that that when I use verbs, I mostly use the first-person, second person and third person singular and less so I use the second person plural. It might not seem like such a big deal but you know when you're a beginning student for instance, especially if you are maybe not of Indo-European language origin, if you’re Chinese or something like that and they throw at you all the three persons and two numbers of the verb, you are overwhelmed by them. If you’re learning languages like Italian for instance where you have three verb groups, I think it would be pretty useful for the students to know that there are three persons and two numbers, but that the second person plural for instance is not used so often lets say in direct speech or maybe the third person singular and plural are used much more often in the news, so maybe you can look out for that and maybe concentrate and do your best to  remember the first-person singular and so on and so on.

Another thing that this list could serve for, could be a basis for a natural acquisition language learning course. I know that there are several people who use word lists, gold lists or 10,000 sentences methods, but like I said I don't really know how these lists came about and who and how decided which sentence will actually make it into 10,000 sentences list and which will not. I have a feeling that to get you off the ground and get you speaking you need much less than 10,000 sentences you just need.. I‘m not saying it‘s going to be only 1500 sentence structures, but I'm saying it is much less than 10,000 sentences.

The whole point of this is basically to get you to a basic fluency level which for me personally is a level where you can start enjoying the language learning process, because all you have to do is talk to people and learn most of the things out of context and to get you there you could just memorize all these expressions that could get you off the ground and then they let you learn a language in the natural way without really having to think too much about grammar and think too much about what is going on in the sentence structure and so on.

The only thing that you will need to learn is which part of the structure is permanent and which part is a substituent block and usually these blocks are nouns or adjectives or other verbs and so on. So like I said for instance if you have the expression: „I forgot what I wanted to tell you” then you know that you can change all the pronouns: „He forgot what she wanted to tell us“, and so on.

Another thing that I could do is to translate this list into other languages. The basis will be English. I don’t know how well this will work until someone tries it out so I don‘t even know if it’s useful as a language learning tool and how useful it will be but by translating this into other languages at least you will see is that these expressions do exist in all of these languages in and how they are used and how they are said.

Of course with languages as different as Chinese there‘s going to be a whole bunch of expressions that Chinese have and we don't have simply because of cultural differences or simply because of the fact that Chinese works in a completely different way but I have really realized that even in such a distant language as Chinese is, I'm looking for the same things to say and you can say these things in Chinese as well, but usually in a very different way. And this is actually one of the things that I want to achieve later on if this list ever makes it – to translate the list into Chinese.

In conclusion I just want to say that obviously this is going to take me forever because my main two order of occurrence lists for Polish and Farsi.. the Polish one is ready but the one for Farsi is not ready yet and I'm basically quite far from making it complete so it’s going to take a while but I'm working on it steadily. I have three Farsi lessons per week and I add about 30 expressions about 20 to 30 suppressions every lesson. So it’s going to take a while but steadily I’ll get there and by the time I do that I hope to come up with a computer program that will help me combine the two lists and another program that will help me with the frequency computations with the dialogues data.

In the end for me of course writing the article is also very difficult, because English is not my native language and to write articles in English is more difficult than writing them in Slovak. There is also always the option to write the article first is Slovak and then translate it into English but either way takes a lot of time so I really don't know when I'm going to finish this. I just really hope that will, because think it's an interesting project at least for me to work on.

I know that this has been done before many times. There are linguistic departments all over the world that research language acquisition, secondary language acquisition, native language acquisition and definitely they research also the necessary vocabulary frequency and so on.  I‘m not influenced by them so I don’t know what methods they use and I wanted, without this influence, with my own system come up with this basic expressions list and maybe compare what I come up with and what they come up with. I know that there are very professional people working in these departments and definitely speak a lot of languages. I have maybe the advantage that I’ve been learning languages as different as Chinese and Polish and Farsi and Italian and then combine the expressions and the knowledge of these languages and come up with a list of these expressions which would maybe be ordered a bit differently than with what the linguistic departments would come up with.

So that’s about it for the project. Like I said I don’t know when I'm going to finish it. It can take a very long time but I hope I do and in the meantime I would like to do some more recordings maybe with topics that would not be so specific, maybe talk a little bit about motivation when it comes to language learning, maybe talk about pronunciation and all these things that a lot of people ask me about and so I hope to talk to you soon, take care and have a good time. Bye bye.

Kending 墾丁and the National museum of marine biology 國立海洋生物博物館

I've been in Taiwan for almost three years now and although I've tried to be more active in my local travels lately, I've never made it to the famous beaches in the south of the island which are scattered around the small town called Kending (墾丁). In general, beaches in Taiwan are not what you would expect from a tropical island since Taiwan is an island of volcanic origin and the only  postcard-type beaches can be found in the south. 

I left Taipei on a sunny and humid Sunday morning. It wasn't 9 am yet and the temperature was already at 35 degrees. I took the High speed rail at the Taipei main station and after about 90 minutes arrived in Gaoxiong (高雄), which is the second largest city in Taiwan. From there I took a bus called the "Kending express" which after about an hour of a pretty sound ride arrived at the National museum of marine biology (國立海洋生物博物館), which is roughly 20 km away from Kending. 

The national museum consists of three large pavilions, an outside water park, research facilities and is absolutely amazing. The three pavilions are called: The Waters of Taiwan, Coral Kingdom and Waters of the world and for someone coming from a landlocked country like myself, they are absolutely fascinating.

Apart from buying a regular entrance ticket visitors have a 'sleepover' option, which is a two day-one night ticket with the possibility to sleep in the museum, and I went for that. By buying this ticket, visitors could choose to sleep in any of the three pavilions next to the exhibit of their choice. I chose to sleep next to the huge Whale shark fish tank and waking up with it swimming above my head was really something amazing. I think the shark must have been about 7 meters long and seeing such a huge animal swim right next to you as you wake up is truly unbelievable.

On the first day of our stay in the aquarium, we toured the 3 pavilions and the nearby coral beach with the aquarium staff. I learned a lot of fancy words like 鰓 (gills), 水母 (jellyfish), 鯨鯊 (whale shark) or 魟 (stingray), which I will probably only get to use when I go back to the aquarium next time:) 

We first went for a walk on the coral beach, looked for anything that moved and staff members explained to us what it was. Afterwards we toured the 3 pavilions, listened to lectures about everything possible from sharks to how the aquarium was built and did a lot of side activities like jellyfish feeding or going into the fish care area where daily guests were not allowed to go. Organization was wonderful throughout the whole stay and is a part of Taiwanese mentality that can only be admired. 

The next day morning I left the Aquarium and went further south to stay in a hotel not far from Nanwan (南灣), which is only one stop away from Kending and went straight to the beach. The water was warm like a bath tub and I never felt the sun burn so strong before in my life. At this time of the year, the weather in Taipei is changing fast. In the morning it is usually very hot and humid, with thunder showers in the afternoon. In Kending there are no thunderstorms, it is only very hot, very humid and a there is very strong sunshine throughout most of the day.

Small companies offering snorkeling services

Not far away from Nanwan, in Houbihu (後壁湖) I went to a small snorkeling beach. Although the coral reef was different from the ones that I've usually seen on TV, the diversity of fish life was stunning. I could recognize a lot of the fish that I saw earlier in the Marine museum. The snorkeling was a lot of fun, but it felt like being at a night market at times because of the amount of people there. 


Later that day I went to the southernmost point in Taiwan called Eluanbi (鵝鑾鼻) and the next day I took the bus back to Gaoxiong where I spent the rest of the day just wandering around the city until taking the High speed rail back to Taipei.

Taiwan's southernmost point

Directions and other information

Although there are other options, taking the High speed rail to Gaoxiong is the best one. If you order your ticket online 15 days before you go, you have a 30% 早鳥 (Early bird) discount.

As you get off the High speed rail in 左營 (the station for Gaoxiong), there is a small stand selling tickets for the Kending express bus. If you want to go to the Marine museum, get off at 保力 and wait for the connecting bus or take a cab, although cab prices are the double of what they are in Taipei.