Japonezul - Chinezul - Blog despre civilizaţia chineză şi japoneză

Asculta Radio Online în chineza

2012-01-10T13:46:00.001-08:00

Chinese Internet Radio and Online News Radio

Invaţă Limba Chineză !!!!

2012-01-10T13:22:00.000-08:00

A "short list" of the best Chinese study resources available to help those new to online/electronic resources to get off the ground.

DictionariesOnline Reading Assistant (instant pinyin and definition while you browse)

Online Dictionaries

- YellowBridge Chinese English Dictionary
- ChinesePod Dictionary (sentences w/ recordings)
- Dict.cn Dictionary, English/Chinese searchable dictionary with many example sentences in English and Chinese.
- Xiaoma Cidian is a dictionary searchable by English, Character and Pinyin, and also has links to other helpful word lists. [S]
- MDBG Dictionary is an all-around dictionary
- Guoyu Dictionary, commercial-level traditional Chinese-based dictionary maintained by Taiwan Department of Education, with large number of word entries and detailed definitions.
- Classical Chinese Dictionary (A) [T]
- Specialized Chinese Dictionaries [S]
- Zhongwen.com, good radical/stem derivation diagrams fro exploring the relationship between characters (in traditional character)
Online Dictionaries that support screen (mouse) character writing
- nciku.com - a new tool based on UniHan
- A Java tool from Chinese-Tools.com
Offline (instant pinyin and definition for offline text reading)
- Dimsum (provides pop-up definition for both websites and offline texts; uses Java, should run on PC/Mac/and more)
- PlecoDict (Palm/PocketPC; US$99.95 for version with John deFrancis's excellent ABC dictionary, allows for a instant definition while reading on your PDA - works the best with TealDoc on Palm; excellent full-featured flashcard system). See discussion.
- Wakan Free mouse-over pop-up dictionary for all windows applications.
- Wenlin, US$199, with academic discounts possible; PC/Mac; includes the ABC dictionary; provides mouse-over pinyin and definitions and unique features such as one-click searches for all characters containing a component or all phrases containing a character. (G) [S,T]
- NJStar (mainly a word processor, but version 5.0 also has a teaching mode which provides pop-up definitions and automated vocabulary list generator; demo version is fully functional, but need to pay for registration for all features, including the full dictionary)
- HanConv: converts between Chinese characters to pinyin and romanized Cantonese, and convert between Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters
- Puku: converts between Chinese character to pinyin on Microsoft Pocket PC. Freeware made by a non-profit Putonghua advocate group.
- Powerword: The most commonly used pop-up translator software in China. More geared towards native Chinese speakers learning English but is perhaps the most efficient Chinese-English mouse-over translator combined with a user-created CEDICT dictionary add-on found here.
- For more on electronic dictionaries, see this discussion and this.
- For more on mouse-over/pop-up dictionaries, see this discussion.
- PABLO (Windows): Freeware Chinese-English dictionary, with handwriting recognition, stroke animations and great search features.
Test Preparation
- Popup Chinese - sample HSK test exercises at three levels of difficulty (beginner, intermediate, advanced).
  
  Tones[list]
- SpeakGoodChinese (program for training tone pronunciation, see discussion)
- Start from Pinyin: Alphabet of Pinyin (with .wav audio)
- Mandarin Chinese Pronunciation Guide (no audio)
- Pinyin Practice (
- Romanization Explained
- Pinyin Wiki
- More here...
Grammar
- ChinesePod (grammar guide, or podcasts with grammar points).
Chinese Usage Dictionary.

Listening Material

Popup Chinese - free podcast lessons, HSK tests and annotated texts and transcripts with mouseover popups. Focus on standard Beijing dialect.
Chinese as a Second Language Podcasts.
Podcast with free transcripts from Nankai University.
Chinese Voices, collection of short, engaging mini-essays with accompanying audio for intermediate students.
CCTV Travel in Chinese (teaches you Chinese with a travel theme; transcript available on website). See this discussion.
CCTV's "Economics Half Hour" 《经济半小时》: videos (click on the little icon after the titles) and transcripts of many shows are available on the site. A little like a more commercialized version of "60 Minutes." The show covers many subjects, not just the economy, despite its name.
ChinesePod.com
China Radio International beginning Chinese listening materials (with pinyin and English transcripts). See discussion.
Chinese subtitles/script for Chinese movies (for movies that you may have downloaded from lib.verycd.com). See discussion.
Online audio lessons (I)
Chinese Radio Online
Chinese Television Online
Radio Free Asia
ChinesePod (learning community & podcasts)
More listening resources: see this discussion.

Reading Material

Chinese Text Sampler (texts graded by difficulty level) (linked through anonymouse.org due to site being blocked by the Great Firewall)
NewsInChinese.com
Collection of writings by famous modern authors such as Lu Xun, Su Tong, and Wang Xiaobo

Flashcards/Vocabulary

Software
- jMemorize, Supermemo-like flashcard system that keeps track of your study history
- MyChineseFlashCards: nice open-source Chinese flashcard program (Mac, PC, Linux)
- See PlecoDict above
- Zhongwen Development Tool, java-based cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux). Open Source.
- PINGRID (Windows): Freeware vocabulary training game. Based on spaced repetitions and 100% geared towards Chinese vocabulary.
Specific Flashcards

Study Tools

Hanyu College: Animated dialogues, karaoke, radio, and advanced readings (B,I,A) [S]
DimSum: offline reading tool with annotation, dictionary (I,A) [S,T]
University of Oxford Multi-Media Language Course (B,I)
Read Mandarin - Learn to Read Chinese : Very useful website created by Daniel for learning characters (B, +pronunciation audio files) [S]

Converters

Language Partners

Find a Chinese chat partner with QQ (a popular instant message program in China). See discussion.
Meet Language Partners Online
LangEx
Sharedtalk.com

Games

Other

Mandarin Slang (Wikipedia)
Mandarin-Cantonese Term Converter
Hanzismatter exposes the misuse of Chinese characters
Signese exposes characters in action

So you want to learn Japanese eh?

2011-12-29T23:28:00.001-08:00

So you want to learn Japanese eh? Great choice! The language is fun, the culture is fascinating, and the food is delicious!

Here's a few tips to get you started.

1. Study everything! Don't look for one or two resources and expect to learn everything from them. When someone asks which book, CD, computer program, or website is best to learn from, I say, "All of them!" I learned something from every Japanese language-related book I've ever read. Study a lot and you'll learn a lot.

2. Start with the basics. The book "Japanese: The Manga Way" by Wayne P. Lammers gives a good, fun overview of the language. So does Tae Kim's "Guide to Japanese" website ( http://www.guidetojapanese.org ) which is very detailed. Kim Allen's "Japanese for the Western Brain" site (http://kimallen.sheepdogdesign.net/Japan… ) gives an overview while focusing on the differences between Japanese and English, and is very helpful. If you need an online dictionary, jisho.org ( http://www.jisho.org ) is a great site to use.

3. As you continue your study, develop each of the four areas of language learning: Hearing, Speaking, Reading, and Writing
--Hearing: Go to JapanesePod101.com ( http://www.japanesepod101.com ) and sign up for their free podcasts. They range from beginner to advanced and will be a great resource in your study.
--Speaking: Talk to Japanese people every chance you get. Shared Talk (http://www.sharedtalk.com ) has voice chat through which you can talk to Japanese people and they're generally very supportive.
--Reading: Memorize the hiragana ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana ), then the katakana ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana ). After that, you can start memorizing kanji and reading japanese manga (which you can purchase from Amazon -- http://www.amazon.co.jp )
--Writing: Start an online blog at Lang-8 ( http://www.lang-8.com ). When you post, native speakers will correct your sentences. It's a great resource.

4. Take a class. The good thing about taking a Japanese class is that it forces you to study, even if you don't want to. It also provides a nice structure for learning the language, along with someone who can correct your pronunciation.

5. Go to Japan! This is the number one, fastest, easiest, guaranteed-to-work way to learn Japanese. Even if it's just for a visit, being immersed in the language is a huge benefit to study. Japanese people are usually really supportive of foreigners learning their language and their encouragement will be a great boost for you.

6. Never give up! Japanese is a really hard language. It requires a lot of memorization and practice. Don't expect to be fluent even after a few years of study (especially if you're not studying in Japan). Language learning is a life-long pursuit.

7. HAVE FUN! This is the most important tip I could give you. As long as you're having fun learning the language, then you will be successful. Always try to find ways of making the learning enjoyable.

これから頑張ってね!

Learn Any Language in 6 Months

2011-12-28T14:34:00.000-08:00

Learn Any Language in 6 Months

Topics: How To, Japan, Language

Read Time: 15 minutes

By utilizing techniques such as spaced repetition, complete immersion, and prioritized learning, I’m confident that anyone can learn any language to conversational fluency in six months or less. I started learning Japanese in November of 2008 and within two months I had learned the meaning of 2000+ kanji, and within six I was having conversations with strangers at rock concerts (cute Japanese girls!). I’m not trying to glorify myself here either – I’m a particularly weak-willed person and getting motivated for me often involves a literal act of God. Language learning has been put on a golden pedestal for most people, achievable only for the super-intelligent. Because of this false imagery and a bad case of failure-leading-to-lack-of-motivation seen in high school language classes, very few people achieve any real success. But if you are simply willing to put in the time, you too can have interesting conversations with people from distant lands.

Step X: Prepare Your Mind

You can do it.

Believe and have faith, this is the first and most important step. I know it sounds cheesy and motivational, but it’s true. Decide that you want to learn a foreign language and commit yourself to it. Imprint it to your mind and imagine yourself already at the goal. The most successful people are the ones who can best visualize their goals, and they don’t let excuses prevent them from reaching their goals – they find a way get around them. Understand that you’ll encounter barriers preventing and hindering you from reaching the goal, but decide beforehand that you’ll find a way to overcome them.

Step X: Learn the Characters of Your Target Language

For languages with alphabets differing drastically from English (Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Arabic, etc.), learn the alphabet first. This shouldn’t take more than a day or two when using an SRS (I’ll explain what this is in a moment).

For Chinese, Japanese, and languages with characterized written languages, I suggest familiarizing yourself with the meanings of characters before learning their pronunciation. This may seem counter-intuitive at first, but there’s a reason. Essentially there are three parts to a character – meaning, pronunciation, and the written character. By skipping pronunciation you can simplify the learning process and familiarize yourself with characters faster than by trying to memorize two things at once. Check out Charles Heisig’s books – “Remembering the Kanji” or “Remembering the Hanzi” for learning characters and further discourse supporting this method.

Step X: Using an SRS (Spaced Repetition Software), Make Native Sentence Cards

SRS is a flashcard-like computer program which allows you to create digital flash cards and study them in the most efficient manner possible. Basically, our memory works best when we repeat items that we want to learn. Just like when you repeat the chorus of your favorite song twenty times on your iPod, SRS imprints the facts into your mind by repetition. But the problem with conventional flashcards is that you end up studying the difficult cards with the same frequency as the easy ones, wasting your precious time. Using an SRS solves this problem by automatically repeating the cards at the optimum time interval. Difficult cards get seen more often than easy ones, and you learn your language faster.

The SRS I use is called Anki, and I highly recommend it.

Now that we have the right tool for memorization, we need to know how to use it for maximum effect. From personal experience I’ve found that learning complete sentences, even if they are small, is the best way to study a language. Cognitive reasoning is one of our most powerful tools here. The brain easily takes phrases and pieces them together to create sentences and communicate ideas. Don’t study vocabulary by itself as this is a waste of time. All you have to do is fill your mind with example structures of everyday sentences in your target language, and your mind will automatically fill in the necessary vocabulary and verb conjugations.

Example flash card from my Anki deck (you may need Japanese text support enabled):

Front:
映画を見た人は誰？

Back:
えいがをみたひとはだれ？
Who is person who watched movie?

There are a few things to take notice of in this example. First, I didn’t worry about “translating” the sentence into English. As long as I can understand the meaning it doesn’t matter. Second, the sentence is short and simple. Linguist Dr. Stephen Krashen suggests the “i + 1″ method, where you add one new item to your knowledge. Try to never make a card with two new words in it. Thirdly, the sentence is native. I don’t remember where I got it, but it’s not an English thought translated into Japanese, it’s real Japanese from a native Japanese source. A dictionary with good examples sentences is one of the best sources for word-specific native material. Thinking in L1 (your mother tongue) and trying to translate to L2 (target language) is detrimental. Learn to think like a native by imitation, just like a baby!

Step X: Complete Immersion: Input Before Output

Another deciding factor for success is immersion. Complete immersion. If you want to learn this langauge, really learn it, then you have to spend every waking moment in it. Most people fail at learning new languages because they simply don’t spend enough time in L2. Taking classes is especially deceptive because they make you feel like you’re learning, when in fact your going at a snail’s pace. I got straight As in my High School Spanish class, but when I took a trip down to Mexico City I realized just how valuable my two years of study were worth: NIL. I was one of the best students in my class, and I still couldn’t handle the most basic Spanish conversations.

Every aspect of your life should be entrenched in your target language. Do you use the internet? Download your internet browser in L2. Do you read the newspaper? Find a way to get it in L2. Do you have a smartphone? Switch the default language to L2. Watch movies in L2. Listen to L2 music exclusively. Every aspect of your life from now on should be done in the language you want to learn. If you want it bad enough you’ll find a way.

“But I don’t live in country X!” “How can I be completely immersed with all this English around me?!” – I feel this is one of the biggest language myths ever. You don’t need to live in France to learn French. You don’t need to live in China to learn Chinese. You don’t need to live in Latin America to learn Latin. Wait a second… that’s not right. Anyway, there are plenty of resources available to you (many for free) where you can get a life-like immersion experience without a 10 hour plane ride. Granted that the real immersion experience is better, but I can surf YouTube for hours and get nearly the same native language exposure as somebody who lives in Japan.

There is no need to worry about understanding the language right away. Complete immersion means you won’t understand everything, and that’s okay. Listen even when you don’t understand. It usually takes babies a year of listening before they start talking, and as adults we have the advantage because we can already think logically and don’t have to figure out our vocal chords.

Don’t force output. It will probably take months of high quality input before you’ll feel comfortable speaking. I feel this is a major flaw in modern teaching methods, and one of many reasons to avoid the classroom. Many college professors expect their students to produce native-like sentences after the first few lessons! Their theory is that you should make mistakes often so that they can be corrected, leading to a better understanding of the language. Bull. Mistakes only create bad habits and confusion. Learn it right the first time and you don’t have to worry about it. Output should feel natural and mistakes should be avoided at all costs; don’t be in a big rush to speak.

Recommended Inputs:

Listen to free audio-book downloads before going to bed. When was the last time someone read you a bedtime story? It’s incredibly relaxing.
Always carry an L2 book with you. Everywhere. Audio-books in conjunction with paper books are awesome when you want to learn pronunciation.
Computer programs with any clout will have a slew of language options. Switch them to your L2.
Buy an iPod touch or smartphone and download the Anki app and a dictionary. You’ll be able to study your flash cards anywhere.
Think in L2. Whenever I thought a thought in English, I did my best to rethink it in Japanese.
Eat your country’s cuisine. Life revolves around food in most countries, so being accustomed to and knowledgeable about native foods will give you an automatic “in” when visiting.
YouTube
Movies – but DO NOT use English subtitles! They’re a crutch that prevent you from diving into the language fully.

Step X: Prioritize

A typical unabridged Chinese character dictionary will have more than 40,000 independent entries. It would take a lifetime to familiarize yourself with all of these characters, but thankfully languages follow the rule of 80/20, a.k.a. the Pareto Principle. What this means is roughly 20% of those characters are used 80% of the time. A well-educated Chinese student will recognize upwards of 7,000 characters, and reading a newspaper may require a working knowledge of 3,000 characters [1]. We can find the same thing in English – “The Reading Teachers Book of Lists claims that the first 25 words make up about one-third of all printed material in English, and that the first 100 make up about one-half of all written material [2].” Using an SRS like Anki and a dictionary with good example sentences, the initial effort of memorizing 100 words should take three days at most. Three days for 50% comprehension! I know I know, that number is slightly overstated because many of those 100 words are lemmas (more than one word – like “is” can be “He was”, “I am”, “You are” etc.), but you see the point I’m trying to make right? By learning the common words first, you quickly increase your effective comprehension of the language. Note: You can find the first 3000 common Japanese words in this post.

Step X: Make it Fun; Choose Material Comparable to Your Current Interests

Beyond the first 500 words or so, I suggest learning interest-specific or field-specific vocabulary. Take the things you currently do in L1, and do them in L2. Find a way to make an L2 copy of your current self. Language learning isn’t difficult, but it does take focused effort over a long period of time. If you want to make this endeavor sustainable, and it must be sustainable, it sure as hell better be fun. Like any good drug addiction, you want to keep coming back to it again and again. I treat myself to a cup of coffee or tasty drink every time I do my SRS reps.

When I was studying in Japan, I completed an introductory program for the PA-10 Mitsubishi robotic arm. It involved learning basic robotic arm control, which was comprised of creating a computer program from scratch, solving inverse kinematics problems, and a mother trucker load of questions for my Japanese lab-mates. In order to communicate effectively I had to learn some of the technical jargon associated with robotics. Now I’m pretty confident using words like 逆魚列 (inverse matrix), 再起動 (restart), 軸線 (shaft axis), 運動学 (kinematics), and 機械工学 (Mechanical Engineering). This kind of vocabulary would be useless for anyone else, even most Japanese, but it was essential for me and my situation.

Step X: Goal Setting – Small and Achievable with Consistency

During my most intense period of learning Japanese, I bought this calendar for 100 Yen ($1) at a thrift store and used it as a daily visual reminder of my goal to become fluent. Each day I accomplished my (small) goal, I took a big red marker and made an X on the day. The sense of accomplishment I felt after each X’d day helped to create even more momentum for the next day.

Learning a language takes a lot of effort, so keep your goals small and achievable while finding ways to keep them sustainable over long periods of time. A small effort every day for a month is far more productive than three days of caffeine-induced cramming. After a few days of studying you’ll become more aware of your physical limitations; it’s at that point you want to create a daily goal. Make your goal achievable, but somewhat of a stretch. Too easy and you’ll end up cutting yourself short, too hard and you’ll get disappointed by failure. The key is long-term sustainability.

In contrast to this, don’t put an extended timeline on your goal to become fluent. When you’re first starting out you shouldn’t worry about when you’ll arrive at your goal, or make baseless assumptions about how long it should take you to acquire a 10,000 word vocabulary. Yes I know, the title of this post is “Learn any language in 6 months”, but it may take some people longer and others shorter. Just start walking the road and have a surprise party when you get to the end.

Step X: Never Stop Learning

I attempt to live my life in such a way that I’m always exposing myself to new ideas and attaining new knowledge. But at the same time, I make an effort to not forget the things I’ve already learned. Learning a new language is an exciting and fulfilling experience, but not quite as fulfilling ten years from now when you’ve forgotten everything you’ve learned. The initial effort of learning is long and tough, but the fun kind of tough, and similar to getting a freight train moving. The power you need to start is immense, but as soon as you’re moving, it’s not too hard to keep going. Many people are willing to put forth the effort to get the train started, but don’t quite realize that the train will eventually come to a slow stop if they don’t keep shoveling the coal.

Step X: Further Reading and Resources

ajatt.com – All Japanese All the Time dot com. This is the blog that inspired me to pursue fluency in Japanese and provided the resources and ideas that are making it possible. Purveyor of the 10,000 sentence method: learn 10,000 sentences in an SRS to achieve native-like fluency. Major props.

antimoon.com – Polish pioneers of the SRS/sentence learning method. These guys learned English to college level fluency in 3 years using their method.

How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months – Author Tim Ferriss wrote an enlightening article that directly inspired my writing this post. Hence, credit is due. Our content is similar in many ways, but disagree with him on some points. I encourage reading his post also to gain a broader perspective on language learning.

Anki – The free SRS that makes it all possible. I suggest watching the Intro Videos to get a better understanding of the concept.

Supermemo Articles – Supermemo, the original SRS, was created by Dr. Wozniak who has written not-a-few articles about SRSing, memory, and acquiring knowledge. Recommended reading: 20 Rules and Memory Myths. Fascinating stuff.

Do you have any language acquisition stories? Failure/Success stories? Discussion and idea-sharing are encouraged, so post a comment!

Reinventing Language Education

2011-11-09T01:21:00.000-08:00

Reinventing Language Education
I wouldn’t go as far as Seth and say that what is happening in the public school systems in regards to language education is a waste, but I think most of us will agree that if we were to talk to ten friends who sat through two semesters of high school Spanish, most would say they learned very little. Even fewer perhaps could actually speak any Spanish. So while I wouldn’t call it a waste, anecdotal evidence at least would point to something far less than success.

In today’s post then, I want to offer a few of my thoughts as to how we might reinvent the system. I put quite a bit of thought into this but in no way think my ideas are great. They are I hope, a beginning. I would love to see a serious conversation take place, for ideas to be shared, for risks to be taken. I would love to hear what you think. I especially want to hear your thoughts from your own experiences. I write the post about the American system, but would like to hear what my international readers have to say from their experience as well. An outside perspective is always a good one to have. And we need to hear from those of you involved in language education.

Nine Ideas
I am not putting forth ideas to ‘reform’ the present system. I am suggesting that we start over. Not an easy task and not an idea that will be readily accepted. The status quo has a certain power to remain. Change is always hard work but often well worth the risk and the effort. And so today I want to present nine ideas as a starting point for reinventing the language education system in America. They are undeveloped ideas at best, but perhaps can act as a catalyst for conversation.

1 – The Only Goal

The goal of the reinvented language classroom will be this: To see students develop a life long love of language learning that will continue for the rest of their lives. To my mind there is no other goal that is higher than this one. It is not a goal I see communicated clearly to students in our language programs today. When I took German in university, the goal was to learn some German, not to fall in love with the German language and German culture. When the end of the semester came, I wiped my brow, took a deep breath and promptly moved on. So did all but one of my classmates.

2 – Scrap The Way It’s Been Done

I don’t think the status quo can be reformed in any way that will truly lead to a transformation that will affect significant change. Because of this I think that perhaps it is time to scrap the way we’ve done it and start dreaming about new ideas and approaches to introduce young people to the wonderful world of language learning. It won’t be easy and it shouldn’t be a top down, the White House has a new plan sort of change. It starts with a conversation which moves onto action.

3 – No Language Specific Classes

The first thing I would suggest is to do away with language specific language classes. High schools would no longer offer Spanish or French but rather would offer a general class that would introduce students to language learning and would allow students to chose what language they would like to learn. The main goal of this class would be to help kids fall in love with a language and give them the tools and knowledge to become life long students of it. I’ll expand on this later.

4 – Teachers as Coaches

Not having to specialize in a specific language, teachers would move into a coach/mentor role and would work to learn new languages along side students. Teaching would still take place but would focus on teaching students how to learn a new language, presentation of ideas about second language acquisition and instruction on how to access the language on the internet and in the community. The teacher would act as a facilitator, regularly introducing students to new tools and activities for learning and monitoring progress as they empower students to take control of their language learning. Modeling language learning would be an important part of the job and they would work more than anything to help their students become independent, self-directed learners. They would not teach grammar. They would not give grades. They would not need to ‘have arrived’ as a distinguished speaker of a particular language but rather would be a passionate and joy filled traveller on the language learning journey – toward any language(s).

5 – Students Are In Charge

Students in this new system would be placed in charge of their language learning. They would chose which language(s) they want to study and to what level they would like to master them. They could focus on one language or may chose to switch languages every month or two. They would create (with their language coach) a personal language learning program and then chose the daily activities they would work on during class. They would regularly reflect on and self-evaluate both their command of the language and their personal learning program. This will all be a big change from anything they have done before and so teacher/coaches will need to work to empower and equip students to take responsibility.

6 – No Levels

There will no longer be levels in the language program. The first year will be required but after that students will chose whether or not to continue to sign up for the language learning journey. Each year they will pick up where they left off. The end of the year will no longer signal the end of their interaction with the language but rather the opportunity to continue through the summer. Teachers will model the life long learner attitude and invite students to see language not as a “class” to be checked off the list, but an amazing lifestyle into which they can enter. The goal will no longer be to pass level one and improve the GPA.

7 - No Grades

GPA will no longer be important because grades will not be given. Grades are a sacred cow in our education system, but I think we need to do away with them in language education. I am not sure what purpose they serve in actually helping students learn another language but they seem one part of our traditional system that may be preventing students from really entering into a passionate pursuit of learning another language. Grades will always set the bar too low. If a student needs to learn 100 words to get an A, they will inevitably learn 100 words and no more. Students will study for the Final Exam in a crash course cram session after which everything ingested is promptly purged. When grades are no longer the goal, the bar can be raised to something worth shooting for – learning a new language so that they can speak and interact with native speakers confidently.

This is not to say that their should be no assessment of or requirements on students. Just the opposite. Students will engage in high quality self-assessment (guided by their teacher in the beginning) that assesses both their ability to use the language and their language learning program. Teachers will also create certain requirements for students to meet. One of these should be for students to demonstrate that they have created real engagement and friendship with native speakers using the language. Perhaps they will be required to demonstrate 600 minutes of spoken conversation or 10,000 words of written communication. What ever it is, it should be real life stuff.

8 – Internet Is Central

Opportunities for language and cultural learning are available today in ways we could only dream of even ten years ago. Until recently, teachers were the main means for student to receive comprehensible input. This was the reality of the pre-Internet world. With the Internet however, high quality opportunities are more abundant than ever before. Teachers must learn to help their student plug into these and use them as efficiently and effectively as possible. It could very well be that the bulk of a student’s time in this new system then will probably be spent in the computer lab. The Internet is the one tool that will allow us to create near immersion like experiences for our students.

9 – Human Interaction Is More Central

The main reason we learn languages is to communicate with real human beings, beautiful people from all over the globe who speak other languages. Everything that happens in the language classroom should work toward creating human interaction. The Internet is key only in that it is the best tool we have to help students develop the necessary language skills to be able to connect and communicate with native speakers of the languages they are learning. It is a tool and rightly used will allow student to create valuable interaction with students from the target language country.

A Final Thought
I do not offer these nine ideas as an expert in any way. I do not pretend that they are fully developed nor is this intended to be a coherent plan for a new system. They are ideas. Plain and simple. I know that there are some amazing teachers out there whose students are falling in love with the language and who are becoming life long students and so I in no way want to take away from the work that you do. This is in no way intended to be a critique of language teachers but rather ideas for changing the system within which they function.

I was both an ESL teacher and a regular high school English teacher in the states before moving to Turkey and so have some experience in this field. My work and writing now are directed at helping learners become independent and self-directed. It is from these two experiences that I have learned to believe in the power of giving students more choices and more responsibility to direct their own learning.

My goal with this post then is merely to see a conversation take place. I could be way off base and many of you will likely disagree with the above, but I feel like there is some need to consider new and creative ideas for the future of the American language education system.

I look forward to a robust and productive conversation.

Japanize your environment.

2011-06-14T21:39:00.000-07:00

So, here is a list of about 10 things to do (and not do), in order to Japanize your environment.

1. Music: Japanese only
Put away the Avril Lavigne. Sell the CDs on EBay; give them to a Japanese friend who’s learning English. Whatever, just get rid of it. Delete the mp3s. Don’t “put aside” your non-Japanese music; that includes the Manu Chao; I don’t care if he sings in English, Spanish *and* French; it’s irrelevant. Destroy it. I know this is harsh, but it’s something you have to do. Why destroy it? Because if you don’t, you will listen to it in a moment of weakness or nostalgia (you’re all: “(sigh) I remember when I understood the lyrics in the songs I listened to, those were the days”); it could lead to weeks of regression, or even destroy your immersion program altogether. Replace it all with Japanese music: music by Japanese *in* Japanese. It’s best not to even “do it in stages”, just go cold turkey. Even if you have so little Japanese music that you have to keep repeating the same song, then that’s a good thing! Repetition is the mother of skill, remember? Let go of the non-Japanese bands; there are plenty of Japanese bands that have the sound and feel you’re looking for.

Not only should you exclude languages other than Japanese from your life, but you should actively include Japanese music with you wherever you go. If you don’t yet have a portable music player, acquire one, and where it around with you *everywhere*. If you are not in an important conversation with someone who does not speak Japanese, then you should be listening to your Japanese music.

2. Movies: Japanese only
Movies that are not in Japanese no longer exist to you. Now, fortunately, you can get Hollywood movies dubbed into Japanese atwww.amazon.jp (be sure to check the item details, especially for movies more than 5-10 years old, since these may be Japanese-subtitled but not dubbed).

Don’t use your significant other as an excuse. “But we have to spend time together”, you say. Bollocks. Take a walk together and hold hands, but make sure to be listening to Japanese music on your portable player; come on, let’s be honest, you don’t really want to hear what they have to say anyhow (joking)! And don’t let your friends or family make fun of you or browbeat you into going along to see the latest mindless flick with them. Don’t let them tell you that you “have to unplug sometimes”; they’re full of crap; they’re only saying that to get you to go along. Don’t let them tell you “you can do it later”. Will they be there for you when your Japanese sucks because you didn’t practice because you were always “going to do it later”? Do your friends know Japanese fluently? Probably not. Because if they did, they would understand why you need to do what you need to do, and they wouldn’t try to dissuade you from it. If they do know Japanese fluently, then they should know better than to attempt to strip you away from the very thing that got them fluent: constant practice.

Be strong. Your friends and family will make fun of you for a while, but just hold on. In the short-term, they may not seem to like you unless you do what they want. But it in the long run, they’ll respect you more than if you’d just given in to their pressure. They may say horrible things to you: “Do you think you’re better than us? Do you value the advice of random people on the Internet more than that of your real world friends and family? Do you think you’re Japanese or something?” to which you may reply under your breath: “actually, I do”.

3. TV: Japanese only
Unless you live in an area with a large Japanese community, there may not be Japanese TV available. But you never know. Check with your local cable/satellite provider. Failing live TV, even if there’s only a small Japanese community, there may be a Japanese store in your area. More likely than not, that store sells/rents tapes of Japanese television, complete with commercials. You want to patronize that store and buy some tapes. Failing that, there’s always Ebay, YouTube and even (shudder) BitTorrent.

One of the cool things about Japanese TV is some of the most popular American TV shows (and even some of the good ones) are dubbed in Japanese, including 24, Monk, CSI (all cities), Friends, Full House (the worst show in human history) and many more.

Whatever your sources, get some Japanese TV arrangement going, and have it playing constantly. Like me, you may not even watch TV. But when it comes to Japanese, and only Japanese, you have the permission to be a couch potato. Or a couch carrot: lighter and leaner than a potato, but still a bit vegetative.

4. Radio: Japanese only
Again, unless you live in an area with a large Japanese community, there may not be Japanese radio available. Not a problem. That’s what the Internet is for. Sometimes, running Japanese TV could be distracting for you. But you can listen to radio and podcasts while you cook. Get some (ask me if you want to know specific places).

In the case of both TV and radio, don’t worry if you can’t understand it all. The point initially is not for you to get everything that’s going on. The point is for you to have it turned on, and playing. At first, you probably won’t understand a single word. Then you’ll start picking up single words. Then you’ll start picking up sentences. Then you’ll start picking up scenes. After some time, you’ll be able to watch and understand it all. It may take a while (many months), but stay patient and let the bright colors, shiny objects and detergent commercials entertain you.

5. Computer/Internet: Japanese only
Do it. Do it now. As far as possible, only visit Japanese websites. Need to check your favorite website? Check the Japanese version instead. Need to check the news? No, you don’t . In addition to original Japanese websites, there are Japanese-language versions of several of the most popular English webpages, including Yahoo, Wired, CNN and Slashdot.

What operating system do you use? Better get the Japanese version.

What’s your browser’s homepage? Better make it a Japanese one.

Tip: enter a JapaneseURL into the box on http://www.hiragana.jp/, and it will add kana pronunciation aids (furigana) to the kanji.

6. Friends: Japanese only
OK, this is as harsh as they get, but you’re going to need to work on your social circle. I’m not saying that you should kick out non-Japanese-speaking people from your life, but you should definitely surround yourself with Japanese speakers.

Sometimes you can’t always be with your real-life Japanese friends, so when you’re alone, your Japanese friends are the singers and actors you watch and listen to.

7. Walls: Japanese only
What is on the walls around you? You need some Japanese posters and signs. If you’re in the kanji-studying phase, then there’s this cool poster of all 2000 odd General Use Kanji; at $24 it isn’t cheap, but in the spirit of “discipline is remembering what you want”, I think it’s a valuable reminder. I had one on my wall. You could also make your own poster by filling in each kanji you acquire. Whatever you do, Japanese the walls of your home.

8. Food: Japanese only
The Japanese restaurants I know of are expensive. Maybe you can visit them only once in a while. You could also visit Japanese food shops, buy the ingredients, and cook your own food. You don’t know how to use the ingredients? Just ask the shopkeepers (or your friends) about what to cook.

Also, whatever kind of food you eat, eat it with chopsticks. I started using only chopsticks years before going to Japan. Don’t be intimidated, they aren’t hard to use. Plus, you can almost eat anything solid with chopsticks: rice, cake, ice-cream. So use them! Again, you may earn the ridicule of those around you, but just grin and bear it. Since moving to Japan, it’s dawned on me that the chopsticks thing wasn’t just a psychological tool and it wasn’t just for getting attention. It really is a social skill; outside of Japan, they may be rare, but in Japan everything comes with chopsticks; you need to know how to use them.

9. Floor and Furniture: Japanese only
This is similar to the chopsticks suggestion. Again, before moving to Japan, I thought I was just being kitsch by doing this, but it turns out (again) that in addition to reminding you of your goal (Japanese fluency) this is actually an important social skill. Japan very much remains a floor-centered society.

Use Japanese-style furnishing in your home. You don’t necessarily need to go out and buy new furniture to do this, and even if you do, it needn’t be expensive. All you need is a low table (zataku, 座卓) to sit at. Low enough that you can sit on the floor with a cushion (seiza, 正座) and use it.

You should also sleep on the floor on a futon; if you don’t have one, you can lay down a duvet/comforter and sleep on that. Anyway, the point is: sleep and work close to the ground. Outside of offices, almost everything in Japan is low, close to the ground (private homes, restaurants, etc.) You’d do well to get used to it sooner rather than later. If you’ve been working high off the ground until now, this may take some getting used to, but the more you do it, the easier it gets. The task doesn’t change; you do.

10. Brain/Thoughts: Japanese only
Last but not least, your brain. You probably have thoughts and some of them might be in words and those words might be in a language that is not Japanese. Well, that won’t do. My method for changing the language of thought, the “inner monologue” if you will, was to carry around a Japanese dictionary (electronic) with me. Whenever I was walking, if I had a non-Japanese thought, I would look up the words in a dictionary, and then re-think the thought in Japanese instead. I now have an inner monologue mostly in Japanese, except when I’m speaking or writing English. Don’t feel silly — it’s worth it. Surrounding yourself with Japanese should eventually Japanize your thoughts anyway, but this forces it to happen sooner.

Anyway, as always, go out and have fun doing Japanese! Take control of what goes into your brain, and your brain will reward you handsomely.

Studying With Japanese Drama: The Step-By-Step Guide

2011-06-10T20:56:00.000-07:00

Studying With Japanese Drama: The Step-By-Step Guide

by koichi on JUNE 10, 2011 in HOW TO STUDY, LANGUAGE, TV/MEDIA

Japanese Dorama (drama)? Check. Studying Japanese? Also check. One of the most addicting things in the world is Japanese drama. If I needed to quit cocaine or something like that, this is what I’d use to kick it. Oh, and Japanese drama is a pretty excellent way to study Japanese. Watching it is one thing… but actually actively studying it is another. I will tell you exactly how to do that and get a ton of benefit compared to the time spent.

Kind Of Not For Beginners

Beginners of Japanese, I’m sorry, this method isn’t amazing for you. It’s better than the “Learning Japanese With Subtitles” article I did a few weeks ago, but it’s still not amazing. That being said, if you watch a lot of jdorama anyways, it wouldn’t hurt for beginners to try this out. I’m just saying there’s probably some things you could spend your time on that would be better for you at your current level … I’m not saying this method won’t be beneficial to all levels (just much more beneficial to intermediate / advanced students of Japanese). There are a few reasons for this:

Intermediate+ students will have an easier time with the kanji (an important part of this process)
Intermediate+ students will have the grammar foundation that will allow them to look up things they don’t know (and then make sense of them).
Intermediate+ students should be able to recognize and avoid gendered language / things they shouldn’t actually need to learn (as well as avoid learning how to talk like a girl / boy or something).
Intermediate+ students will know when someone is speaking unrealistically in the drama so they won’t end up speaking like that when they try what they’ve learned out in the real world.

Anyways, are you ready? I’m going to start at the beginning and work my way through how you might use a single episode of some Japanese drama to learn a lot of Japanese… and a whole ton of it, too. I’m kind of baffled by how well this works. Thank you internets for making it possible.

Step 1: Choose The Right Drama

I can’t really go into a whole lot of detail on how to acquire the drama… but I can tell youwhat drama to watch. It’s actually kind of important for this, because not all drama will allow you to follow the steps I’m laying out here. Why is that? Because we’re starting with a (Japanese) transcript of the drama first, and not all dramas have this readily available to the world.

There’s a pretty incredible website called どらま・のーと (Drama Note) where someone (or some people?) are transcribing Japanese drama episodes. The site’s all in Japanese (I’ll help make some sense of it in a moment) and it’s even doing current drama series (like right now Jin 2 and BOSS 2 are the ones getting the most attention, it seems).

There’s also a list of previous drama that have been transcribed over here, but the most current stuff is on the main DramaNote website.

Things aren’t particularly well organized, I’d say, so I’m going to keep it pretty simple. I’d use the search feature to try and find what you’re looking for, or take a look at the どらま・のーと(旧) page and see if what you want is on the list. Not every drama is up there, of course, but there’s enough to keep any Japanese student busy for a really really long time. Here’s a list of some of the more popular dramas, at least in my mind (though this guide will mostly focus on BOSS, to keep things simple).

BOSS: http://www.dramanote.com/category/7359462-1.html

Jin: http://www.dramanote.com/category/7359471-1.html

Buzzer Beat: http://www.dramanote.com/category/7359468-1.html

Rookies: http://www.dramanote.com/category/7359431-1.html

Hana Yori Dango: http://www.dramanote.com/category/7359277-1.html

Hana Yori Dango 2: http://www.dramanote.com/category/7359431-1.html

Densha Otoko: http://www.dramanote.com/category/7359260-1.html

Gokusen: http://www.dramanote.com/category/7359231-1.html

Pretty nice list, I’d say. One thing that might be confusing is how it lists out episodes. I spent a long time trying to figure out why Boss Episode 1 wasn’t doing what was written in the transcript. Then I realized I was on the wrong season. For example, if you go to the BOSS posts page, you’ll need to go back to the first page to get to Season 1 episode 1 – the ones on the most recent page are from Season 2.

The rest of this guide is going to pretend like you’re watching BOSS, though you can follow along pretty much the same way with any of the other dramas listed above too.

So, if you want to follow along on the live site, you’ll want to go to the BOSS Season 1 Episode 1 page on どらま・のーと.

BOSS Season 1 Episode 1

If you take a look at the Season 1 Episode 1 Page, you’ll see the transcript for that episodes. There’s little notes in there from time to time, but as long as you’re not a total beginner in Japanese you can find where the talking starts. Before getting started, though, I’d recommend downloading Evernote (it’s where I keep all my drama notes, so I can access them anywhere). You can see my Evernote has a 日本語 section where I put these (and other study stuff).

Right now all you can see is Jin and BOSS, because I copied over a ton of the どらま・のーと pages so I’d have access to them for later. Above is my notes for BOSS Season 1 Episode 1 (which is what we’re talking about here). For this guide, all you need to do is copy over the first episode’s content, though.

どらま・のーと doesn’t have the English translation (the image above has my own notes in it), and it doesn’t have times or anything else. All that is up to you (and I think it’s good practice).

Now, once you have the notes copied over, the next step involves some of the actually studying stuff, though how you do it differs depending on if you have English subtitles or not in the version of BOSS you ~~downloaded~~, er, purchased.

Subtitles Vs. No Subtitles

I’m not going to say one is better than the other, necessarily. I think they both have their benefits and drawbacks. Let me list them out for you:

Subtitles

Allows you to get through a lot more content more quickly (so you can study more content, but not as intensely)
Doesn’t give you the opportunity to translate and figure stuff out on your own (which can be a great way to learn)
Most subtitles, especially fansubs have a good number of mistakes in them, so you should be aware of that possibility.

No Subtitles

Probably won’t be able to study as much in one sitting (though this depends on your level).
Will have things you just won’t understand the meaning of (and will have to get someone to help you, which slows you down a bit).
Overall probably a higher level, so +1 for advanced students and maybe +0 or -1 for intermediate students. Like I said, though, totally depends on you.

I don’t really care which one you choose, I think both can be good. The key, as always, is consistent study over a long period of time, so no matter which one you end up working with, as long as you do it every day you’ll make lots of progress, and that progress will grow exponentially over time.

Step 2: Notes + Dorama

The next step requires you to set your computer up so you can see both the notes and the video (in this guide’s case, BOSS Season 1 Episode 1). Here’s a look at an example setup. Pretty standard. Click on it to make it bigger.

On one side I have my notes (in Evernote) and the other side I have the drama playing. This version of the video happens to have subtitles, so we’ll go through that way. If your video doesn’t have subtitles (or you want to cover them, which is totally good too) you can follow pretty much the same steps, except you’ll have to look up grammar you don’t understand.

As the episode plays, you just follow along, writing the translations in. I’d recommend doing around 10 pieces of dialog at a time. Once you have the translations for all the sentences written down, move on to the next step (don’t worry, the speaking part comes after!).

Step 3: Vocab

Most likely, there’s going to be some vocab that you don’t understand or know yet (if there wasn’t any, then maybe you don’t need to study so much!). My favorite way to study vocabulary is Anki, though you can use whatever you’d like. After you’ve gotten your 10 dialog translations written down, go through and pick out the words you don’t know / don’t know really well, then put them into your flashcard program of choice. Just the act of putting your own words in is good study on its own, and of course you’ll use the flashcard program to study them over time, as well.

After you’ve put the words you don’t know into your flash card program, go through them once to help learn them a bit before moving on to the next step (which will also help you to learn them).

Step 4: Practicing Then Shadowing

The next step is actually two steps. First, you’ll want to go through your Japanese notes and make sure you can read everything. Maybe you won’t be able to (as in, going through your flashcard deck once wasn’t enough… that’s normal), so you’ll have to make sure that you can. Go through line by line and learn how to read everything – once you can read your 10 lines at a decent speed, then you can move on to shadowing, which involves using the video too.

For watching the dramas in this part, I’d recommend VLC. It plays pretty much anything, and it also has a neat little feature that helps a lot with this part. I’m sure it’s something similar on the PC / Linux, but if you hit ALT + COMMAND + ←, it’ll jump back in the video by 10 seconds. That’s perfect for studying a short bit of the video over and over again (until you can do it naturally right along with the video).

Anyways, for this step, you’ll play the video, and just try to speak along with the speaking characters. You’ll try to mimic their accent, and you’ll try to keep up with them in speed (this is why you do a little pre-study beforehand, so it’s easier to get up to their speed more quickly). Approximately ten seconds at a time, you’ll shadow the same bit over and over again, until you feel like you’re really really similar (or exactly the same) as what’s going on in your drama.

Now, this is where a little bit of knowledge comes in handy… people don’t always talk like normal people, so knowing a little bit of Japanese beforehand will help you to avoid studying terrible speech in such detail. Drama’s going to be a little better about this than anime, but that doesn’t mean you won’t run into a weirdo or two on whatever you’re watching. You’ve been warned!

After you’ve gotten the first ten seconds down pat, move on to the next ten seconds, and so on, until you’ve finished your first ten (or so) lines of dialog. Then, it’s repeat and review time!

Step 5: Repeat & Review

There has to be a bit of a mix between repeating and reviewing to make this study method really powerful. If you only study and never review, you won’t learn new words and you just won’t get as much out of it. Sure, review takes up some of your time you could be studying new things, but overall I think it’s definitely way worth it.

Here’s kind of what I’d recommend:

Make sure you study your vocab deck every day (Anki will tell you what you need to study and what you don’t need to study, so this is easy).
Go through everything you’ve done in the past once via your Evernote notes (read everything there, you don’t necessarily have to do it with the video every time, because that will get really long after a while.
Since you’re studying in blocks (as in 10 dialog points) you can mark sections off as “memorized” after a while. Once you’ve come to the point where you’ve memorized a block of dialog, you can probably skip that one and not review it anymore (or as much).
Color code things giving you trouble so you know to either look them up or study them more (i.e. use them in your Lang-8 journal entries for practice, or something). Review and work on these things more than things not giving you trouble (the point is to learn new things, after all).
Always try to mix in some new stuff too (as in, add 10 lines of dialog every day… or 20 lines, or 30 lines, or whatever you think you can handle while still doing your reviews).
Spend some time with each line of dialog and try to replace certain parts of it to make your own (different) sentences. This will help you to not get stuck on only what is said in the dramas you’re watching.

The main thing, though, is to study consistently. I’m always harping on this, but it’s the most important thing of all. Do this everyday (or do something else every day) and you’ll get good, no problem. It’s the consistency that counts, not the 12 hour cram-fests one day a week.

I hope you enjoyed this guide, and I hope it helps a lot of you too! I think it’s a pretty good strategy, and a pretty good way to practice and learn a lot, while still enjoying yourself! So… what drama will you start with?

ASCULTA cît mai multa japoneza pentru a trece pragul durerii

2011-04-11T12:42:00.002-07:00

One part of AJATT is to listen to as much Japanese as possible be it music, TV, or anime. Basically, always listen to something even if it is white noise. I had a talk with someone over instant messenger about this. They were having the same problems I had when I started trying the whole 24 hours of Japanese audio. It hurt after a while. When I was starting I literally got headaches after listening to a couple of hours of Japanese because it wasn’t white noise yet. I was actively trying to listen and do other things.

One thing we can do with our native language is listen for hours without actually hearing what is being said. That is the goal with turning Japanese to white noise. However, it does come with some difficulties because at first we aren’t used to hearing it so it really messes with our brains when it is pure words. Music is fairly easy for our brain to process as white noise since it is rhythmic. Conversation and narration on the other hand is hard and coarse so we need to ease into it.

I can now listen to Japanese conversation with little to no problems keeping it as white noise with no ill effects. Here is some of what I did to do that.

Watch anime while doing other stuff – This sucked to some degree because I kept wanting to watch the anime, but it had an interesting side effect. I would tune in and out of the show allowing my brain to force the Japanese to white noise. Gradually over time this helped train my brain that it is okay to have Japanese as white noise.

Learning Japanese Podcasts – Podcasts like JapanesePod101 really helped too because they will speak both English and Japanese during the show so it is another way to help your brain make the transition to allowing Japanese be white noise. Key is you have to listen to the show as white noise.

Brute Force – At the end of the day the goal is hearing Japanese and putting it as white noise so another thing I did was short sessions of audio. I would launch a conversation rich J-Drama and minimize it while programming, and when the episode was over turn on some music. That way it gives bursts of conversation and speech, but not so much it would give me headaches.

LOTS of Active Listening – This kind of goes against the grain, but when trying to build a tolerance to something; you need A LOT of whatever it is. In this case we need to hear a LOT of Japanese. So the best way is to do so is to watch a lot of anime and j-drama to get used to hearing it more and more and more, and in context. Then use the above methods to let your brain know that is ok for it to be white noise while you aren’t paying attention.

These are things that worked for me. Hopefully if you are having trouble like I did this will help you or maybe parts of it will help you. If you have had a similar problem how were able to get past it?

ASCULTA c

2011-04-11T12:42:00.001-07:00

Învaţam japoneza folosind subtitrarea filmelor

2011-04-11T12:38:00.000-07:00

First, lets get something out of they way. A lot of people say to better learn Japanese you MUST turn off subtitles when watching anime or J-Drama’s. I partially agree with this, but only to a point. I say this because while listening to conversations far above your head help you to get tones and eventually remember words; it sucks because you have no idea what is going on. It gets frustrating. At Tokyo in Tulsa I watched the first disc of Ai Yori Aoshi in raw Japanese no subtitles since I was doing late night in the Anime rooms and no one was there. Its depressing to only know bits an pieces of the conversation, and basic conversations at that. In short watching anime and J-Drama without subtitles can help, but it sucks. I do recommend it, but not all the time. I mean we Otaku, Americanized reference, want to enjoy what Japan has to offer and understand it.

That all being said here are 5 simple ways, from experience, subtitles help you learn.

Correcting the Subtitles – Often times we get speed subs of stuff to watch so the translations aren’t all that great, even some non-speed subs are bad. This leads to an excellent opportunity to listen to what is being said while watching and reading the subtitles, and correct them. Basically watch what is happening, listen to tones and words, and read the subtitles (easier than it sounds). At this point you can start to tell what is being meant by the tones, which helps in Japanese conversation, and by words, which helps in comprehension. Those are the two keys after that pick up the vocabulary and you will start to notice times when the subtitles could be a bit better or how they are off just a bit, or completely. Its okay if they are because YOU have now found out they are, and that means you are learning Japanese.
Word Recognition – When studying we learn a lot of words and can somewhat keep track of what words we do know. While I watch anime I will read the subtitles, and when I read a word in the subtitles that has been said and I do know the Japanese counterpart I’ll make sure I hear it. I suggest you do the same. If you don’t hear the word you read in the subtitles rewind and try to find it. If you can’t then it might be an opportunity for #1 above or you need to work on the word a bit, as long as it is not a word in a different dialect. Don’t beat yourself up if you can’t hear the word you will eventually.
Speed Recognition – If there is one thing to be learned it is that Japanese is a FAST language. it can be read and spoken fast. This leaves us at a disadvantage because English isn’t really a fast language it takes a while to read in comparison and with some of the most complex sentence structures available it doesn’t leave room to consistent speed talking. So how do subtitles help with this? well it helps us tune our ears to start reading the subtitles faster, but also trying to pick up the phrases too. Sometimes I have caught myself reading half the subs and picking up the other half by listening to dialog.
Sentence Structure – This one is a tad bit harder to really follow unless you geek out a bit on grammar, both English and Japanese. When the subtitles are good subtitles and it is a leisurely show you can concentrate on what is being said and make out the differences between English and Japanese. This may not be important or even notable to most people, but it can help when learning general sentence structure in spoken language which can differ quite far sometimes from written. Again this can only really be done when it is a leisurely anime and you are paying attention, but it has helped while in speaking situations at my Japanese language club.
Enjoyment – This might seem to be a cop-out point, but I really believe that if you don’t enjoy doing any of this then you aren’t going to get any benefit from it. I tend to do the above naturally, but I also do it as a fun exercise. After all learning Japanese should be fun and not a chore so finding fun ways of doing it is important. Too many people in my Japanese class aren’t actually enjoying the experience and having fun with it so they don’t get very far. Every time they mess with Japanese is it a chore so things like this ruin their experience of Anime or J-Dramas. So don’t do any of this if you aren’t going to enjoy it.
In the end learning Japanese is what you make of it. Nothing more nothing less. This is a way for you to maybe get more out of what you do, and also maybe gives you another way to look at study habits when dealing with media.

Have you found ways to effectively use subtitles to help you learn?

Steps to Start Learning Japanese

2011-04-11T12:25:00.000-07:00

Define Your Goals
Learn About Learning AJATT is a Good Place to Start
Start Listening to Japanese
Learn Katakana and Hiragana
Try to Forget Romaji
Start Learning Kanji
Seek Out Friends Learning Japanese
Get a Good Book
Vocab Is A Key
Be Aware
Note: During this whole process you should be trying to read and learn vocab

Define your Goals
One of the most important things for people to realize is why they are doing something. So the first step is to figure out why you are learning Japanese so you can stay motivated to continue. Write down your goal on a post-it, and post it somewhere you will see it everyday. Every time you get another reason add it to another post-it note next to the last one. That should help to keep you focused.

Learn About Learning – AJATT is a good place to start
Everyone always talks about learning something new, but often people don’t realize knowing “how to learn” is almost as important as learning. So I recommend visiting the AJATT (All Japanese All The Time) site and reading his site to learn more about learning. You can maybe also pick up a few pointers on where to start learning Japanese

Start Listening to Japanese
If you aren’t watching Anime, Japanese Dramas or listening to Japanese Music it is recommended to start, now. Start surrounding yourself with Japanese video, audio, and as much culture as you can. The more you hear Japanese the more learning new Japanese will be easier for you. For example during a local Language club meeting people will use phrases I hear all the time or say things with specific tones and I’ll recognize them because I hear them a lot in Anime or J-Dramas, so it makes figuring out the language easier. I recommend first just start listing to Japanese Music by finding some Japanese radio stations.

Learn Katakana and Hiragana
One of the most important steps to learning Japanese is learning the writing systems. There are 3 to learn (hiragana, katakana, and kanji) the first 2 are the easiest, and can get you started quite well. It is very important to learn Hiragana and Katakana over romaji since it is native to Japan and you wont go to Japan or to Japanese sites and see romaji. I also made a post about how to Learn Katakana and Hiragana in 2 weeks, please feel free to check it out and give it a shot.

Try to FORGET Romaji
Romaji is the devil, Waterboy reference there. One of the biggest problems is too many people rely on romaji. It hinders not only their reading of Japanese, but also their speaking. I expand a lot more on this in a post on Why Your Language Book is Holding you Back. Suffice it to say remove romaji from your daily use as quick as possible.

Start Learning Kanji
I used to fight Kanji a lot, still do at times. I always felt like some drunk Chinese dude sat down one day and said “Hey, I am going to make a screwed up writing system just to mess with foreigners”, still do feel that way at times. Some of the kanji just makes you go “What?”. However, as I learn more and more Kanji I understand the importance of kanji, and that kanji makes japanese easy, believe it or not.

I recommend to at least start learning Kanji from the Hesig book “Remembering the Kanji“. It is an easy book to follow and gets you started down the path of learning some of the most important Kanji to learn. The book teaches 2047 in total.

Seek Out Friends Learning Japanese
This I think is one of the most important aspects of learning Japanese. If you can’t share it with anyone then what is the point in learning it. So either start looking for friends who are Japanese or others learning Japanese, or both. For in person local friends checkout Meetup.com. It is how I found our local city based Language group, maybe even start one if there isn’t one. Also here are some online ways to connect with others too.

Smart.fm
Twitter – Follow Me
Lang-8
EduFire
Get a Good Book
One of the things I disagree with the AJATT method on is how to learn grammar. While it is entirely possible to learn proper grammar from finding patterns, have done it a bit. I personally feel it takes a bit too long, plus I like to be a bit nerdy and learn grammar. So I recommend finding a good solid text book to follow. Remember the link above,Why Your Language Book is Holding you Back, when selecting your book. There are 2 textbooks I recommend you choose between Elementary Japanese and/or Genki. I plan to do a review on both of them in the future as to why I recommend them specifically.

Vocabulary Is A Key
I analogize this to golf. One thing you hear all the time in golf is “Work on the short game”. My problem for the longest is if I can’t get off the tee-box close enough to the green to use my short game, the short game doesn’t matter. You can learn grammar, writing system, culture, everything, but if you don’t have a vocabulary then it is all useless. The biggest hindrance for a lot of people is knowing enough words to understand what is going on around you. So learn vocab and keep at it.

Be Aware
Finally, be aware of your learning and your progress. How you study, habits, and your personal life change over time. As you learn newer and better ways to do things you will tweak things in your life. The key thing is to be aware of these changes and the changes around you and to adjust your learning accordingly. Also be sure to pay attention to your goals of why you are learning Japanese. Many times our goals and reasons for learning new things change. It isn’t bad to change, but it is important to realize the importance of ever changing goals. So just be aware, and go with the flow. most of all have fun.

Conclusion
A lot of the time when people want to learn something new they aren’t sure where to start. Hopefully these 10 steps provide you the starting point to at least get far enough to know where the next step is in learning Japanese is. Just remember this is a place to start and isn’t a definitive guide.

If you have any recommendations or questions please leave a comment. Especially if you disagree let me know why and where.

Hiragana Song

2011-04-10T12:50:00.000-07:00

Как самосу сделать чайник из исинской глины

2010-11-05T10:11:00.000-07:00

Изучение японского с промежуточного уровня: Пособие, Рабочая тетрадь, Аудиокурс к пособию

2010-11-03T10:44:00.001-07:00

Tema-betsu Chyuukyu Kara Manabu Nihongo + Wākubukku (Изучение японского с промежуточного уровня: Пособие, Рабочая тетрадь, Аудиокурс к пособию)
Год выпуска: 2007
Автор: Мацуда Хироши и др.
Жанр: Комплект из 1) учебника (пособия) и 2) рабочей тетради и аудиокурса к пособию.
Издательство: Kenkyusha
ISBN: 978-4-327-38445-6
Формат: JPG, PDF, RTF
Качество: Отсканированные страницы
Количество страниц: 193+80 (приложение)
Формат аудио: mp3
Качество: 128 кбит/сек, 32 кГц, Стерео
Размер: 377 MB

Quote:
Описание: Комплект предназначен для перехода с промежуточного уровня (中級, примерно 2-кю Норёкушикена), на продвинутый уровень (上級, примерно 1-кю). Он широко применяется в японских университетах, профессиональных школах и др. К 2007 году пережил 19 редакций (с 1991 года).
Предназначен, для занятий с учителем, т.к. ответы на вопросы практикума и ключи к упражнениям есть только для рабочей тетради (частично). Однако, постепенное нарастание сложности текстов позволяет работать с комплектом и самостоятельно (из личного опыта).
Пособие (textbook) и рабочая тетрадь (workbook) могут быть использованы вместе или раздельно.
Язык - только японский, перевода нигде нет. Фуригана подписана для некоторых kanji.
Также к учебнику прилагается аудиоприложение テーマ別中級から学ぶ日本語
Доп. информация:
Изучение каждой темы состоит из 4-х секций:
1. Основной текст.
2. Практика.
3. Скоростное чтение
4. Понимание услышанного.

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Японская гравюра 17-19 веков Japanese Engraving of the 17-19 Centuries

2010-11-01T23:12:00.000-07:00

Название: Тетрадь 11. Японская гравюра 17-19 веков
Автор: Воронова Б.Г.
Издательство: Изобразительное искусство
Год: 1987
Страниц: 64
Формат: djvu
Размер: 17,8 МБ
Качество: хорошее, 600 dpi, OCR
Серия или Выпуск: Очерки по истории и технике гравюры

Одиннадцатая тетрадь сборника "Очерки по истории и технике гравюры" посвящена истории японской гравюры 17 - 19 веков. В книге рассматриваются основные этапы развития техники гравюры, стилистические особенности различных школ, а также анализируется творчество конкретных мастеров, включая Харунобу, Утамаро, Хокусай, Хиросигэ и др.

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Восточный дневник дизайнера

2010-10-31T11:17:00.000-07:00

Название: Восточный дневник дизайнера.
Автор: Урицкая М.А., Исаев И.А., Яковлева С.А.
Издательство: М.: Ниола 21-й век
Год: 2006
Страниц: 221
Формат: DjVu
Размер: 21.7MB
Качество: хорошее
Язык: русский

Описание:
Речь идет о стилях мебели и стилях жизни, а также о неизбежной эклектике, которая не мешает жить красиво, если дизайнеры по интерьеру талантливо воплощают наши эксклюзивные фантазии. "Восточный дневник дизайнера" - своеобразное путешествие по интерьерам и дальним странам. Это книга о колоритных предметах мебели и самобытных аксессуарах. В книге 240 страниц - около 700 иллюстраций и любопытнейший текст.
Все десять разделов книги отмечены тропическим колоритом и этническими мотивами многоликого Востока. Читатель увидит немало талантливых работ, по-новому трактующих этнику, тенденции минимализма, формы ар деко и, конечно, колониальный стиль в интерьере - великолепный результат синтеза восточной и европейской культур. Сегодня различные вариации этого стиля вновь на волне популярности. "Дневник" написан для тех, кого влекут краски, ароматы и философская символика Востока, кто склонен сочетать экзотику с европейским комфортом. Индия, Китай, Япония, Таиланд, Филиппины, Индонезия, Мьянма... Каждая страна узнаваема в любом предмете, изготовленном руками ее удивительных мастеров, а также в оформлении жилых помещений, отелей, офисов, фешенебельных террас, открытых тропическим бризам. Экологически чистая мебель, изготовленная терпеливыми восточными руками, украшает жизнь и вкусно пахнет природой. Своей экзотичностью она обязана тропическим деревьям, кустам, водорослям, каучуковой смоле, ракушкам, гнездам термитов и другим дарам моря и джунглей. Современные интерьеры в восточном духе могут совмещать предметы, нацеливающие на деловую и творческую активность, с вещами, позволяющими расслабиться и насладиться достигнутым. Великие мастера и начинающие дизайнеры всего мира устремляют взоры на Восток, черпая там энергию и вдохновение в поисках стиля, который как никакой другой создает ощущение открытости и свободы. "Восточный дневник дизайнера" повествует именно об этом. Наш "Дневник" адресован дизайнерам, художникам, работникам салонов и галерей, специалистам по мебели и просто людям - всем, кто заинтересованно формирует пространство жизни!

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Суши - это просто! Секреты традиционной японской кухни

2010-10-26T10:04:00.001-07:00

Название: Суши - это просто! Секреты традиционной японской кухни
Автор: Нобуко Цуда
Издательство: ФАИР
Год: 2008
Страниц: 164 с илл.
Формат: DJVU > RAR
Размер: 6,02 MB
ISBN: 978-5-8183-1283-5
Качество: Хорошее
Язык: Русский

Японскую кухню называют съедобным искусством, а начинается японская кухня с суши. Блюда суши популярны во всем мире и заслужили название еды XXI века, так как менее калорийны, более полезны и не способствуют приобретению лишнего веса, потому что готовятся без жиров. В этой небольшой книге есть все, что надо знать о суши: от восторгов по поводу вкуса до истории создания, от набора продуктов и кухонной утвари до рецептов и способов их приготовления, от разделки и пластования разного вида рыбы до подачи блюд и рецептов супов. Картину трапезы из блюд суши дополняют рисунки и цветные фотографии. Благодаря секретам традиционной японской кухни вы удивите свою семью и гостей блюдами, которые украсят стол на любом званом ужине или дружеской вечеринке.

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Shinto - religie si traditie

2010-10-24T12:44:00.000-07:00

Nu ma erijez in a fi atotcunoscatoare.Adevarul e ca ,destinul m-a dus intr-un oras cu multe temple si,vrand nevrand am cerut relatii.Privind religia,ritualurile(cele la vedere),modul cum se raporteaza un japonez obisnuit la Dzeu.
Fiecare familie are un loc special care e un fel de “templu”in mijlocul caruia troneaza o statueta a lui Buddha unde se fac rugaciuni,se ard betisoare parfumate…
Ceea ce m-a uimit ,la japonezi ,a fost numarul mare de “talismane”.Le gasesti la temple dar si la tarabe.

Fiecare din ele are un rol anume.Unele te protejeaza,alte atrag banii,dragostea,intelegerea intre parteneri.
-sunt locuri ,pe langa temple,unde este captata apa din izvoare naturale. .Aici se practica “misogi” ceea ce reprezinta curatarea corpurilor intr-un rau de langa templu(practicat de calugari).
Restul credinciosilor doar isi clatesc gura sau isi spala mainile,fata ,cu sens de purificare.
-exista locuri speciale unde se aprind betisoare parfumate iar fumul care se degaja este folosit la curatarea “corpurilor”,la purificarea lor…
Il aduci cu palmele asupra corpului cerand divinitatii sa te purifice ,sa alunge boala…
Intr-un loc de langa un templu special ridicat pt o divinitate care aduce prosperitatea,am “spalat” banii ca sa atraga alti bani.
Shinto accentueaza practicile drepte, sensibilitatea si atitudinea. In Shinto exista patru afirmatii de baza:
1-traditia si familia
2-dragostea pt.natura,natura este sacra.
3-curatenia psihica
4-”matsuri”-venerarea si onorurile aduse zeitatilor kami si spiritelor ancestrale.
Toate zeitatile religiei Shinto sunt vazute drept ingaduitoare, care sustin si protejeaza oamenii.
Shinto reprezentand o religie toleranta care accepta existenta si altor religii. Asa ca multi dintre japonezi practica 2 religii:shintoismul si budhismul.
Sunt locuri unde se agata placute speciale pe care s-au scris dorinte catre divinitate.

La temple,exista un loc special amenajat unde,contra a 100 yeni,”extragi” un betisor dintr-un recipient pe care este scrisa o “ideograma”.Aceasta ideograma are corespondent un numar.La fel ca in Yi King(Cartea transformarilor).E un fel de oracol.
Mie mi-a cazut:
Nr.8-BEST FORTUNE:
“Don’t get along with the classes as the upper classes.Both in culture and fighting go well”.
As zice ca,japonezii au o “religie” aparte.Pt ca si aici,ca si in medicina traditionala, au suferit influente.In japonia convietuiesc 3 mari categorii de religii:
-shintoismul(religia nescrisa a japoniei )
-budismul(religie de origine indiana)
-crestinismul(adus de misionari in anul 1549).

A aborda o alta cultura este ca si cum ai asista la o piesa de teatru Kabuki, unde ego-ul fiecarui actor este ascuns de o masca. Cealalta cultura este masca, iar realitatea din spatele mastii este altceva, de origine japoneza.”
Conform vechii religii nipone-shintoismul-japonezii venereaza natura ,avand o multime de locuri sacre:munti,paduri,ape…Fiecare templu este dedicat unei anumite “kami” care raspunde
la rugaciunile sincere.Sun temple ridicate in cinstea animalelor considerate “mesagerii” templelor.
P.S.-undeva ,la munte ,am vazut statuia alba a “madonei crestine “pe care am si pozat-o..
Imi place shintoismul!
va urma-hana:)))

Основы китайской живописи. Энциклопедия

2010-10-19T07:56:00.001-07:00

Название: Основы китайской живописи. Энциклопедия
Автор: Джейн Дуайт
Издательство: АРТ-РОДНИК
Год: 2008
Формат: PDF
Размер: 98.6 мб

Джейн Дуайт
Основы китайской живописи. Энциклопедия

В китайской живописи кистью используется минимальное количество линий для передачи сюжета, ритма и грации. Эта книга предложит вам более 200 законченных мотивов для воссоздания, от цветов и фруктов до живой природы и ландшафтов.

Каждый мотив включает в себя объяснение его символических значений, палитры цветов и пошлаговую инструкцию, обучающую тому, как правильно рисовать.
Вводная часть книги рассматривает необходимые инструменты, материалы и техники. Вы научитесь правильно выбирать кисти, бумагу, а также готовить тушь, добиваясь ее правильной консистенции.
Издание включает советы по композиции, позволяющие грамотно комбинировать изображения на листе для создания идеально сбалансированных гармоничных произведений.

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Японские замки 1540-1640

2010-10-18T22:51:00.000-07:00

Название: Японские замки 1540-1640.
Автор: Тернбулл С.
Издательство: М.: Астрель, АСТ
Год: 2005
Страниц: 72
Формат: PDF
Размер: 65.7MB
ISBN: 5-271-11419-8,5-17-029172-8, 1-84176-429-9(англ.)
Качество: отличное
Серия или Выпуск: ЦИТАДЕЛЬ
Язык: русский (пер.с англ.А.Шевченко)

Описание:
В книге подробно рассказывается о роли классического японского замка в военной и гражданской жизни Японии, при этом особое значение придается военной функции замка.
Текст сопровождается множеством фотографий и реконструкций.

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Japoneza 日本語, nihongo

2010-10-16T09:25:00.000-07:00

Japoneza (日本語, nihongo ► pronunţie ► ) este principala limbă vorbită și scrisă în Japonia. Japoneza prezintă asemănări sintactice cu limbile altaice, și posibile influențe de vocabular și morfologie din limbile malaio-polineziene. Pe durata ultimelor aproximativ 15 secole, în urma contactului cultural cu China, un număr important de cuvinte au pătruns în limba japoneză, împreună cu scrierea ideografică. În afară de caracterele chinezești (numite în japoneză "kanji"), japoneza folosește în prezent și "hiragana", "katakana" (două alfabete fonetice silabice paralele, de cîte aproximativ 50 de simboluri fiecare), și ocazional "rōmaji" (caractere latine).

Este considerată o limbă aglutinantă (care formează cuvinte și expresii prin alăturarea de morfeme) și se distinge printr-un sistem complex de forme de exprimare onorifică, reflectînd structura ierarhică, "verticală," a societății japoneze.

Sunetele din limba japoneză sînt relativ puține la număr. Accentul se manifesta prin intonație (înălțimea sunetului), care poate servi uneori la diferențierea unor cuvinte altfel identice.

Deși nu este deloc înrudită cu limba chineză, japoneza a împrumutat masiv din aceasta pe parcursul a mai mult de 1500 de ani de legături culturale. În scrierea japoneză au fost folosite inițial exclusiv ideogramele chinezești, numite în limba japoneză "kanji", dar datorită diferențelor majore la nivel gramatical între cele două limbi această metodă de scriere era greoaie și a trebuit îmbunătățită prin introducerea unor caractere fonetice care să marcheze de exemplu flexionările specifice limbii japoneze. Astfel au început să fie folosite, pe lîngă kanji, și două silabare ("alfabete" în care unui caracter îi corespunde o silabă) rezultate din simplificarea unor ideograme chinezești. Acestea sînt: hiragana, folosit pentru scrierea terminațiilor gramaticale, prepozițiilor și conjuncțiilor, precum și altor cuvinte care altfel ar trebui scrise cu ideograme prea complicate, și katakana folosit în scrierea numelor străine (provenite din limbi care nu au kanji), cuvintelor de origine străină, sau stilistic pentru accentuarea unor cuvinte (similar cu folosirea caracterelor cursive sau aldine în limba română).

Япония. Незавершенное соперничество

2010-10-14T11:49:00.000-07:00

Название: Япония. Незавершенное соперничество
Автор: Александр Широкорад
Издательство: Москва: Вече
Год: 2008
Страниц: 464
Формат: djvu (rar)
Размер: 18,4 MB
ISBN: 978-5-9533-3472-3
Качество: хорошее
Серия или Выпуск: Друзья и враги России
Язык: русский
У границ земли дальневосточной...

От издателя
Япония и Россия - соседи. Однако с начала XIX века их взаимоотношения выстраивались довольно сложно. Россия никогда не претендовала на японские острова. В свою очередь, даже националистически настроенные японские генералы главные цели своих походов видели в Китае и южных морях. Почему же на протяжении XX века русские и японцы пять раз сходились на поле брани? Готовилась ли Япония во время Второй мировой войны к нападению на СССР? Почему сейчас, в XXI веке, Япония является единственной в мире страной, выдвигающей к России территориальные претензии на государственном уровне?
Ответы на эти и многие другие вопросы читатель найдет в новой книге историка А. Б. Широкорада.

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Японский сад за несколько дней

2010-10-09T12:06:00.000-07:00

Название: Японский сад за несколько дней
Автор: Роберт Кетчел
Издательство: Кладезь-Букс
Год: 2002
Страниц: 160
Формат: pdf
Размер: 68 Мб
ISBN: 5-93395-029-7, 0-600-60304-0
Качество: среднее
Язык: русский

Эта книга - практическое руководство по созданию более 20 японских элементов и приспособлений от соцу до чайного сада на имеющемся у вас участке - привнесет в вашу жизнь спокойствие и безмятежность восточных садов.
Простые проекты, рассчитанные на одну неделю, или более сложные, на создание которых потребуется до двух-трех недель.
Указания, что и как надо сделать, разбиты в книге на этапы и сопровождены иллюстрациями.
Даны советы по ряду практических вопросов - от прокладки дорожек из камней до сооружения бамбуковых арок.
Информация по подходящим растениям и уходу за ними.

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China critică acordarea Premiului Nobel pentru Pace disidentului Liu Xiaobo

2010-10-08T21:43:00.001-07:00

Acordarea Premiului Nobel pentru Pace disidentului Liu Xiaobo este "contrară principiilor" acestei distincţii şi va afecta relaţiile dintre China şi Norvegia, avertizează Ministerul chinez de Externe, citat de AFP, anunta Mediafax.

"Liu Xiaobo este un infractor condamnat de sistemul judiciar chinez pentru încălcarea legilor chineze. A acorda Premiul Nobel unei asemenea persoane este contrară principiilor acestei distincţii şi reprezintă o alterare a acestui ideal", precizează diplomaţia chineză.

Decizia Comitetului Nobel "va afecta relaţiile dintre China şi Norvegia", avertizează Ministerul chinez de Externe.

Premierul Norvegiei, Jens Stoltenberg, i-a transmis felicitări disidentului chinez Liu Xiaobo, în pofida presiunilor Beijingului. Înainte de atribuirea premiului, regimul de la Beijing avertizase că o decizie în favoarea disidentului Liu Xiaobo ar putea fi interpretată ca "un gest neamical", riscând să afecteze relaţiile dintre China şi Norvegia.

Cei cinci membri ai Comitetului Nobel pentru Pace sunt numiţi de Parlamentul norvegian, dar au statut de independenţi.

Liu Xiaobo, în vârstă de 54 de ani, ispăşeşte în prezent o pedeapsă de 11 ani de detenţie pentru "subminarea puterii de stat".

Cît cheltuie o familie în China pentru produse alimentare

2010-10-06T11:57:00.000-07:00

Conform cărţii lui Peter Menzel "Hungry Planet" o familie medie din Beijing cheltuie 1233.76 iuani, adica 155 dolari SUA ++PE SĂPTĂMÎNĂ!

SURSA: magazeta.com

Mao Zedong

2010-10-06T11:20:00.001-07:00

Mao Zedong (sau Mao Țe-Tung 毛泽东 sau Mao Tzedong; n. 26 decembrie 1893,d. 9 septembrie 1976,a fost un revoluțonar chinez, teorist politic și lider al Partidului Comunist Chinez.

În urma războiului civil, în 1949 Partidul Comunist Chinez sub conducerea lui Mao Zedong a preluat puterea în China, proclamând Republica Populară Chineză.

Mao Zedong a instaurat o dictatură sângeroasă, zeci de milioane de chinezi fiind uciși în timpul în care acesta a condus China.

Fiu de țărani, Mao Zedong a fost de profesie învățător. A condus forțele comuniste în lupta dusă împotriva forțelor naționaliste (1927-1949), străbătând întreaga Chină pentru a-și recruta armata (este ceea ce ideologia oficială a numit Marșul cel Lung). Din 1935, a fost lider al Partidului Comunist Chinez și in aceasta calitate, dupa 1949 - șeful de facto al statului. Politica economică a „Marelui salt înainte” inițiată de el a eșuat, ca și Revoluția Culturală. În consolidarea regimului comunist în China, s-a bizuit pe țărănime și pe cultul personalității.

Contribuțiile sale aduse teoriei marxist-leniniste, strategiile sale militare și politicile sale comuniste sunt cunoscute colectiv sub numele de maoism.

Mao rămâne o figură controversată până în ziua de azi, având o avere în continuă evoluție. Este privit în China ca un mare revoluționar, un strateg politic, un mare conducător de armată și salvator al națiunii. Chinezii îl mai văd pe Mao ca pe un om care, prin politica sa, a ajutat economia Chinei și a ajutat la formarea Chinei moderne. În plus, Mao este privit și ca un poet, filozof și vizionar, din cauza cultului personalității folosit în timpul conducerii sale.[1]

Totuși, acțiunile politice ale lui Mao, din 1949 și până în 1976, sunt vinovate pentru moartea a între 50 și 70 de milioane de chinezi. De când Deng Xiaoping a preluat puterea în 1978, multe politici maoiste au fost abandonate pentru reforme economice.

Ce este Pǔtōnghuà 普通话?

2010-09-22T12:46:00.000-07:00

Norma putonhua 普通话 este norma de pronunţare şi transcriere a caracterelor chineze conform dialectuli pronunţat din regiunea Beijingului.

Gramatica putonhua corespund normelor stabilite în lucrările literare scrise în limba modernă; care sîn cele mai aproape de dialectele de nord ale limbii chineze.

În literatura de specialiatate putonhua tine de dialectul "mandarin" al limbilor clasice: deşi mandarin este un nume colectiv pentru tot grupul limbilor din regiuinile de nord a Chinei.

}n Taiwan limba oficiala este numita goiui 国语 adica "limba de stat" în Singapore şi Malasia huaiui 华语 adica "limba chinezilor".

Common Phrases

English	Chinese (Traditional)	Chinese (Simplified)	Pinyin
Hello!	你好！	你好！	Nǐ hǎo!
What is your name?	你叫什麼名字？	你叫什么名字？	Nǐ jiào shénme míngzi?
My name is...	我名字叫...	我名字叫...	Wǒ míngzi jiào ...
How are you?	你好嗎？/ 你怎麼樣？	你好吗？/ 你怎么样？	Nǐ hǎo ma? / Nǐ zěnmeyàng?
I am fine, how about you?	我很好，你呢？	我很好，你呢？	Wǒ hěn hǎo, nǐ ne?
I don't want it / I don't want to	我不要。	我不要。	Wǒ bú yào.
Thank you!	謝謝！	谢谢！	Xièxie
Welcome! / You're welcome! (Literally: No need to thank me!) / Don't mention it! (Literally: Don't be so polite!)	歡迎！/ 不用謝！/ 不客氣！	欢迎！/ 不用谢！/ 不客气！	Huānyíng! / Búyòng xiè! / Bú kèqì!
Yes. / Correct.	是。 / 對。	是。 / 对。	Shì. / Duì.
No. / Incorrect.	不。/ 不對。	不。/ 不对。	Bù. / Bú duì.
When?	甚麼時候？	什么时候？	Shénme shíhou?
How much money?	多少錢？	多少钱？	Duōshǎo qián?
Can you speak a little slower?	您能說得再慢些嗎？	您能说得再慢些吗？	Nín néng shuō de zài mànxiē ma?
Good morning! / Good morning!	早上好！ / 早安！	早上好！ / 早安！	Zǎoshang hǎo! / Zǎo'ān!
Goodbye!	再見！	再见！	Zàijiàn!
How do you get to the airport?	去機場怎麼走？	去机场怎么走？	Qù jīchǎng zěnme zǒu?
I want to fly to London on the eighteenth	我想18號坐飛機到倫敦	我想18号坐飞机到伦敦	Wǒ xiǎng shíbā hào zuò fēijī dào Lúndūn.
How much will it cost to get to Munich?	到慕尼黑需要多少錢？	到慕尼黑需要多少钱？	Dào Mùníhēi xūyào duōshǎo qián?
I don't speak Chinese very well.	我的中文講得不太好.	我的中文讲得不太好.	Wǒ de Zhōngwén jiǎng de bú tài hǎo.

Китай поможет Молдавии преодолеть "винную" зависимость от России

2010-09-19T00:59:00.000-07:00

Одним из важнейших результатов официального визита правительственной делегации Молдавии в Китай является договоренность о неограниченном экспорте молдавской винодельческой продукции на китайский рынок. Об этом заявил 17 сентября на пресс-конференции в Кишиневе по итогам визита в Пекин премьер-министр Молдавии Владимир Филат, передает корреспондент ИА REGNUM Новости.

По мнению Филата, договоренность с Пекином исключает зависимость страны от единственного рынка сбыта винодельческой продукции, что сделает молдавских производителей менее уязвимыми. "Сейчас на европейском и китайском рынках наблюдается рост потребления винодельческой продукции. И Молдавия должна быть на них активно представлена", - заявил Владимир Филат.

Стоит отметить, что до сих пор почти весь экспорт молдавской винодельческой продукции был ориентирован на Россию. Однако в последние месяцы Роспотребнадзор выявил большое количество крупных партий молдавского вина, в которых найдены опасные для здоровья химические вещества. Глава ведомства Онищенко обвинил молдавское правительство в несостоятельности, предложил молдаванам "красить своим вином заборы", а также призвал Молдавию не везти в Россию "помои". 17 июля глава Роспотребнадзора заявил, что в ближайшие недели Россия может запретить ввоз на свою территорию винодельческой продукции из Молдавии. 27 июля Роспотребнадзор начал процедуру возврата в Молдавию около 1 млн литров забракованного молдавского вина. А в августе Роспотребнадзор выявил еще 17, 6 тыс. литров молдавского вина, не соответствующего гигиеническим нормативам.
Проблемы с молдавским вином в последние годы совпадали по времени с периодами ухудшения российско-молдавских отношений. Так в марте 2006 года, когда действия коммунистических властей Молдавии привели к критическому ухудшению молдавско-российских отношений, Россия полностью приостановила импорт винодельческой продукции из Молдавии - тогда в ней обнаружили пестициды и тяжелые металлы. Поставки возобновились только в ноябре 2007 года после длительных переговоров.

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard

2010-09-17T11:14:00.000-07:00

by David Moser
University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies

The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So what do I mean by "hard"? Since I know at the outset that the whole tone of this document is going to involve a lot of whining and complaining, I may as well come right out and say exactly what I mean. I mean hard for me, a native English speaker trying to learn Chinese as an adult, going through the whole process with the textbooks, the tapes, the conversation partners, etc., the whole torturous rigmarole. I mean hard for me -- and, of course, for the many other Westerners who have spent years of their lives bashing their heads against the Great Wall of Chinese.

From Schriftfestschrift: Essays on Writing and Language in Honor of John DeFrancis on His Eightieth Birthday (Sino-Platonic Papers No. 27, August 1991), edited by Victor H. Mair

If this were as far as I went, my statement would be a pretty empty one. Of course Chinese is hard for me. After all, any foreign language is hard for a non-native, right? Well, sort of. Not all foreign languages are equally difficult for any learner. It depends on which language you're coming from. A French person can usually learn Italian faster than an American, and an average American could probably master German a lot faster than an average Japanese, and so on. So part of what I'm contending is that Chinese is hard compared to ... well, compared to almost any other language you might care to tackle. What I mean is that Chinese is not only hard for us (English speakers), but it's also hard in absolute terms. Which means that Chinese is also hard for them, for Chinese people.1

If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in the same way some New Yorkers are actually proud of living in the most unlivable city in America.) Maybe all Chinese people deserve a medal just for being born Chinese. At any rate, they generally become aware at some point of the Everest-like status of their native language, as they, from their privileged vantage point on the summit, observe foolhardy foreigners huffing and puffing up the steep slopes.

Everyone's heard the supposed fact that if you take the English idiom "It's Greek to me" and search for equivalent idioms in all the world's languages to arrive at a consensus as to which language is the hardest, the results of such a linguistic survey is that Chinese easily wins as the canonical incomprehensible language. (For example, the French have the expression "C'est du chinois", "It's Chinese", i.e., "It's incomprehensible". Other languages have similar sayings.) So then the question arises: What do the Chinese themselves consider to be an impossibly hard language? You then look for the corresponding phrase in Chinese, and you find Gēn tiānshū yíyàng 跟天书一样 meaning "It's like heavenly script."

There is truth in this linguistic yarn; Chinese does deserve its reputation for heartbreaking difficulty. Those who undertake to study the language for any other reason than the sheer joy of it will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect. Those who are actually attracted to the language precisely because of its daunting complexity and difficulty will never be disappointed. Whatever the reason they started, every single person who has undertaken to study Chinese sooner or later asks themselves "Why in the world am I doing this?" Those who can still remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle. Those who merely say "I've come this far -- I can't stop now" will have some chance of succeeding, since they have the kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective that it takes.

Okay, having explained a bit of what I mean by the word, I return to my original question: Why is Chinese so damn hard?

1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.

Beautiful, complex, mysterious -- but ridiculous. I, like many students of Chinese, was first attracted to Chinese because of the writing system, which is surely one of the most fascinating scripts in the world. The more you learn about Chinese characters the more intriguing and addicting they become. The study of Chinese characters can become a lifelong obsession, and you soon find yourself engaged in the daily task of accumulating them, drop by drop from the vast sea of characters, in a vain attempt to hoard them in the leaky bucket of long-term memory.

The beauty of the characters is indisputable, but as the Chinese people began to realize the importance of universal literacy, it became clear that these ideograms were sort of like bound feet -- some fetishists may have liked the way they looked, but they weren't too practical for daily use.

For one thing, it is simply unreasonably hard to learn enough characters to become functionally literate. Again, someone may ask "Hard in comparison to what?" And the answer is easy: Hard in comparison to Spanish, Greek, Russian, Hindi, or any other sane, "normal" language that requires at most a few dozen symbols to write anything in the language. John DeFrancis, in his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, reports that his Chinese colleagues estimate it takes seven to eight years for a Mandarin speaker to learn to read and write three thousand characters, whereas his French and Spanish colleagues estimate that students in their respective countries achieve comparable levels in half that time.2 Naturally, this estimate is rather crude and impressionistic (it's unclear what "comparable levels" means here), but the overall implications are obvious: the Chinese writing system is harder to learn, in absolute terms, than an alphabetic writing system.3 Even Chinese kids, whose minds are at their peak absorptive power, have more trouble with Chinese characters than their little counterparts in other countries have with their respective scripts. Just imagine the difficulties experienced by relatively sluggish post-pubescent foreign learners such as myself.

Everyone has heard that Chinese is hard because of the huge number of characters one has to learn, and this is absolutely true. There are a lot of popular books and articles that downplay this difficulty, saying things like "Despite the fact that Chinese has [10,000, 25,000, 50,000, take your pick] separate characters you really only need 2,000 or so to read a newspaper". Poppycock. I couldn't comfortably read a newspaper when I had 2,000 characters under my belt. I often had to look up several characters per line, and even after that I had trouble pulling the meaning out of the article. (I take it as a given that what is meant by "read" in this context is "read and basically comprehend the text without having to look up dozens of characters"; otherwise the claim is rather empty.)

This fairy tale is promulgated because of the fact that, when you look at the character frequencies, over 95% of the characters in any newspaper are easily among the first 2,000 most common ones.4 But what such accounts don't tell you is that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words made up of those familiar characters. (To illustrate this problem, note that in English, knowing the words "up" and "tight" doesn't mean you know the word "uptight".) Plus, as anyone who has studied any language knows, you can often be familiar with every single word in a text and still not be able to grasp the meaning. Reading comprehension is not simply a matter of knowing a lot of words; one has to get a feeling for how those words combine with other words in a multitude of different contexts.5 In addition, there is the obvious fact that even though you may know 95% of the characters in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very characters that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline "JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS" is not going to get very far if they don't know the words "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis".

The problem of reading is often a touchy one for those in the China field. How many of us would dare stand up in front of a group of colleagues and read a randomly-selected passage out loud? Yet inferiority complexes or fear of losing face causes many teachers and students to become unwitting cooperators in a kind of conspiracy of silence wherein everyone pretends that after four years of Chinese the diligent student should be whizzing through anything from Confucius to Lu Xun, pausing only occasionally to look up some pesky low-frequency character (in their Chinese-Chinese dictionary, of course). Others, of course, are more honest about the difficulties. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me "My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can't read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to save my life." This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers (at least in those unguarded moments when one has had a few too many Tsingtao beers and has begun to lament how slowly work on the thesis is coming).

A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task -- never mind reading the book in question. This state of affairs is very disheartening for the student who is impatient to begin feasting on the vast riches of Chinese literature, but must subsist on a bland diet of canned handouts, textbook examples, and carefully edited appetizers for the first few years.

The comparison with learning the usual western languages is striking. After about a year of studying French, I was able to read a lot. I went through the usual kinds of novels -- La nausée by Sartre, Voltaire's Candide, L'étranger by Camus -- plus countless newspapers, magazines, comic books, etc. It was a lot of work but fairly painless; all I really needed was a good dictionary and a battered French grammar book I got at a garage sale.

This kind of "sink or swim" approach just doesn't work in Chinese. At the end of three years of learning Chinese, I hadn't yet read a single complete novel. I found it just too hard, impossibly slow, and unrewarding. Newspapers, too, were still too daunting. I couldn't read an article without looking up about every tenth character, and it was not uncommon for me to scan the front page of the People's Daily and not be able to completely decipher a single headline. Someone at that time suggested I read The Dream of the Red Chamber and gave me a nice three-volume edition. I just have to laugh. It still sits on my shelf like a fat, smug Buddha, only the first twenty or so pages filled with scribbled definitions and question marks, the rest crisp and virgin. After six years of studying Chinese, I'm still not at a level where I can actually read it without an English translation to consult. (By "read it", I mean, of course, "read it for pleasure". I suppose if someone put a gun to my head and a dictionary in my hand, I could get through it.) Simply diving into the vast pool of Chinese in the beginning is not only foolhardy, it can even be counterproductive. As George Kennedy writes, "The difficulty of memorizing a Chinese ideograph as compared with the difficulty of learning a new word in a European language, is such that a rigid economy of mental effort is imperative."6 This is, if anything, an understatement. With the risk of drowning so great, the student is better advised to spend more time in the shallow end treading water before heading toward the deep end.

As if all this weren't bad enough, another ridiculous aspect of the Chinese writing system is that there are two (mercifully overlapping) sets of characters: the traditional characters still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the simplified characters adopted by the People's Republic of China in the late 1950's and early 60's. Any foreign student of Chinese is more or less forced to become familiar with both sets, since they are routinely exposed to textbooks and materials from both Chinas. This linguistic camel's-back-breaking straw puts an absurd burden on the already absurdly burdened student of Chinese, who at this point would gladly trade places with Sisyphus. But since Chinese people themselves are never equally proficient in both simplified and complex characters, there is absolutely no shame whatsoever in eventually concentrating on one set to the partial exclusion the other. In fact, there is absolutely no shame in giving up Chinese altogether, when you come right down to it.

2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.

To further explain why the Chinese writing system is so hard in this respect, it might be a good idea to spell out (no pun intended) why that of English is so easy. Imagine the kind of task faced by the average Chinese adult who decides to study English. What skills are needed to master the writing system? That's easy: 26 letters. (In upper and lower case, of course, plus script and a few variant forms. And throw in some quote marks, apostrophes, dashes, parentheses, etc. -- all things the Chinese use in their own writing system.) And how are these letters written? From left to right, horizontally, across the page, with spaces to indicate word boundaries. Forgetting for a moment the problem of spelling and actually making words out of these letters, how long does it take this Chinese learner of English to master the various components of the English writing system? Maybe a day or two.

Now consider the American undergraduate who decides to study Chinese. What does it take for this person to master the Chinese writing system? There is nothing that corresponds to an alphabet, though there are recurring components that make up the characters. How many such components are there? Don't ask. As with all such questions about Chinese, the answer is very messy and unsatisfying. It depends on how you define "component" (strokes? radicals?), plus a lot of other tedious details. Suffice it to say, the number is quite large, vastly more than the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. And how are these components combined to form characters? Well, you name it -- components to the left of other components, to the right of other components, on top of other components, surrounding other components, inside of other components -- almost anything is possible. And in the process of making these spatial accommodations, these components get flattened, stretched, squashed, shortened, and distorted in order to fit in the uniform square space that all characters are supposed to fit into. In other words, the components of Chinese characters are arrayed in two dimensions, rather than in the neat one-dimensional rows of alphabetic writing.

Okay, so ignoring for the moment the question of elegance, how long does it take a Westerner to learn the Chinese writing system so that when confronted with any new character they at least know how to move the pen around in order to produce a reasonable facsimile of that character? Again, hard to say, but I would estimate that it takes the average learner several months of hard work to get the basics down. Maybe a year or more if they're a klutz who was never very good in art class. Meanwhile, their Chinese counterpart learning English has zoomed ahead to learn cursive script, with time left over to read Moby Dick, or at least Strunk & White.

This is not exactly big news, I know; the alphabet really is a breeze to learn. Chinese people I know who have studied English for a few years can usually write with a handwriting style that is almost indistinguishable from that of the average American. Very few Americans, on the other hand, ever learn to produce a natural calligraphic hand in Chinese that resembles anything but that of an awkward Chinese third-grader. If there were nothing else hard about Chinese, the task of learning to write characters alone would put it in the rogues' gallery of hard-to-learn languages.

3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.

So much for the physical process of writing the characters themselves. What about the sheer task of memorizing so many characters? Again, a comparison of English and Chinese is instructive. Suppose a Chinese person has just the previous day learned the English word "president", and now wants to write it from memory. How to start? Anyone with a year or two of English experience is going to have a host of clues and spelling rules-of-thumb, albeit imperfect ones, to help them along. The word really couldn't start with anything but "pr", and after that a little guesswork aided by visual memory ("Could a 'z' be in there? That's an unusual letter, I would have noticed it, I think. Must be an 's'...") should produce something close to the target. Not every foreigner (or native speaker for that matter) has noted or internalized the various flawed spelling heuristics of English, of course, but they are at least there to be utilized.

Now imagine that you, a learner of Chinese, have just the previous day encountered the Chinese word for "president" (总统 zǒngtǒng ) and want to write it. What processes do you go through in retrieving the word? Well, very often you just totally forget, with a forgetting that is both absolute and perfect in a way few things in this life are. You can repeat the word as often as you like; the sound won't give you a clue as to how the character is to be written. After you learn a few more characters and get hip to a few more phonetic components, you can do a bit better. ("Zǒng 总 is a phonetic component in some other character, right?...Song? Zeng? Oh yeah, cong 总 as in cōngmíng 聪明.") Of course, the phonetic aspect of some characters is more obvious than that of others, but many characters, including some of the most high-frequency ones, give no clue at all as to their pronunciation.

All of this is to say that Chinese is just not very phonetic when compared to English. (English, in turn, is less phonetic than a language like German or Spanish, but Chinese isn't even in the same ballpark.) It is not true, as some people outside the field tend to think, that Chinese is not phonetic at all, though a perfectly intelligent beginning student could go several months without noticing this fact. Just how phonetic the language is a very complex issue. Educated opinions range from 25% (Zhao Yuanren)7 to around 66% (DeFrancis),8 though the latter estimate assumes more knowledge of phonetic components than most learners are likely to have. One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it. Furthermore, this phonetic aspect of the language doesn't really become very useful until you've learned a few hundred characters, and even when you've learned two thousand, the feeble phoneticity of Chinese will never provide you with the constant memory prod that the phonetic quality of English does.

Which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you're just sunk. And you're sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.

This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra" is hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on "rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost anything. By contrast, often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character.

As one mundane example of the advantages of a phonetic writing system, here is one kind of linguistic situation I encountered constantly while I was in France. (Again I use French as my canonical example of an "easy" foreign language.) I wake up one morning in Paris and turn on the radio. An ad comes on, and I hear the word "amortisseur" several times. "What's an amortisseur?" I think to myself, but as I am in a hurry to make an appointment, I forget to look the word up in my haste to leave the apartment. A few hours later I'm walking down the street, and I read, on a sign, the word "AMORTISSEUR" -- the word I heard earlier this morning. Beneath the word on the sign is a picture of a shock absorber. Aha! So "amortisseur" means "shock absorber". And voila! I've learned a new word, quickly and painlessly, all because the sound I construct when reading the word is the same as the sound in my head from the radio this morning -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the next week I see the word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the sound by simply reading the word phonetically -- "a-mor-tis-seur". Before long I can retrieve the word easily, use it in conversation, or write it in a letter to a friend. And the process of learning a foreign language begins to seem less daunting.

When I first went to Taiwan for a few months, the situation was quite different. I was awash in a sea of characters that were all visually interesting but phonetically mute. I carried around a little dictionary to look up unfamiliar characters in, but it's almost impossible to look up a character in a Chinese dictionary while walking along a crowded street (more on dictionary look-up later), and so I didn't get nearly as much phonetic reinforcement as I got in France. In Taiwan I could pass a shop with a sign advertising shock absorbers and never know how to pronounce any of the characters unless I first look them up. And even then, the next time I pass the shop I might have to look the characters up again. And again, and again. The reinforcement does not come naturally and easily.

4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.

I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about three years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I picked it up out of curiosity. "Hmm," I thought to myself. "I've never studied Spanish in my life. I wonder how much of this I can understand." At random I picked a short article about an airplane crash and started to read. I found I could basically glean, with some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. 186 people were killed. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency. The plane had just been serviced three days before and no mechanical problems had been found. And so on. After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.

What was going on here? Why was this "foreign" language so transparent? The reason was obvious: cognates -- those helpful words that are just English words with a little foreign make-up.9 I could read the article because most of the operative words were basically English: aeropuerto, problema mechanico, un minuto, situacion critica, emergencia, etc. Recognizing these words as just English words in disguise is about as difficult as noticing that Superman is really Clark Kent without his glasses. That these quasi-English words are easier to learn than Chinese characters (which might as well be quasi-Martian) goes without saying.

Imagine you are a diabetic, and you find yourself in Spain about to go into insulin shock. You can rush into a doctor's office, and, with a minimum of Spanish and a couple of pieces of guesswork ("diabetes" is just "diabetes" and "insulin" is "insulina", it turns out), you're saved. In China you'd be a goner for sure, unless you happen to have a dictionary with you, and even then you would probably pass out while frantically looking for the first character in the word for insulin. Which brings me to the next reason why Chinese is so hard.

5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.

One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary is about the equivalent of an entire semester of secretarial school. When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up contests in the junior high schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball! Chinese is not exactly what you would call a user-friendly language, but a Chinese dictionary is positively user-hostile.

Figuring out all the radicals and their variants, plus dealing with the ambiguous characters with no obvious radical at all is a stupid, time-consuming chore that slows the learning process down by a factor of ten as compared to other languages with a sensible alphabet or the equivalent. I'd say it took me a good year before I could reliably find in the dictionary any character I might encounter. And to this day, I will very occasionally stumble onto a character that I simply can't find at all, even after ten minutes of searching. At such times I raise my hands to the sky, Job-like, and consider going into telemarketing.

Chinese must also be one of the most dictionary-intensive languages on earth. I currently have more than twenty Chinese dictionaries of various kinds on my desk, and they all have a specific and distinct use. There are dictionaries with simplified characters used on the mainland, dictionaries with the traditional characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and dictionaries with both. There are dictionaries that use the Wade-Giles romanization, dictionaries that use pinyin, and dictionaries that use other more surrealistic romanization methods. There are dictionaries of classical Chinese particles, dictionaries of Beijing dialect, dictionaries of chéngyǔ (four-character idioms), dictionaries of xiēhòuyǔ (special allegorical two-part sayings), dictionaries of yànyǔ (proverbs), dictionaries of Chinese communist terms, dictionaries of Buddhist terms, reverse dictionaries... on and on. An exhaustive hunt for some elusive or problematic lexical item can leave one's desk "strewn with dictionaries as numerous as dead soldiers on a battlefield."10

For looking up unfamiliar characters there is another method called the four-corner system. This method is very fast -- rumored to be, in principle, about as fast as alphabetic look-up (though I haven't met anyone yet who can hit the winning number each time on the first try). Unfortunately, learning this method takes about as much time and practice as learning the Dewey decimal system. Plus you are then at the mercy of the few dictionaries that are arranged according to the numbering scheme of the four-corner system. Those who have mastered this system usually swear by it. The rest of us just swear.

Another problem with looking up words in the dictionary has to do with the nature of written Chinese. In most languages it's pretty obvious where the word boundaries lie -- there are spaces between the words. If you don't know the word in question, it's usually fairly clear what you should look up. (What actually constitutes a word is a very subtle issue, of course, but for my purposes here, what I'm saying is basically correct.) In Chinese there are spaces between characters, but it takes quite a lot of knowledge of the language and often some genuine sleuth work to tell where word boundaries lie; thus it's often trial and error to look up a word. It would be as if English were written thus:

FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT THE STALE MATE BE TWEEN MAN AGE MENT AND THE ACT OR 'S UNION BE CAUSE THE STAND OFF HAD SET BACK THE TIME TABLE FOR PRO DUC TION OF HIS PLAY, A ONE MAN SHOW CASE THAT WAS HIS FIRST RUN A WAY BROAD WAY BOX OFFICE SMASH HIT. "THE FIRST A MEND MENT IS AT IS SUE" HE PRO CLAIM ED. "FOR A CENS OR OR AN EDIT OR TO EDIT OR OTHER WISE BLUE PENCIL QUESTION ABLE DIA LOG JUST TO KOW TOW TO RIGHT WING BORN AGAIN BIBLE THUMP ING FRUIT CAKE S IS A DOWN RIGHT DIS GRACE."

Imagine how this difference would compound the dictionary look-up difficulties of a non-native speaker of English. The passage is pretty trivial for us to understand, but then we already know English. For them it would often be hard to tell where the word boundaries were supposed to be. So it is, too, with someone trying to learn Chinese.

6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).

Forget it. Way too difficult. If you think that after three or four years of study you'll be breezing through Confucius and Mencius in the way third-year French students at a comparable level are reading Diderot and Voltaire, you're sadly mistaken. There are some westerners who can comfortably read classical Chinese, but most of them have a lot of gray hair or at least tenure.

Unfortunately, classical Chinese pops up everywhere, especially in Chinese paintings and character scrolls, and most people will assume anyone literate in Chinese can read it. It's truly embarrassing to be out at a Chinese restaurant, and someone asks you to translate some characters on a wall hanging.

"Hey, you speak Chinese. What does this scroll say?" You look up and see that the characters are written in wenyan, and in incomprehensible "grass-style" calligraphy to boot. It might as well be an EKG readout of a dying heart patient.

"Uh, I can make out one or two of the characters, but I couldn't tell you what it says," you stammer. "I think it's about a phoenix or something."

"Oh, I thought you knew Chinese," says your friend, returning to their menu. Never mind that an honest-to-goodness Chinese person would also just scratch their head and shrug; the face that is lost is yours.

Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway. An uninitiated westerner can no more be expected to understand such writing than Confucius himself, if transported to the present, could understand the entries in the "personal" section of the classified ads that say things like: "Hndsm. SWGM, 24, 160, sks BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg., some lthr., twosm or threesm ok, have own equip., wheels, 988-8752 lv. mssg. on ans. mach., no weirdos please."

In fairness, it should be said that classical Chinese gets easier the more you attempt it. But then so does hitting a hole in one, or swimming the English channel in a straitjacket.

7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.

Well, perhaps that's too harsh. But it is true that there are too many of them, and most of them were designed either by committee or by linguists, or -- even worse -- by a committee of linguists. It is, of course, a very tricky task to devise a romanization method; some are better than others, but all involve plenty of counterintuitive spellings.11 And if you're serious about a career in Chinese, you'll have to grapple with at least four or five of them, not including the bopomofu phonetic symbols used in Taiwan. There are probably a dozen or more romanization schemes out there somewhere, most of them mercifully obscure and rightfully ignored. There is a standing joke among sinologists that one of the first signs of senility in a China scholar is the compulsion to come up with a new romanization method.

8. Because tonal languages are weird.

Okay, that's very Anglo-centric, I know it. But I have to mention this problem because it's one of the most common complaints about learning Chinese, and it's one of the aspects of the language that westerners are notoriously bad at. Every person who tackles Chinese at first has a little trouble believing this aspect of the language. How is it possible that shùxué means "mathematics" while shūxuě means "blood transfusion", or that guòjiǎng means "you flatter me" while guǒjiàng means "fruit paste"?

By itself, this property of Chinese would be hard enough; it means that, for us non-native speakers, there is this extra, seemingly irrelevant aspect of the sound of a word that you must memorize along with the vowels and consonants. But where the real difficulty comes in is when you start to really use Chinese to express yourself. You suddenly find yourself straitjacketed -- when you say the sentence with the intonation that feels natural, the tones come out all wrong. For example, if you wish say something like "Hey, that's my water glass you're drinking out of!", and you follow your intonational instincts -- that is, to put a distinct falling tone on the first character of the word for "my" -- you will have said a kind of gibberish that may or may not be understood.

Intonation and stress habits are incredibly ingrained and second-nature. With non-tonal languages you can basically import, mutatis mutandis, your habitual ways of emphasizing, negating, stressing, and questioning. The results may be somewhat non-native but usually understandable. Not so with Chinese, where your intonational contours must always obey the tonal constraints of the specific words you've chosen. Chinese speakers, of course, can express all of the intonational subtleties available in non-tonal languages -- it's just that they do it in a way that is somewhat alien to us speakers of non-tonal languages. When you first begin using your Chinese to talk about subjects that actually matter to you, you find that it feels somewhat like trying to have a passionate argument with your hands tied behind your back -- you are suddenly robbed of some vital expressive tools you hadn't even been aware of having.

9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met.

Language and culture cannot be separated, of course, and one of the main reasons Chinese is so difficult for Americans is that our two cultures have been isolated for so long. The reason reading French sentences like "Le président Bush assure le peuple koweitien que le gouvernement américain va continuer à défendre le Koweit contre la menace irakienne," is about as hard as deciphering pig Latin is not just because of the deep Indo-European family resemblance, but also because the core concepts and cultural assumptions in such utterances stem from the same source. We share the same art history, the same music history, the same history history -- which means that in the head of a French person there is basically the same set of archetypes and the same cultural cast of characters that's in an American's head. We are as familiar with Rimbaud as they are with Rambo. In fact, compared to the difference between China and the U.S., American culture and and French culture seem about as different as Peter Pan and Skippy peanut butter.

Speaking with a Chinese person is usually a different matter. You just can't drop Dickens, Tarzan, Jack the Ripper, Goethe, or the Beatles into a conversation and always expect to be understood. I once had a Chinese friend who had read the first translations of Kafka into Chinese, yet didn't know who Santa Claus was. China has had extensive contact with the West in the last few decades, but there is still a vast sea of knowledge and ideas that is not shared by both cultures.

Similarly, how many Americans other than sinophiles have even a rough idea of the chronology of China's dynasties? Has the average history major here ever heard of Qin Shi Huangdi and his contribution to Chinese culture? How many American music majors have ever heard a note of Peking Opera, or would recognize a pipa if they tripped over one? How many otherwise literate Americans have heard of Lu Xun, Ba Jin, or even Mozi?

What this means is that when Americans and Chinese get together, there is often not just a language barrier, but an immense cultural barrier as well. Of course, this is one of the reasons the study of Chinese is so interesting. It is also one of the reasons it is so damn hard.

Conclusion

I could go on and on, but I figure if the reader has bothered to read this far, I'm preaching to the converted, anyway. Those who have tackled other difficult languages have their own litany of horror stories, I'm sure. But I still feel reasonably confident in asserting that, for an average American, Chinese is significantly harder to learn than any of the other thirty or so major world languages that are usually studied formally at the university level (though Japanese in many ways comes close). Not too interesting for linguists, maybe, but something to consider if you've decided to better yourself by learning a foreign language, and you're thinking "Gee, Chinese looks kinda neat."

It's pretty hard to quantify a process as complex and multi-faceted as language-learning, but one simple metric is to simply estimate the time it takes to master the requisite language-learning skills. When you consider all the above-mentioned things a learner of Chinese has to acquire -- ability to use a dictionary, familiarity with two or three romanization methods, a grasp of principles involved in writing characters (both simplified and traditional) -- it adds up to an awful lot of down time while one is "learning to learn" Chinese.

How much harder is Chinese? Again, I'll use French as my canonical "easy language". This is a very rough and intuitive estimate, but I would say that it takes about three times as long to reach a level of comfortable fluency in speaking, reading, and writing Chinese as it takes to reach a comparable level in French. An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in two Romance languages in the time it would take them to reach the same level in Chinese.

One could perhaps view learning languages as being similar to learning musical instruments. Despite the esoteric glories of the harmonica literature, it's probably safe to say that the piano is a lot harder and more time-consuming to learn. To extend the analogy, there is also the fact that we are all virtuosos on at least one "instrument" (namely, our native language), and learning instruments from the same family is easier than embarking on a completely different instrument. A Spanish person learning Portuguese is comparable to a violinist taking up the viola, whereas an American learning Chinese is more like a rock guitarist trying to learn to play an elaborate 30-stop three-manual pipe organ.

Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.

There is still the awe-inspiring fact that Chinese people manage to learn their own language very well. Perhaps they are like the gradeschool kids that Baroque performance groups recruit to sing Bach cantatas. The story goes that someone in the audience, amazed at hearing such youthful cherubs flawlessly singing Bach's uncompromisingly difficult vocal music, asks the choir director, "But how are they able to perform such difficult music?"

"Shh -- not so loud!" says the director, "If you don't tell them it's difficult, they never know."

Bibliography

(A longer version of this paper is available through CRCC, Indiana University, 510 N. Fess, Bloomington, IN, 47408.)

Chen, Heqin, (1928)"Yutiwen yingyong zihui" [Characters used in vernacular literature], Shanghai.

DeFrancis, John (1966) "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese", Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, Vol. 1, No. 1, Feb. 1966, pp. 1-20.

DeFrancis, John (1984) The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

DeFrancis, John (1989) Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Kennedy, George (1964) "A Minimum Vocabulary in Modern Chinese", in Selected Works of George Kennedy, Tien-yi Li (ed.), New Haven: Far Eastern Publications.

Mair, Victor (1986) "The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries and Current Lexicographical Projects", Sino-Platonic Papers, No. 1, February, 1986 (Dept. of Oriental Studies, University of Pennsylvania).

Zhao, Yuanren, (1972) Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics, Anwar S. Dil (ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Notes

I am speaking of the writing system here, but the difficulty of the writing system has such a pervasive effect on literacy and general language mastery that I think the statement as a whole is still valid. back
John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984, p.153. Most of the issues in this paper are dealt with at length and with great clarity in both this book and in his Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989. back
Incidentally, I'm aware that much of what I've said above applies to Japanese as well, but it seems clear that the burden placed on a learner of Japanese is much lighter because (a) the number of Chinese characters used in Japanese is "only" about 2,000 -- fewer by a factor of two or three compared to the number needed by the average literate Chinese reader; and (b) the Japanese have phonetic syllabaries (the hiragana and katakana characters), which are nearly 100% phonetically reliable and are in many ways easier to master than chaotic English orthography is. back
See, for ex., Chen Heqin, "Yutiwen yingyong zihui" [Characters used in vernacular literature], Shanghai, 1928. back
John DeFrancis deals with this issue, among other places, in "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese", Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, Vol. 1, No. 1, Feb. 1966, pp. 1-20. back
George Kennedy, "A Minimum Vocabulary in Modern Chinese", in Selected Works of George Kennedy, Tien-yi Li (ed.), New Haven, 1964, p. 8. back
Zhao Yuanren, Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics, Anwar S. Dil (ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976, p. 92. back
John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, p. 109. back
Charles Hockett reminds me that many of my examples are really instances of loan words, not cognates, but rather than take up space dealing with the issue, I will blur the distinction a bit here. There are phonetic loan words from English into Chinese, of course, but they are scarce curiosities rather than plentiful semantic moorings. back
A phrase taken from an article by Victor Mair with the deceptively boring title " The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries and Current Lexicographical Projects" (Sino-Platonic Papers, No. 1, February, 1986, Dept. of Oriental Studies, University of Pennsylvania). Mair includes a rather hilarious but realistic account of the tortuous steeplechase of looking up a low-frequency lexical item in his arsenal of Chinese dictionaries. back
I have noticed from time to time that the romanization method first used tends to influence one's accent in Chinese. It seems to me a Chinese person with a very keen ear could distinguish Americans speaking, say, Wade-Giles-accented Chinese from pinyin-accented Chinese. back

Modele pentru caligrafia chineză

2010-09-14T00:01:00.001-07:00

Vlad Filat descoperă China

2010-09-13T11:55:00.000-07:00

Filat invită China să investească în R. Moldova pentru a avea acces la piața UE și CSI

China a decis să acorde Republicii Moldova ajutor nerambursabil în valoare de 20 mil. yuani (circa 3 mil. dolari SUA), pentru lichidarea consecinţelor inundaţiilor care au avut loc în Republica Moldova în acest an. Declarația îi aparține lui Wen JIABAO, Preşedintele Consiliului de Stat al Chinei (Prim-ministrul Republicii Populare Chineze), lansată în cadrul unei întrevederi cu premierul Vlad Filat în China, ca urmare a unei scrisori înaintate Chinei de premierul moldovean.

Oficialul chinez a precizat că ajutorul va fi disponibil în 2011.

Cei doi oficiali au discutat despre consolidarea relaţiilor bilaterale dintre cele două state, majorarea exporturilor de vinuri moldoveneşti pe piaţa chineză și lansarea unor proiecte de interes comun.

Wen JIABAO a avansat ideea ca Republica Moldova să vină cu propuneri concrete către partea chineză, ceea ce va permite companiilor chineze să beneficieze de oportunităţile oferite de ţara noastră. Premierul chinez a menţionat drept domenii de interes agricultura, telecomunicaţiile şi infrastructura. Wen JIABAO a spus că ţara sa este interesată şi de lansarea parcurilor industriale în ţara noastră.

„Noi suntem interesaţi în promovarea importului de vinuri moldoveneşti pe piaţa chineză. De asemenea, sîntem deschişi pentru intensificarea schimbului de experienţă între cetăţenii ambelor state în domeniul educaţiei, ştiinţei, agriculturii”, a menţionat Premierul chinez.

„Ne dorim ca relaţia dintre ţările noastre să se consolideze în interes reciproc. Republica Moldova poate deveni o platformă pentru promovarea investiţiilor chineze, avînd în vederea poziţionarea geografică a ţării noastre, care permite accesul atât spre piaţa Uniunii Europene, cât şi în spaţiul CSI. Este vorba de o piaţă care însumează peste 700 milioane de consumatori”, a spus premierul Filat.

Prim-ministrul Vlad FILAT a avut astăzi la Tianjin, China, o întrevedere cu Wen JIABAO, Preşedintele Consiliului de Stat al Chinei (Prim-ministrul Republicii Populare Chineze)

Discuţia s-a axat pe consolidarea relaţiilor bilaterale dintre cele două state, majorarea exporturilor de vinuri moldoveneşti pe piaţa chineză, lansarea unor proiecte de interes comun.

Wen JIABAO a salutat prezenţa Prim-ministrului Republicii Moldova în China, menţionînd că în ultimul an relaţia dintre cele două ţări au cunoscut o dezvoltare ascendentă. Premierul chinez a apreciat participarea Prim-ministrului moldovean la Forumul economic Davos.

Premierul Vlad FILAT a mulţumit pentru ospitalitate şi pentru sprijinul constant acordat de China ţării noastre pe parcursul anilor.

Wen JIABAO a spus că, în cei 18 ani de la stabilirea relaţiilor diplomatice, China a susţinut independenţa şi integritatea teritorială a Republicii Moldova, iar relaţiile moldo-chineze s-au dezvoltat pragmatic şi strategic.

„Noi apreciem susţinerea politică a unei singure Chine de către Republica Moldova şi respectăm calea de dezvoltare aleasă de ţara Dvs. Sînt convins că relaţia dintre cele două state va continua să se dezvolte, iar această întrevedere le va da un nou impuls”, a specificat Premierul Chinei.

Wen JIABAO a menţionat că, drept urmare a scrisorii Premierului Vlad FILAT, China a decis să acorde Republicii Moldova ajutor nerambursabil în valoare de 20 mil. yuani (circa 3 mil. dolari SUA), precizînd că ajutorul va fi disponibil în 2011.

Prim-ministrul Chinei a mai spus că ţara sa va acorda ajutor Republicii Moldova pentru lichidarea consecinţelor inundaţiilor, care au afectat ţara noastră în acestc an.

Wen JIABAO şi-a exprimat convingerea că cele două state trebuie să intensifice cooperarea. Oficialul a avansat ideea ca Republica Moldova să vină cu propuneri concrete către partea chineză, ceea ce va permite companiilor chineze să beneficieze de oportunităţile oferite de ţara noastră. Premierul chinez a menţionat drept domenii de interes agricultura, telecomunicaţiile şi infrastructura. Wen JIABAO a spus că ţara sa este interesată şi de lansarea parcurilor industriale în ţara noastră

De asemenea, oficialul a optat pentru intensificarea activităţii Comisiei mixte moldo-chineze, astfel încît aceasta să joace un rol important în atragerea şi valorificarea investiţiilor în interesul ambelor state. Wen JIABAO şi-a exprimat aprecierea faţă de vinurile moldoveneşti.

„Noi sîntem interesaţi în promovarea importului de vinuri moldoveneşti pe piaţa chineză. De asemenea, sîntem deschişi pentru intensificarea schimbului de experienţă între cetăţenii ambelor state în domeniul educaţiei, ştiinţei, agriculturii”, a menţionat Premierul chinez.

Vlad FILAT a mulţumit pentru asistenţa acordată de către China Republicii Moldova, dar şi pentru atitudinea faţă de integritatea teritorială a ţării noastre.

Premierul a vorbit despre întrevederile pe care le-a avut la Shanghai, precizînd că a ţinut neapărat să participe la Expoziţia mondială Shanghai - 2010 şi la inaugurarea Zilelor Republicii Moldova la Shanghai, dat fiind importanţa acestor evenimente şi perspectivele pe care le oferă.

„Ne dorim ca relaţia dintre ţările noastre să se consolideze în interes reciproc. Republica Moldova poate deveni o platformă pentru promovarea investiţiilor chineze, avînd în vederea poziţionarea geografică a ţării noastre, care permite accesul atît spre piaţa Uniunii Europene, cît şi în spaţiul CSI. Este vorba de o piaţă care însumează peste 700 milioane de consumatori”, a spus Prim-ministrul Republicii Moldova.

Vlad FILAT a menţionat că experienţa şi potenţialul Chinei sînt importante pentru Republica Moldova.

„Consider că acestea pot fi utilizate eficient, în special în aşa domenii ca: infrastructura drumurilor, energetică, telecomunicaţii, căi ferate. Deja avem stabilită o colaborare bună cu companiile Huawei, ZTE, iar în curînd vom lansa un proiect important împreună cu compania Sinohydro. Ne dorim ca acest ritm să se intensifice”, a spus Prim-ministrul Republicii Moldova.

Vlad FILAT a menţionat că personal se va ocupa de administrarea relaţiei moldo-chineze şi de proiectele comune ce vor fi lansate.

Filat alături de 38 de businessmani a plecat în China

Însoțit de o delegație de 80 de funcționari și oameni de afaceri

, Vlad Filat face o vizită oficială în Republica Populară Chineză. Începînd de astăzi, prim-ministrul se va afla în China timp de 5 zile. Scopul vizitei este o misiune de afaceri.

Vizita va începe la Shanghai , unde Premierul va avea la 11 septembrie o întrevedere cu Preşedintele Guvernului Shanghai Han Zheng. A doua zi, Vlad Filat va participa la Forumul economic moldo-chinez şi la Expoziţia mondială Shanghai – 2010. De asemenea, Premierul va participa la inaugurarea zilelor Republicii Moldova la Shanghai , unde va susţine o conferinţă de presă.

La 13 septembrie, la Tianjina, va avea o întrevedere cu Premierul chinez Wen Jiabao, împreună cu care va susţine şi o conferinţă de presă. Ulterior, Vlad FILAT va participa la Forumul Economic Mondial „Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2010” . În penultima zi, oficialul va avea întîlniri cu oameni de afaceri chinezi și cu conducerea mai multor companii importante din China, unde va participa la Forumul economic moldo-chinez, în Beijing.

La expoziția mondială de la Shanghai, alături de Vlad Filat vor participa și mai mulți reprezentanți ai mediului de afaceri de ordin economic. Reprezentanţi ai companiilor vinicole Chateau Vartely, combinatul de vinuri „Cricova”, combinatul de vinuri de calitate „Mileştii Mici”, EuroAlco, Lion Gri, Sălcuţa,Vinăria Bostavan, precum şi conducătorii întreprinderilor Orhei-Vit, Ionel, Litera, Moldovagaz, Moldtelecom, Banca de Economii, Glorinal, Artmet, Consult Grup și mulți alții.

Amintim că la 6 septembrie ne-a vizitat vice-ministrul Culturii Republicii Populare Chineze, Yang Zhijin. Vice-ministrul chinez și Vlad Filat au semnat un program de cooperare, timp de 4 ani, care include o colaborare a Republicii Moldova cu Republica Populară Chineză pe segmentul cultural și comercial economic.

China a decis să acorde R.Moldova ajutor nerambursabil în valoare de 20 mil. yuani (circa 3 mil. dolari SUA)

Prim-ministrul Vlad Filat a avut astăzi la Tianjin, China, o întrevedere cu Wen Jiabao, Preşedintele Consiliului de Stat al Chinei (Prim-ministrul Republicii Populare Chineze). Discuţia s-a axat pe consolidarea relaţiilor bilaterale dintre cele două state, majorarea exporturilor de vinuri moldoveneşti pe piaţa chineză, lansarea unor proiecte de interes comun.

Wen Jiabao a salutat prezenţa prim-ministrului Republicii Moldova în China, menţionînd că în ultimul an relaţia dintre cele două ţări au cunoscut o dezvoltare ascendentă. Premierul chinez a apreciat participarea Prim-ministrului moldovean la Forumul economic Davos.

Wen Jiabao a menţionat că, drept urmare a scrisorii Premierului Vlad Filat, China a decis să acorde Republicii Moldova ajutor nerambursabil în valoare de 20 mil. yuani (circa 3 mil. dolari SUA), pentru lichidarea consecinţelor inundaţiilor care au avut loc în Republica Moldova în acest an, precizînd că ajutorul va fi disponibil în 2011.

Wen Jiabao şi-a exprimat convingerea că cele două state trebuie să intensifice cooperarea. Oficialul a avansat ideea ca Republica Moldova să vină cu propuneri concrete către partea chineză, ceea ce va permite companiilor chineze să beneficieze de oportunităţile oferite de ţara noastră. Premierul chinez a menţionat drept domenii de interes agricultura, telecomunicaţiile şi infrastructura. Wen Jiabao a spus că ţara sa este interesată şi de lansarea parcurilor industriale în ţara noastră.

De asemenea, oficialul a optat pentru intensificarea activităţii Comisiei mixte moldo-chineze, astfel încît aceasta să joace un rol important în atragerea şi valorificarea investiţiilor în interesul ambelor state. Wen Jiabao şi-a exprimat aprecierea faţă de vinurile moldoveneşti.

Vlad Filat a menţionat că personal se va ocupa de administrarea relaţiei moldo-chineze şi de proiectele comune ce vor fi lansate, informează serviciul de presă al guvernului de la Chişinău.

O companie chineză vrea să investească milioane de dolari în RM

Compania chineză „Sinohydro Group ltd.”, care implementează la ora actuală peste 250 de proiecte în valoare de peste 20 de miliarde de dolari, vrea să lanseze câteva proiecte în domeniul infrastructurii drumurilor şi aprovizionării cu apă potabilă şi în Republica Moldova.

Discuţii în acest sens au fost purtate de către premierul Vlad Filat şi vice-preşedintele „Sinohydro Group ltd.”, Sun Yue.

Sun Yue l-a informat pe Vlad Filat că compania are circa 130 mii de salariaţi, care implementează peste 250 de proiecte în 53 de state ale lumii. „Compania acordă o importanţă deosebită relaţiilor economice între China şi Moldova prin implementarea unor proiecte concrete. Pentru aceasta, „Sinohydro Group ltd.” a trimis în Republica Moldova, în acest an, şase grupe de experţi care s-au documentat la faţa locului asupra posibilităţilor de investire în ţara dumneavoastră”, a menţionat Sun Yue.

Sun Yue a precizat că deja au fost identificate domeniile în care urmează a fi lansate proiectele şi că îşi doreşte ca acest proces să demareze cât mai rapid.

„Pentru mine cooperarea dintre două state nu depinde de mărimea suprafeţei statelor, ci de relaţia pe care o au acestea. În cazul Chinei, cred că aceasta este una bine consolidată. Noi ne dorim să lansăm cât mai multe proiecte comune de anvergură, care să vină în interesul cetăţenilor ambelor state”, a specificat Filat.

De menţionat că premierul va întreprinde, la mijlocul lunii septembrie, o vizită oficială în China. Oficialul va avea o întrevedere cu omologul său chinez, dar va participa la mai multe evenimente ce ţin de domeniul economic.

Diferentele dintre GERMANI ŞI CHINEZIci

2010-09-05T04:27:00.000-07:00

Differences Between German and Chinese

A studia şi a nu gândi este o risipă. A gândi şi a nu studia este periculos.

2010-09-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

Confucius>

A studia şi a nu gândi este o risipă. A gândi şi a nu studia este periculos.
Când vorbeşti mult, aproape întotdeauna spui şi ce n-ar trebui spus.
Conştiinţa:... lumina inteligenţei pentru a distinge binele de rău.
Cuvintele sunt vocea inimii.
Este greu să găseşti o pisică neagră într-o cameră întunecată, atunci când ea nu se află acolo.
Fiecare lucru are frumuseţea lui, dar nu oricine o vede.
Ignoranţa este noaptea minţii, dar o noapte fără lună şi stele.
Modestia este fundaţia solidă a tuturor virtuţilor.
Natura ne aseamănă. Educaţia ne deosebeşte.
Numai cei foarte înţelepţi şi cei foarte ignoranţi nu se schimbă.
Nu te ruşina de greşelile tale, transformându-le în crime.
Nu contează cât de încet mergi, atâta vreme cât nu te opreşti.
Nu trebuie să fii trist că n-ai fost remarcat. Fii trist că n-ai făcut nimic remarcabil.
Oamenii se aseamănă în natura lor; obiceiurile îi diferenţiază.
Păstrează credinţa şi sinceritatea ca principii primordiale.
Proştii se plâng că nu sunt cunoscuţi de suficient de mulţi oameni. Înţelepţii se plâng că nu cunosc suficient de mult oamenii.
Raiul înseamnă să fii una cu Dumnezeu.
Tăcerea este prietenul adevărat care nu te trădează niciodată.
Trebuie să ştii să perseverezi pentru a ajunge la echilibru. Trebuie să fii echilibrat pentru a avea posibilitatea să examinezi cu calm şi limpezime. Trebuie să examinezi cu calm şi vedere clară pentru a ajunge la linişte, la încredere. Trebuie să fi obţinut liniştirea, încrederea, pentru a putea discerne esenţialul lucrurilor. Când se discerne esenţialul lucrurilor, se poate atinge scopul.
Unde se găseşte un om care să fie pentru sine însuşi un cenzor sever, un martor, un acuzator, un judecător; care să-şi recunoască vina, să se cheme el însuşi în faţa tribunalului conştiinţei sale, să se recunoască vinovat şi să se pedepsească?
Un tablou este un poem fără cuvinte.
Vrei să trăieşti cum se cuvine? Învaţă mai întâi să mori.

China a lansat un post de ştiri în limba engleză

2010-08-31T06:05:00.000-07:00

Agenţia informaţională de stat din China „Xinghua” a anunţat despre lansarea unei televiziuni de ştiri ce va emite 24 de ore în limba engleză. Postul va fi lansat în regim de testare la 1 mai 2010, iar de la 1 iulie va activa în regim normal.

Responsabili pentru lansarea televiziunii e compania chineză China Network Corporation (CNC), căreia îi aparţine şi agenţia „Xinghua”. Postul TV va transmite ştiri externe, economice, culturale şi emisiuni de interes general dedicate evenimentelor din RPC.

„Xinghua” anunţă că postul va fi recepţionat prin reţelele de cablu şi satelit din America de Nord, Europa, Africa, statele regiunii Asia – Pacific, iar compania CNC va oferi telespectatorilor „o sursă alternativă de informaţie”.

Conform AP, autorităţile RPC sunt nemulţumite de activitatea mass-mediei internaţionale care „e subiectivă şi transmite doar ştiri cu conţinut negativ”.

Tehnologia ameninţă scrierea chinezească

2010-08-30T12:08:00.001-07:00

Dependenţi de celulare şi computere, tinerii asiatici au început să uite să-şi exprime gândurile în scris prin intermediul ideogramelor. Scrisul de mână se transformă într-o adevărată provocare pentru tinerii asiatici de astăzi, conectaţi în permanenţă la noile tehnologii.

Asiaticii care au acum în jur de 20 de ani mărturisesc că le vine greu să-şi aducă aminte ce caractere trebuie să folosească în momentul în care sunt puşi să-şi aştearnă pe hârtie gândurile sau planurile. De vină este tehnologia modernă care îi face pe tineri să uite de pixuri sau stilouri, dar mai ales de caracterele specifice întrucât tot mai mulţi utilizează alfabetul latin, relevă AFP.

Tocmai din această cauză, mulţi dintre elevi şi studenţi au ajuns dependenţi de telefoanele mobile. Practic, ei fac apel la un sistem de
scriere a limbii chineze cu ajutorul alfabetului latin şi invers, folosindu-şi celularele pentru a-şi aminti, din punct de vedere vizual, cum arată ideogramele pe care urmează să le scrie.

Un alt studiu, realizat de portalul Dayang Net din China, a scos la iveală faptul că 80% din respondenţi au uitat cum se scriu anumite caractere. 43% din persoanele intervievate au declarat că scriu cu caractere chinezeşti doar pentru a se semna şi pentru a completa o serie de acte.

Computerele distrug tradiţia

Li Hanwei, o tânără de 21 de ani, studentă la Universitatea din Hong Kong, se confruntă în mod curent cu astfel de probleme. „Când nu-mi amintesc cum se scrie un caracter, îmi iau telefonul, caut caracterul şi încerc să-l copiez, să-l desenez", povesteşte Li. Dacă nu ar avea acest sistem la dispoziţie, ar fi pierdută. Şi nu este singura în această situaţie disperată.

Zeng Ming, în vârstă de 22 de ani, din provincia chineză Guangdong crede că „este vorba de o problemă a tinerilor din ziua de astăzi sau, cel puţin, de o problemă a utilizatorilor de computere".

Siok Wai Ting, asistent universitar la catedra de lingvistică a Universităţii din Hong Kong a explicat că „scrierea chinezească nu poate fi învăţată sistematic, ci trebuie memorată".

Potrivit lui Siok, o problemă şi mai mare ameninţă să prindă contur: cei care uită să scrie aceste caractere au toate şansele să uite şi să citească în limba lor natală. „Scriind, memorăm caracterele. În chineză, scrisul şi cititul sunt într-o legătură strânsă", a afirmat Siok.

Conform cercetărilor făcute la Universitatea din Hong Kong, cititul în limba chineză activează o parte a creierului aflată în apropierea ariei motorii, implicată şi în coordonarea activităţii cerebrale pentru scrisul de mână.

Previziuni adeverite

Liderii chinezi au luat de multă vreme în calcul apariţia unor astfel de situaţii, chiar dacă la acea dată nici nu se punea problema unei dezvoltări exponenţiale a tehnologiei.

Având în vedere gradul de complexitate a caracterelor chinezeşti, în 1936, revoluţionarul lider chinez Mao Zedung i-a spus jurnalistului american Edgar Snow că „mai devreme sau mai târziu, credem că vom fi nevoiţi să le abandonăm dacă vrem să creăm o nouă cultură socială în care să se implice toată lumea". Mao a ales însă doar să simplifice multe dintre ideograme. Acum, dependenţa tinerilor de tehnologie pare să continue această tendinţă.

83% din tinerii chinezi recunosc că au probleme reale când sunt puşi în situaţia de a scrie de mână folosind caractere chinezeşti.

枯籐老 O viţă de vie uscata

2009-12-22T23:12:00.000-08:00

枯籐老樹昏鴉，
小橋流水人家，
古道西風瘦馬。
夕陽西下，
斷腸人在天涯。
O viţă de vie uscata, trunchiul unui copac, negrul amurgului.
Poduleţul pe linga o casă, şi o apă grabită ce murmură
Un drum bătut, şi vintul dinspre vest, caluţul obosit.
Apusul soarelui ce îmi surîde aplecat
Şi inima ce-i frîntă, aici la capătul pămîntului.

CUM China a devenit China...

2009-12-08T12:48:00.001-08:00

China (chineză tradiţională: 中国; chineză simplificată: 中国 Hanyu PinYin: Zhōngguó) este o regiune culturală, o civilizaţie antică, şi, în funcţie de perspectivă, o entitate naţională sau multinaţională extinsă pe o suprafaţă mare în Asia de Est.

China are una dintre cele mai vechi civilizaţii din lume, compusă din state şi culturi datând mai mult de şase milenii. Ea are cel mai vechi sistem de limbă scrisă utilizat în lume şi este privit ca sursa a numeroase invenţii. Istoric, cultura Chinei şi-a extins sfera de influenţă peste Asia de Est prin religie, tradiţii, precum şi prin sisteme de scriere, fiind adoptate de diferite culturi învecinate, cum ar fi Japonia, Coreea şi Vietnam. Primele dovezi ale prezenţei umane în regiune au fost găsite într-o peşteră din Zhoukoudian şi este unul din primele exemple de Homo erectus, acum cunoscut sub numele de Omul din Peking, estimat aproximativ că a trăit de la 300,000 la 550,000 de ani în urmă.

Republica Populară Chineză a fost proclamată la 1 octombrie 1949, după victoria militară a Partidului Comunist Chinez asupra Kuomintang-ului. Cu toate acestea, China în sine este cea mai veche civilizaţie existentă astăzi, are o istorie de peste 5000 de ani. Aceasta este acum o Republica Socialistă, reglementată de un singur partid care are un control asupra celor douăzeci şi două de provincii, cinci regiuni autonome, patru municipalităţi şi două regiuni administrative speciale (Hong Kong şi Macau).

China este una dintre cele cinci membri permanenţi de Securitate al ONU, precum şi membru al Organizatiei pentru Cooperare din Shanghai. În prezent, "Regatul de Mojloc" este clasat pe locul al doilea ca mare economie prin calcul din PIB în paritatea puterii de cumpărare şi a treia de către criteriul monetar. În mod oficial ţară comunistă, Republica Populară Chineză a adoptat o economie socialistă de piaţă în cazul în care liberalismul economic şi controlul politic autoritar intervin împreună într-o formulă specifică.

Chinese POD Sistem de învăţare a limbii chinese

2009-12-02T10:39:00.000-08:00

http://magazeta.com/

Последователям метода Ма™ и всем изучающим китайский язык посвящается. Подборка ссылок на подкасты о Китае и по китайскому языку от нашего читателя и контрибутора Veaceslav.

Помимо таких мега-популярных подкастов, как «Laowaicast», «PODнебесная» и «ChinesePOD», есть ещё и такие:

Видео-подкасты «Watch to Learn Chinese»

Подкасты и уроки от CSLPod

Персональный подкаст китаянки «Ellen's podcast». Учит китайскому, взамен просит поправлять её английский.

Подкасты и уроки китайского от iMandarinPod.

Китайские уроки с Сержем Мельником. Серж живёт в Китае 13 лет, а китайский язык изучает более 20 лет.

podcast BEIJING — англоязычный подкаст о жизни в Пекине, интервью с жителями города.

Learning Mandarin Podcast — аудио-уроки по китайскому языку, как обычно, за дополнительную плату можно получить транскрипты выпусков и упражнения.

Princess Remy's Podcast (黑米公主) — подкаст о Китае и китайском языке из Австрии

Skype-ul ne ajută să învăţăm chineza

2009-11-29T10:38:00.000-08:00

Cel mai evident mod de a vorbi cu cineva din China este prin Skype. Sînt mulţi chinezi care doresc să cunoască rusa sau româna.

Poţi să te întregistrezi pe www.xlingo.com/ and here: www.language-exchanges.org/ şi vei găsi dintre milioanele de chinezi unul, sau UNA care vrea să te înveţe chineza în schimbul rusei romanei sau englezei.

Oamenii în Hong Kong locuiesc în cuşti...ad literam

2009-11-28T06:17:00.000-08:00

Hong Kong Citizens Are Living in Cages… Literally

Grija Guvernului Chinez a fost nemărginită. Multe din victimile lăsate fără case în 2008 a primit din partea autorităţilor locale un "apartament" care este situat într-un bloc industrial.

Cititorule, ia aminte.

Sistemul de transcriere al limbii chineze

2009-11-24T12:37:00.000-08:00

Romanizare este procesul de transcriere a unei limbi în alfabetul latin. Există multe sisteme de romanizare pentru limbile chineză din cauza lipsei de o transcriere nativă fonetică până în timpurile moderne. Chineza pentru prima dată a fost scrisă în caractere latine de misionarii creştini din Europa în secolul al 16-lea.

Astăzi, cele mai frecvente standarde de romanizare pentru limba mandarină este Hanyu Pinyin (汉语拼音 / 汉语拼音), cunoscută de multe ori pur şi simplu ca pinyin, introdusă în 1956 de către Guvernul Republicii Populare Chineze, şi ulterior adoptată de Singapore şi Taiwan. Pinyin este aproape universal folosit acum pentru predarea limbii vorbite chineze în şcoli şi universităţi din America, Australia şi Europa. Părinţi chinezi, de asemenea, utilizează Pinyin pentru a preda copiilor lor, sunete şi tonuri de predare cuvinte noi. Romanizarea Pinyin este, de obicei scrisă sub fiecare caracter chinez.

A doua cel mai frecvent sistem de romanizare, Wade-Giles, a fost inventat de Thomas Wade în 1859 şi modificată de Herbert Giles în 1892. Deoarece acest sistem aproximează fonologic cu consoanele şi vocalele engleze , adică este vorba de o Anglicization, ar putea fi deosebit de utilă pentru incepatorii vorbitori chinezicare provin din ţări anglofone. Wade-Giles a fost utilizată în structurile academice în Statele Unite, în special înainte de anii 1980, şi până de curând a fost utilizată pe scară largă în Taiwan.

Atunci când este folosit în cadrul textelor europene, transcrierile tonul în ambele pinyin şi Wade-Giles sunt adesea lăsat deoparte pentru simplitate; Wade-Giles utilizează apostrofuri. Astfel, cele mai multe cititoare de Vest va fi cu mult mai familiarizaţi cu Beijing decît cu Běijīng (Pinyin), precum şi cu Taipei mai mult de T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles).

Iată câteva exemple de Hanyu Pinyin şi Wade-Giles, pentru comparaţie:

Wade-Giles Hanyu Pinyin
中国/中國 Chung1-kuo² Zhōngguó "China"
北京 Pei³-ching1 Běijīng Capitala Republicii Populare Chineze
台北 T'ai²-pei³ Táiběi Capitala of the Republici China
毛泽东/毛澤東 Mao² Tse²-tung1 Máo Zédōng Liderul Partidului Comunist Chinez
蒋介石/蔣介石 Chiang³ Chieh4-shih² Jiǎng Jièshí Liderul naţionalist cuniscut ca Chiang Kai-shek, cu pronunţie cantoneză)
孔子 K'ung³ Tsu³ Kǒng Zǐ "Confuciu"

Japonezul - Chinezul - Blog despre civilizaţia chineză şi japoneză

Asculta Radio Online în chineza

Invaţă Limba Chineză !!!!

So you want to learn Japanese eh?

Learn Any Language in 6 Months

Learn Any Language in 6 Months

Step X: Prepare Your Mind

Step X: Learn the Characters of Your Target Language

Step X: Using an SRS (Spaced Repetition Software), Make Native Sentence Cards

Step X: Complete Immersion: Input Before Output

Step X: Prioritize

Step X: Make it Fun; Choose Material Comparable to Your Current Interests

Step X: Goal Setting – Small and Achievable with Consistency

Step X: Never Stop Learning

Step X: Further Reading and Resources

Reinventing Language Education

Japanize your environment.

Studying With Japanese Drama: The Step-By-Step Guide

Studying With Japanese Drama: The Step-By-Step Guide

Kind Of Not For Beginners

Step 1: Choose The Right Drama

BOSS Season 1 Episode 1

Subtitles Vs. No Subtitles

Subtitles

No Subtitles

Step 2: Notes + Dorama

Step 3: Vocab

Step 4: Practicing Then Shadowing

Step 5: Repeat & Review

ASCULTA cît mai multa japoneza pentru a trece pragul durerii

ASCULTA c

Învaţam japoneza folosind subtitrarea filmelor

Steps to Start Learning Japanese

Hiragana Song

Как самосу сделать чайник из исинской глины

Изучение японского с промежуточного уровня: Пособие, Рабочая тетрадь, Аудиокурс к пособию

Японская гравюра 17-19 веков Japanese Engraving of the 17-19 Centuries

Восточный дневник дизайнера

Суши - это просто! Секреты традиционной японской кухни

Shinto - religie si traditie

Основы китайской живописи. Энциклопедия

Японские замки 1540-1640

Japoneza 日本語, nihongo

Япония. Незавершенное соперничество

Японский сад за несколько дней

China critică acordarea Premiului Nobel pentru Pace disidentului Liu Xiaobo

Cît cheltuie o familie în China pentru produse alimentare

Mao Zedong

Ce este Pǔtōnghuà 普通话?

Common Phrases

Китай поможет Молдавии преодолеть "винную" зависимость от России

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard

by David Moser University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies

1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.

2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.

3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.

4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.

5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.

6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).

7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.

8. Because tonal languages are weird.

9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met.

Conclusion

Bibliography

Notes

Modele pentru caligrafia chineză

Vlad Filat descoperă China

Prim-ministrul Vlad FILAT a avut astăzi la Tianjin, China, o întrevedere cu Wen JIABAO, Preşedintele Consiliului de Stat al Chinei (Prim-ministrul Republicii Populare Chineze)

Filat alături de 38 de businessmani a plecat în China

China a decis să acorde R.Moldova ajutor nerambursabil în valoare de 20 mil. yuani (circa 3 mil. dolari SUA)

O companie chineză vrea să investească milioane de dolari în RM

Diferentele dintre GERMANI ŞI CHINEZIci

A studia şi a nu gândi este o risipă. A gândi şi a nu studia este periculos.

China a lansat un post de ştiri în limba engleză

Tehnologia ameninţă scrierea chinezească

枯籐老 O viţă de vie uscata

CUM China a devenit China...

Chinese POD Sistem de învăţare a limbii chinese

Skype-ul ne ajută să învăţăm chineza

Oamenii în Hong Kong locuiesc în cuşti...ad literam

by David Moser
University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies