Hi, my name is Niel, otherwise known as Confused Laowai. I blog about my exciting, yet often confusing adventure learning Chinese.
The misty haze of Chinese dialects
Some linguists spend their lifetime on the topic of dialects and language classifications. Then we get the Chinese dialect continuum. Ooh boy. Time and time again I find it so hard to explain to people how Chinese dialects are viewed. You get “dialects” such as Min, Hakka, Wu etc, but then you also get dialects such as the Taiwan or Beijing dialect, which are actually variants of Mandarin itself, in accent, slang and vocabulary. What’s [...]
The Four Strands of Language Learning
In the pursuit of acquiring a language, there are various methods, techniques, guides and approaches which are often emotionally and personally motivated. In my research, and on a personal level, I’m interested foreign language acquisition. It fascinates me. I’m not the best language learner out there. I’ve only been learning one foreign language (Chinese) since University, while now and then dabbling on other languages, like Spanish or Japanese. However, my pursuit in understanding the processes [...]
Onomatopoeia in Chinese
Onomatopoeia, that darn impossible word to write. I always get it wrong! (I had to check this post a few times) Alas, enough about English’s terrible spelling rules and onto Chinese. I always thought that onomatopoeia in a language was not arbitrary, in the sense that people recreate the sounds in word form. That’s what onomatopoeia is supposed to do right: The formation of a word, as cuckoo, meow, honk, or boom, by imitation of [...]
5 ways Chinese radicals are sub-consciously trolling you
As you might or might not know, I’m doing research at present into Chinese Vocabulary Acquisition focused on Spaced Repetition Systems. One of the areas I’m looking at is Chinese orthography, specifically Chinese radicals and how it influences word recognition. I’ve read through quite a lot of papers and interesting stuff happens when you read Chinese characters. One, is the influence of Chinese radicals in processing words and characters. But they all aren’t positive. Sometimes, [...]
A visit from Beijing JiaoTong University and how 姜 trolled me
Last week, a few professors from Beijing JiaoTong University visited the lab I’m doing research at. I was nervous the whole week as I knew I’d have to talk in Chinese to them. I hardly get speaking practice in South Africa, which I know is my worst ability in Chinese at the moment! I looked up a lot technical terms yesterday, which I didn’t even end up using when I talked. Yes, I’m nervous like [...]
Tonally Orthographic Pinyin
I found out this really cool way to write Pinyin while browsing the Chinese Stack Exchange (ps. which you guys must join!). It’s called Tonally Orthographic Pinyin. Its main aim is to make tone marks redundant. The creator said this: The TOP system is redundantly marked for tones: with colors, with capital and small letters, and with the standard Hanyu Pinyin tone marks. So, where you would get “Nǐ huì shuō yīngwén ma?” in TOP [...]
So what color is 青 really? Blue? Green? Help!
Oh boy. Here we go again with Chinese confusing the hell out of me. Today’s culprit is 青. Yes, that one that appears in 青年 meaning youth. I almost want to make a knee-jerk old timer joke about how confusing the youth are these days, but I’d resist. So, why am I confused about 青, because it seems to represent so many different colors! From “nature’s color” to “blue” to “green” to “greenish black”… heck [...]
I have a drinking problem
Heyoooo. Gotta love sensationalist headlines right!? Don’t worry this is not a hungover post or drunk blogging, but rather an interesting thing I noticed the other day. I was busy creating a website (which will be online tomorrow, so expect another blog post tomorrow or Tuesday) when I typed the character for drinking. You all know it. It is written as 喝. However, something strange happened. The character was different. Now let me show you [...]
Oddities in Chinese: Hanyu Pinyin Syllables
I’ve been learning Chinese for almost four years now (a few more months to go). I still discover interesting things about Mandarin everyday. I remember back in 1st year of Chinese, we went through the Pinyin chart of syllables, getting the grips of Chinese pronunciation. Syllable after syllable we went: bo, po, mo, fo etc etc. Little did I know that now three years later I’m still finding some oddities in these syllable charts and [...]
Radtacular Radicals
I’ve been reading some academic papers lately. I’m trying to find research on the importance of radicals in Chinese Orthography. It basically confirms what we all know, radicals are important in Chinese character recognition and learning. Chinese Orthography is complex, thanks to its logographic writing system. However, I’ve been hard at work trying to figure out if there is a better way to learn Chinese Characters/Vocabulary than mnemonics/srs/rote repetition etc. The answer to me lies [...]
