Finished the (No Typing) Essential Cantonese Vocabulary course on Memrise

Where “finished” means I did half the course, because the other half is the same sentences or words, just with the card reversed. (No Typing) Essential Cantonese Vocabulary is a fully-voiced audio course on Memrise which takes you from “Hello” to long advertising slogans and tongue-twisters which aren’t exactly essential but are fun to learn.

As a Cantonese learner who has been stuck at intermediate for years and is now trying to break through to the advanced level, what I need most is vocabulary and native-level audio and video input. While the speech in this course is a little slower and a lot clearer than what you’ll hear people on Hong Kong radio, TV and Youtube speaking, it’s still enough to be a good reference and you will hear much of the vocab being used on an everyday basis.

I’d say it’s a really good course for those on the beginner-to-intermediate level, but after that what you really need is just regular native conversation from regular native content. At the very least you should move on to natural content for children like Peppa Pig in Cantonese on Youtube (download it ASAP before it gets taken down).

However, it’s still a worthwhile experience when you’ve just reached intermediate, because you will inevitably have some gaps in your vocabulary. For example, I didn’t know all the parts of the body, I didn’t know the names of some clothing items like scarves and high heels, common food ingredients like oyster sauce and hoisin sauce, etc.

And getting more sentence practice while I was at it was a good thing as well. Memrise works by repeated words and phrases over and over again until they’re burned into your brain, so my recall of the stuff I learned is really high.

If I had to criticize the Essential Cantonese Vocabulary it would be for two things. Firstly, half the deck is wasted on repeats, so it’s really only about 900 cards instead of almost 2000 like you might first expect. And secondly there are a few mistakes that haven’t been fixed despite being pointed out ages ago, probably because the deck is no longer being maintained.

But those are just minor criticisms. If you’ve finished the usual gauntlet of basic textbooks like “Teach Yourself Cantonese” and Youtube videos and you’re still feeling a bit weak in terms of everyday vocabulary, this is a good place to fill in some gaps, refresh your memory or cement what you’ve learned into your brain.

In any case, there are very few intermediate or advanced Memrise Cantonese courses that take you past the basic level and have both Cantonese characters (not jyutping! say no to romanization once you’re past the beginner level!) and quality audio. Apart from this one, I only know of Intermediate Cantonese w Audio, mostly taken from Adamn Sheik’s Cantonese website and Cantonese through Song, now sadly abandoned.

So if you use Memrise and you’re learning Cantonese, this is one of the few options you’ve got, so have at it!

For me, my next step is to move on to native Hong Kong dramas and TV shows with Chinese subtitles, not English. I tested myself briefly with an episode of Wong Fei Hung and realized I could understand about 80% of what was happening as long as I checked the subs. For now I will work through all the Cantonese Peppa Pig episodes on YouTube while searching for Cantonese (not “written Chinese”) subtitles. I’ll share any findings I make here so fellow learners can benefit. See you in a bit~.

 

Trying to learn Mandarin with the Spoonfed Chinese Anki deck

Exactly what it says in the title – I’m thinking of learning Mandarin Chinese and I’ve found a promising tool for it. Anki is a spaced repetition system that helps you memorize stuff, Google it. And in addition to uploading your own sentences, you can also download pre-made decks where people have compiled and shared their vocabulary lists, sentences, etc. I’m already using four of these intermittently for Korean and Cantonese:

FSI Cantonese
Cantonese Words
Korean Grammar Sentences by Evita
Korean 한자어 Vocabulary Builder (Sino-Korean words)

Now I just added one more: SpoonFed Chinese. 8000+ Mandarin sentences supposedly arranged in order of difficulty so they regularly introduce new vocabulary items and grammar concepts. The idea is that by the time you work through the whole deck, you will have a ton of vocabs and grammar as well as reading and listening practice so you will be functionally competent in Mandarin.

Does it work? I googled around for a bit, but didn’t get enough results to prove it. Most people who use the SpoonFed Chinese deck do so with a number of other resources, and those who said they would use it exclusively have never reported back on their results. I myself plan to use it exclusively at first, but will branch out into other stuff if I find Mandarin interesting enough to stick with.

Full disclaimer: I’m not a complete beginner at Mandarin Chinese. I took a semester of Chinese in college ages ago and I’ve been learning Cantonese for many years now. I would say I’m an upper beginner in Mandarin and maybe medium-intermediate in Cantonese? So if I come back months later and say “Hey, look at all these cool things I can do with Mandarin now!” you should know that I didn’t start from zero. I.e. “results may not be typical.”

Before I go, I should answer the question no one is asking: why Mandarin, and why now? I took that semester in Chinese in college and dropped it because I wasn’t very interested in China or in Chinese culture. And I’m still not, not really. But in the past year I’ve been reading more Chinese webtoons and romance web novels, and some of them are pretty fun.

I’m really grateful to the companies and fan translators who make it possible for me to enjoy the better series (especially the non-rapey, non-abusive prince/CEO titles, which are like 1 in a million). At the same time, sometimes you see a series on NovelUpdates and it has over 1000 chapters… but only 10 are translated. Case in point, The Delicate Prince and His Shrewd Peasant Consort.

I appreciate the free translations, but in the 2.5+ years it would take for this series to be fully translated, I’m pretty sure I could learn enough Chinese to read it for myself. Assuming I put in a lot of hard work and didn’t lose motivation, which is a big “assuming.” Which is also why I’m not spending money on many resources or books or anything. Just SpoonFed Chinese to begin with, then we’ll see.

How often will I update on this pet project? Not very often, because I’m not that serious about it. Korean and Cantonese still come first before Mandarin. Let’s aim for either updates every 6 months or every 10% of the deck, whichever comes first. Either way it will be a fun experiment, so look forward to the results!

Anyone know how to export Surusu decks to Anki?

Like it says in the topic, I want to export Surusu decks to Anki. Surusu and Anki are both SRS (spaced repetition something-or-the-other) programs that help with learning new vocabulary and stuff. I used Surusu for a couple of years then stopped SRSing altogether. Recently I picked it up again recently and switched to Anki instead of Surusu for the following reasons

  • Surusu hasn’t updated in a while. The owner Khatz of All Japanese All the Time hasn’t updated his blog in ages so the tool is most likely good as dead.
  • Anki has a better community in case I need a little extra help.
  • I like the Anki interface a little better. Barebones Surusu was good when I had a slow, unreliable connection but now I don’t really need it. It just looks cluttered.
  • I have a Moto E smartphone and a Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet now, and I like the slick look of Ankidroid, so I recently started using it. Strictly speaking I could get by just fine with the desktop version with syncs to the web version, but I’m a sucker for apps.
  • I like having a desktop version of my SRS deck instead of having everything stored on someone’s server that could go poof at any time.
export surusu decks to anki
Surusu vs Anki, which one is better? (psst: It’s not Surusu)

The last point in particular is a big issue for me since I have a lot of cards in Surusu. Which brings me back to my main question, how do I export those cards and either import them into Anki or just leave them lying around my computer as is my right because they are my cards?

I did some research online but the only concrete result I found was over 3 years old and pointed to this possible solution on Github which involves installing Ruby (who’s she?) and something called “scrapi gem” on my computer. The instructions themselves don’t look that complicated, but I thought I’d cast about online for other possible solutions first. If nothing turns up/I manage to work something out, I’ll post it here to be fair, but in the meantime, anyone have any ideas? Any positive experiences trying to retrieve your decks from Surusu? Please share, thanks!

Going My Way

Nothing interesting’s going on with me, I’m still plodding faithfully along. I gave up on books for now to focus on internet resources. I was lucky enough to come across Milan’s Cantonese blog with several Cantonese monologues recorded by his wife, a native Cantonese speaker. They’ve made excellent sacrifices to my Cantonese SRS deck, MWA HA HA HA HA! I’m happy with how much I’ve learned from them so far, but I’m also encouraged by how much I already understand. I can’t call myself a beginner any more, maybe more like a lower-intermediate learner. I can get the gist of most things I listen to, and even understand quite a bit of some topics. As for the news, once they have those Mandarin subtitles up, it’s all over for them. Needless to say, I enjoy watching the news quite a bit.

Or more like I enjoyed it, because the ATV stream I used to watch regularly suddenly went down a few nights ago. I’m heart-broken sad Now I have to find a new source of terrible dramas and annoying tourism shows and endless mahjong tournaments and pro-Beijing news to watch. It was fun to have ATV streaming away whether I watched it or not, and I learned a ton of new characters and compounds from the news broadcasts. But it does no good to lament the past, just got to keep moving forward. I’m sure I’ll find something else eventually.

Two more radio programs

This time for Japanese. I scribbled them down on my noticeboard, but I forgot to note which programs they were. Knowing myself, they’re almost certainly music programs, most likely Japanese 60s, 70s and 80s classics, because that’s what I listen to the most. Anyway, they’re both on Sankakuyama FM, Wednesdays at 8pm GMT and Fridays at 9pm GMT. I used to really like Sankakuyama FM because they had a great mix of music and talk, and because their stream was fairly low quality it could stream on my slow connection without a hitch.

Unfortunately the other day I started listening and there was this right-wing guy on spouting all this racist crap about Koreans and Russians and how they think they’re better than everyone else, and that kind of pissed me off. I know Japan’s been having trouble with Russia lately, but to cast aspersion in all Russians because of that is the height of ignorance. So yeah, I’ve been souring on them a bit lately, but I still listen when that idiot isn’t on.

Cantonese is going well, I’m up to Lesson 23 of Teach Yourself Cantonese! And I finally learned to say “computer” and “fax machine” (actually I’d already learned them elsewhere, but let’s pretend I hadn’t), but not “internet” or “e-mail”. I’ve been going at a pretty good pace, but yesterday I wasn’t up to it and skipped a day of review. Yikes, 180+ items backed up in my SRS! I’m still catching up even now.