Learning - Animefangirl!

Finished the FSI Cantonese Anki deck (a sort of review)

As I wrote a few posts ago, I’m mostly dropping Cantonese in 2021. However I don’t want to lose my progress entirely over the course of the year, so I’ll still be reviewing my Anki deck cards and Memrise lessons, reading and watching a little Cantonese here and there, that sort of thing. Shortly before Christmas 2020, I finished up the FSI Cantonese Anki deck, so I figured I should say a few words about it here, this being my language blog in addition to anime/manga. However did I make any progress from it? I think I did, but it’s hard to tell because:

I have no objective standard for marking my progress. I didn’t take any tests before, or try to understand something and fail etc. There’s no way to do an effective “Before and After.”
I didn’t use the FSI deck exclusively. I also used a Cantonese vocabulary deck, the Cantonese conversations at OPLingo (fantastic resource, try it for sure), Peppa Pig in Cantonese and a bunch of other resources. After all it took months to complete the FSI deck, so it didn’t make sense to stick to one resource exclusively.
The FSI Cantonese Anki deck is pretty basic. I’ve been studying the language long enough that most of it was old-hat in terms of vocabulary and structure.

So while I do feel I improved a bit in Cantonese listening comprehension and reading comprehension last year, I can’t give the FSI Cantonese deck any solo credit for helping me get better. I will say three things though.

It’s a good resource for reading written Cantonese. I’ve lost track of the number of materials I’ve seen with Mandarin/Standard Chinese subtitles or text. That’s how it’s done on a native level, but it’s not helpful for beginners at all. I mean eventually you’ll have to adapt to listening in one language and reading in another, but in the early stages, a pure Cantonese resource is great.
It’s also a good resource for understanding Cantonese spoken at close to regular speed. There’s a good mix of both men and women chatting about a variety of everyday topics without making the dialogues feel excessively “manufactured.” Though the conversations never really “go” anywhere. They’re just snippets, so if you want full conversations, check the OPLingo site I linked earlier.
There still aren’t many Cantonese materials aimed at the intermediate-to-advanced learner. And especially not those that include both audio and an accurate text transcript. And doubly-especially not free and still available. So there’s no reason not to use this deck if you can find it.

Here is the Anki link. As I often say for Cantonese, you don’t exactly have a lot of options, so you might as well take what you can get.

In contrast, I just picked up a couple of good Korean decks because I’ve almost exhausted all of Evita’s decks and finished the Hanja deck as well. I’ve had so little to review lately that I’ve been doing more and more of the Spoonfed Chinese deck I said I was putting on hold. But that changes today. Back to learning more Korean so I can read promising series like “The Emperor Reverses Time” and “The Villainess is a Marionette” without having to deal with scanlation drama. See ya!

Dropping Cantonese to focus on Korean in 2021

It’s January again! And January has traditionally been the time for setting language-learning targets. And then February-December is the time for ignoring those goals and doing something else entirely!

You probably don’t remember, but in January 2020 I planned to work on both my Cantonese and Korean throughout the year. And indeed I did my best to do what I’d said I would do.

Giving up on Cantonese

For Cantonese, I found several resources for upper-intermediate learners trying to transition to native level texts/videos. The most important and most helpful was OPLingo/Language Tools’ Cantonese Conversations, 100 native-level dialogues with transcripts and audio. They’re not paying me for this endorsement, btw. I’m genuinely giving my thoughts on a bright oasis amidst a desert of useful Cantonese learner resources. I worked my way through several of those dialogues, and if time permits I’ll give a more detailed review another time.

I also watched the usual “Peppa Pig in Cantonese” as well as other Youtube resources like “Cantonese with Brittany” and “100 Cantonese dialogues.” But after all that, I still don’t feel like I’ve gotten much better at Cantonese.

To be honest, my immersion is just too low right now. I barely watched any Cantonese movies or dramas last year, I rarely listen to RTHK these days, and the little Chinese manhua I did read raw was all in Mandarin. Furthermore, I don’t anticipate this situation changing much this year – I don’t plan to watch much in Cantonese, plus anything I do want to watch will probably be subtitled, so why should I push myself so hard to learn the original language?

That’s the problem, really. I’ve lost sight of my original motivation to learn Cantonese. Or rather I still remember it, but it’s not enough to sustain me any more. Originally I loved the sound of the language and the free-spirited culture of Hong Kong, so I just wanted to learn to speak it myself. That kind of loose motivation just isn’t enough to push me through the tough hurdles to true fluency.

Not to mention Hong Kong itself is on the decline… growing numbers of people speak Mandarin as a first language in Hong Kong, and the “free-spirited culture” is being rapidly destroyed by the Chinese Communist Party… but we can save that topic for another day.

Contrast all this with my Korean progress

By the end of December 2020, I’d become capable of reading Korean manhwa in the raw. With copious lookups in Naver dictionary, of course (I’ll explain the actual process of reading a Korean manhwa with the Naver Dictionary app in a future post). But I still enjoyed reading the raws of My Husband’s Reversal and What it Takes to be a Villainess and then comparing them to the official translated version when they come out.

I’m really happy to discover that most of the time, there are few differences between what I think a manhwa said and what it actually said. That means I’m understanding most of what I read! It’s still a struggle because I forget vocabulary between chapters (I need to use an SRS) but it’s very rewarding.

Plus I’m currently working through Billy Go’s Korean Reading Made Simple and finding that I understand 80-90% of each text even before I read the explanations and translations provided. That’s a text aimed at intermediate learners, so I can proudly declare myself to be an Intermediate Korean Learner!! Yay! Of course I’m only halfway through the book, but I’m already feeling pretty good about myself.

I’ll be honest with you guys though: knowing Japanese and Cantonese really helps with Korean! Especially if you use hanja to help you learn vocabulary! I feel like I’ve said it before somewhere but I’ll repeat it: if you have a Japanese/Chinese background and are contemplating learning Korean, go for it! It’ll be much easier than you think!

Summary

The TL;DR is that Cantonese has gotten hard and unrewarding while Korean is still easy and very rewarding. Human Behavior 101 demands that I focus on the activity that is giving me the most dividends at this point in time.

My goal for Cantonese, therefore, is to shelve it, focus on Korean, then pick it up again in 2022 if I miss it. That said, I’m not 100% dropping it. I’d lose too much hard-earned proficiency that way. So I plan to watch at least one Cantonese movie/drama episode a month. And to read through at least one of the Cantonese Conversation dialogues a week. And of course I still love Cantonese pop music so I’ll keep listening to my collection. Apart from that, I won’t push myself.

For Korean, my goal remains unchanged. I want to read manhwa comfortably in the raw! Official translation companies like Tappytoon have gotten really good at releasing accurate, high-quality chapters in a timely fashion, no complaints there. BUUUUT in most cases they’re still behind the raws, and I’m greedy and don’t want to wait.

“She was sent by god” has been stalled at chapter 9 for almost 6 months!

Besides, raw manhwa is just the first step in my ambitions to read Korean romance web novels in the raw! There are sooooo many out there that have just started being translated. There’s like 3 chapters here, 7 chapters there, 5 chapters of this other one. So frustrating!! And it’s not like there’s a regular schedule for most of these translations either. Groups just grab titles to keep them away from other groups, then hoard them for ages with scanty releases.

Plus sometimes, to be honest, the translations are completely crap. Sorry, it’s the truth. Even without access to the raws, the quality of the “English” and the nonsensical text alone tells you that it’s bad. Some of it is barely cleaned-up machine translation, and for some reason, Korean MTL is even worse than Japanese and Mandarin MTL. It’s nigh unreadable.

Sooo… for this year I’m going to focus on the manhwa and leave the novels alone. I want to get the point where I refer to a dictionary sparingly or not at all when reading basic romance manhwa of the sort I indulge myself in lately. I’m already close to that point, just need a lot more vocabulary and a little more grammar. We’ll review the situation again in January 2022 and take it from there, God willing. See you then!

Spoonfed Chinese experiment on hold

You may remember I said two months ago that I was going to try learning Mandarin Chinese with the Spoonfed Chinese Anki deck and very little else. If you don’t remember, refer to that post here. I said I would provide an update every 10% of the way, which is approximately how far I’ve gotten with it now. However I’m going to have to put the experiment on hold for a very simple reason:

Mandarin is interfering with my Cantonese.

The two languages have some significant differences, but they’re ultimately very, very similar. This will be great for me when I finally get round to learning Mandarin seriously, but right now my Cantonese isn’t quite good enough yet.

I’m just stepping into Advanced now and picking up more key vocabulary. When I learn to pronounce something one way in Cantonese, then right away step into the Spoonfed deck and learn to say it a different way, it honestly messes with my head. The net result is I don’t learn it in either language. With enough repetition it sticks eventually, but it’s frustrating and makes me dread learning instead of look forward to it.

All hope is not lost, though. I don’t want to lose the gains I’ve made with Mandarin so far, so I’m going to set the deck to give me only 1 new card ever day. That way I still get to revise what I know already, and still continue to learn at a drastically reduced rate.

Eventually, once I consider myself proficient in Cantonese, I’ll be able to return with more seriousness. It will be like my Japanese levels, where I can comfortably read 結果 as “kekka” in Japanese and as “gitgwo” in Cantonese without any problems. I’ve heard of people working on both Mandarin and Cantonese at the same time, but I don’t have the background they do (or the resilience and intelligence, shrug) so I’m not going to force myself.

Brief comment on the Spoonfed Chinese Anki deck though: it’s really good. Some might consider it repetitive, but it’s great for me. It gives a new vocabulary item, hammers it in with some examples, then moves on to the next item. And it frequently incorporates other things you’ve learned in the past so you don’t forget them. You’ll just be building your Chinese reading skills brick by brick, sentence by sentence. And speaking skills too, if you did like I did and sounded each sentence out loud.

So if you’re learning just Mandarin or if you’re made of sterner stuff than me, I recommend it all the way. Other languages have sentence decks as well, but at least for Cantonese and Korean I haven’t seen anything as systematic and easy to follow. That’s all the more reason why I don’t want to quit entirely but merely sloooow down to a crawl for now.

Any Cantonese progress?

Things are looking up on the Cantonese front. I recently found a great tool which is just what I need to push me over the Intermediate plateau. It’s the Reading tool on Languages.io, specifically the Cantonese Conversations course. 100 native-level conversations with full audio and written Cantonese. Amazing! I’ll write a fuller report once I’ve fooled around with it a little more, but I’m seeing great progress already just from listening to each one. There is light at the end of the Cantonese tunnel at last!

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!