learning more context about new vocab words

[gegehuhu]

I live in China self-study Mandarin.

My method is mainly to soak up new vocabulary from my environment (spoken and written), add it to excel spreadsheets on my computer, and memorize the new characters and words one by one. I use MDGB and NCIKU as my main online sources.

NCIKU is helpful mainly because of all the example sentences. So I can try to understand how the new word is used in context.

But I still have a desire to learn more context about these words to better help me (accurately) incorporate them into my daily usage.

Specifically there are a couple pieces of information I'd love to have access too. And so I'm asking all of you out there in the Chinese learning community if you have any idea if this kind of information has been documented or published anywhere.

Mind you, this information is fairly subjective. There's no way it could ever be documented scientifically. That said, I think common sense says one ought to be able to make a pretty good estimate.

The information is:

a) the frequency of use of a particular word, and

B) whether the word is mainly found in written chinese (书面) or in spoken chinese (口语)

I've gotten tripped up on these time and again. English doesn't seem to have quite a solid line between written language and spoken language. Obviously, there is a difference. But I feel that in English the division is more about class. For certain members of the intellectual class , spoken English can be just as deep as written English. As a relatively new Chinese learner, it strikes me as odd that there are so many words that you simply can't use in spoken language because they are considered appropriate only in written English. I wonder how much of this is post-1949

[anonymoose]

A good resource for this is Google. Simply search for the word in question, and see how other people have used it.

If you search for just one word, often that word will appear in the title of the result pages, and may not be very useful if it's not in a complete sentence. To get around this, try searching for another word simultaneously, and you will likely get much more useful results. For example, suppose you want to know how to use the word 谨慎. A Google search comes up with many results, but most of the first ones will not be very helpful if you want to find authentic examples of how it is used in practice. So think of any other unrelated word, say 狗腿子 just for example, and search for that simultaneously. Then you will get many results that contain the word that you were looking for in the first place, and you can just ignore the second word.

As for the difference between written and spoken language, I think you will develop a feel for it as your Chinese improves. Dictionaries often say if a word is usually reserved for written usage only, but even in Chinese, the boundary between spoken and written language is not absolute. A formal speech, for example, is likely to contain a lot more bookish language than informal chatter.

[creamyhorror]

The dictionary Wenlin has frequency data. You can also search the corpuses out there for frequency and usage examples (e.g. the Sinica Corpus (traditional Chinese) and the UCLA Corpus (simplified)). The UCLA corpus even has genre statistics, so you know how often the word appears in mystery novels as opposed to news reports.

Jukuu works well for parallel sentences when NCiku isn't enough. It also has a nice pie chart showing the breakdown of the English words that were used to translate the entered Chinese word.

[chrix]

gegehuhu, English does too. When I was a high school student on exchange in Australia, I once told my classmates something like "I want to purchase a car" and that sounded pretty ridiculous (that's what happens when you spend five hours a day reading the newspaper ). But you're right, due to the huge influence of Classical Chinese on the written language, the gap might indeed be bigger in Chinese (there's also the issue of regionalisms and so forth), though it's not absolute.

You will get a feel as you progress in your studies as anonymoose has said (especially if you study some Classical Chinese ), but you could also read books on this topic as "Expressions of Written Chinese".

As far as frequency data goes, a number of researchers have put their data online, but you always have to consider the source of the data. Often frequency data is based on newspaper corpora and so would be more representative of written language (as a matter of fact, there are very few corpora of spoken Chinese).

[gegehuhu]

thanks for everyone's responses so far. some very useful stuff in there!

anonymoose, i had trying google too, but just for search result numbers to compare the frequency of synonyms, etc. your idea for double-word searches is very sharp.

chrix, i suppose you're right. some words sound too bookish in spoken english. i'm not so sure your example of "i want to purchase a car" fits into that category, though. if you said that sentence to me, it would sound completely normal to me. i'd probably say the same thing myself. there's nothing bookish about the word "purchase". its a perfectly normal, everyday word

[chrix]

Well, my Australian high school class mates would disagree (or at least did so when they were in high school), and a least some of my dictionaries do. But speaking of dictionaries, try to get some good dictionaries that mark 書面語 as such. It won't be consistent, as there's never a clear line, but it might help.

Also, you could buy books about the Chinese lexicon. For instance, I have a book that's called HSK词汇精解 that basically discusses synonyms, and they usually note whether a word is more likely to be used in the spoken or written language.

[anonymoose]

Well, my Australian high school class mates would disagree (or at least did so when they were in high school), and a least some of my dictionaries do.

I think foreigners often have less latitude for bending the rules than do native speakers. Certainly if I heard a native speaker say "I want to purchase a car", I wouldn't think there's anything unusual about it. The use of the word "purchase" might stand out more if it were said by a foreigner.

[chrix]

I guess you had to be there... it's not like I completely recall the exact context after all these years, but in this case it was really a case of using too big words..