Is it just me? Or does anyone only study low-tech?

[Elizabeth_rb]

Hi everyone!

 

Browsing various threads here, I'm often stumped by the high-tech language learning methods that seem to have completely evaded me.  I don't even know what several of them are, and Lang-8 along with a few interesting blog subscriptions are the only non-print resources I use to support my Chinese learning.  (Not counting native speakers, of course!! )  

 

I have a few probably very old and passé websites bookmarked from a few years ago, but none of the new ones and I rarely even look at the ones I do know.  The fact that my smartphone totally refuses to download and install any apps aside, I have nothing like that either.  I (well, 'we' actually, as my hubby is also a regular Chinese user) just have a shelf or three loaded with about 100 study texts including course books, grammar reference and workbooks, dictionaries and specific things like situational vocab, radicals and measure words.  He uses the odd ChinesePod recording here and there too, but that really is it.

 

Does anyone else make much use of the print stuff these days?  Is there anyone out there who, like me, doesn't even have an electronic dictionary (Sir does have one of those...) and rarely/never uses on-screen learning?  I don't think it's wrong to do that, or better not to, just curious if I'm the only one and am hopelessly out of touch or what???

 

 

[Hofmann]

Not sure about the others, but I took university courses, where we used paper textbooks. I usually bought used ones. Other people's markings can be surprisingly useful.

 

However, I still use electronic resources such as popup dictionaries, electronic flashcards, and dictionaries with handwriting recognition for their convenience.

[Elizabeth_rb]

Mm, maybe that's it.  I too did uni courses and so did Sir (my hubby).  Seems like most folk here are studying independently.

[Ania]

I personally think that it would be a real waste not the use the new electronic resources, especially that some of them are free, but I do still use textbooks and they are my primary resource for learning. I'm a traditionalist in that respect and somehow I just learn better from paper I do use a lot of what the internet has to offer (especially different kinds of podcasts and specially prepared graded reading material), but I like the structure of a textbook and I use all those "new age" reseources as supplements to my textbook learning. One of the great advantages of many podcasts is that I can listen to them in my car when I drive to work and unlike in textbook listening exercises, everything is explained, so I don't need to look at the script when I don't understand something. And that gives me 2 extra hours of learning a day, which I otherwise wouldn't have. But when I'm studying home I really do prefer good old fashioned textbooks

 

As far as dictionaries and grammar reference books, right now I don't own any in paper form, but I do plan on getting a strictly grammaar book soon. However I have abandoned paper dictionaries altogether I no longer use them for anything, not in my professional life and not for studying Chinese.

[Elizabeth_rb]

Thanks Ania.

 

Can you recommend any free resources??  I'm watching kids' vids on YouTube just now....!!!

[Ania]

There's a wonderful list of reaources in this thread: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/8195-best-of-chinese-study-tools-studying-chinese-online-and-off/ Many of them are free, so take a look and see if anything catches your attention and sutis your level and expectations

[deathtrap]

Unfortunately I live in Jordan, and it's many times faster to use electronic media than waiting for physical media to be shipped here. It's also usually double the price due to shipping + customs. I have a few physical textbooks and readers but the vast majority of my study materials are electronic.

 

I'm a comp.sci. graduate and software developer by trade so electronic gear is just second nature. Right now I have a physical textbook and a grammar book open, iPad, Galaxy note 2, 2 laptops, and a 32" monitor all sitting here with Chinese materials open on them(forums, grammar books, Audacity) and the 32" usually has a video and ebook open. Youtube is usually up for watching a quick video every now and then. Pleco is always open on my Note 2 because it's so easy to look things up with the handwriting support, it seriously kicks ass. 

[Shelley]

I have taken some evening classes both private and ones at our local university, these all used paper based materials but as a life long self studier I have hoarded ( yes it probably is a bit of a strong word but its sort of like that) any and all Chinese learning material i can get my hands on paper or electronic.

 

Have to agree with deathtrap Pleco is the bees knees. It is worth the cost of an entry level android or apple phone ( just make sure it will run Pleco spec wise) to have this excellent app at your disposal.

 

It all has its uses, once you have you would miss it, so if you manage fine with out it all,  then well done and carry on.

 

P.S. I have about 10 times the amount of shelves you show in your picture stuffed with Chinese text books and other Chinese related books, so its probably a good thing that some of my more recent stuff is electronic

[Lu]

I did all of my initial learning on paper, and have a pile of books of a similar size (and you have a faded Beginning Chinese reader just like me! I think they're almost antique by now :-) ). Almost all my reading I still do in paper books. But almost all my dictionary needs I meet with computer and Pleco (not just electronic dictionaries, also google image, wikipedia, you name it), and the studying I do these days is with Anki on my phone. If I would start again now, or if I would start on a new language, I'd probably do it the old-fashioned way again, with a textbook and a teacher. It's what works for me. But if other things work better for other people, good for them and good that other things are around.

[Gharial]

It's always nice to get a peek at people's bookshelves.   I've got all those dictionaries (and more!) bar the Times one, plus quite a few grammars besides the Yip & Rimmington. I like the Hugo and Scurfield courses but would replace the Kan Qian version of Colloquial Chinese with the original by T'ung & Pollard.   I'll take some photos of my shelves a bit later and post 'em. Anyway...I agree with the others that it'd be worth investing in a new smartphone and downloading stuff like Pleco, that's a great app and just the thing when you're away from your books and even your PC.

 

I started studying Chinese ("postgrad" Dip) in the mid 90s, so there wasn't really a great choice of media available. Paper was king, and electronic stuff rare or expensive. The good thing with paper publishing is that it is (or should be) a meticulous process, and the product has to be of reasonably high quality to justify the venture. I guess some e-products (such as some of the dictionaries offered by Pleco) wouldn't be quite as good had they not been print versions originally (not that they weren't compiled using computers!).

 

The main advantage of machine-readable stuff other than portability is that you can find every instance of an item, and in any position (not just head/initial). It's a shame that many older, paper-based resources haven't yet been typed up and input into computers. To take one extreme example, T.K. Ann's Cracking the Chinese Puzzles is an interesting and useful work that is very badly indexed (it really needs a Pinyin index rather than the four-corner numbering system, and the Abridged/single-volume paperback edition doesn't even have that!). I've dusted off a start I made a couple of years ago on just such an index, and am now creating it in spreadsheet form (but it'll probably be at least half a year before it's anywhere near complete). I can't claim to be much of a techie but one will at least be able to search by Pinyin, character, phonetic component, character number, Abridged edition page number, and English glosses.

 

I'd actually like to create a "learner" corpus (esp in the sense of stuff I have learned and would like to review) of all the sentences in the better of my printed resources (e.g. the aforementioned T'ung & Pollard), and feed the text/data through something like the Chinese Word Extractor program. But I'll need to dig around a bit more and see if it's already in machine-readable form, or look into OCR software, and maybe get into a bit of basic programming if the word segmentation isn't good enough. We'll see, but it'll be an interesting little set of projects!

 

At the very least I'd suggest getting recent corpus-based books such as the following: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/42592-routledge-frequency-dictionary/ . This covers thousands more characters than the Yong Ho frequency dictionary, though not in quite the same depth in terms of grammar, compounds, and usage if not examples. Mind you, YH's examples are somewhat invented, for pedagogical purposes, while the Routledge's, though often quite concise (carefully selected if not edited down?), are ostensibly genuine, drawn from authentic text. One of the authors of that work, Tony McEnery, has written another called Corpus-based Language Studies, which has a unit on research on tense and aspect in Chinese versus English (so it'll be of a bit more relevance than books about just English corpus linguistics). Could be one way into the world of Chinese data-crunching and e-wizardry.

[imron]

All of my early learning was paper based too, and I literally wore out my 《现代汉语词典》(currently held together by duct tape).

I think there's definitely utility in paper based learning still, and it's probably a good idea to learn how to use a paper dictionary, but having said that, Pleco is an indispensable resource for learners - note however that by Pleco I don't mean the free version. In my opinion the real value comes from the dictionaries it has available and also the flash card functionality.

It's much easier to carry around than a large paper dictionary and with the click of a button you can add any words you look up to a list for later revision, and that's a killer combo.

[Xiao Kui]

I used a paper dictionary for my first 4 years of study - it was so time-consuming looking up characters by radical and/or stroke order. I'm very grateful to have Pleco now. I do still have a pretty good collection of textbooks, dictionaries, and novels that I wish I had more time for.

 

I'm currently studying Nepali, and online and electronic resources are limited. The meatiest curriculum I've found is an old-school textbook. I've only been learning two months now at a pretty casual pace, but once I've mastered the basics I'm going to start looking for things to read online.  The textbook is useful, but dry - I'm looking forward to reading real news stories and books!

[imron]

it was so time-consuming looking up characters by radical and/or stroke order.

Time consuming - absolutely. I'm sure it also gave you a much better understanding not only of the words you were looking up but also of Chinese characters and their general composition, all of which you miss with an electronic dictionary.

Where Pleco compensates for this is with the quick and easy add to flash card functionality so you can easily go back and revise words you have looked up.

Any electronic dictionary without this functionality will probably not be as useful to you long-term learning as a paper dictionary.

[Francis101]

I still use the books and am a strong advocate for hard paper materials. I some times get caught up in the bells and whistles of apps, podcasts, and other digital media. I spend way too much time configuring or organizing rather than studying. When I sit down with a good textbook or character diagrams I know I am going to learn and put the effort in to!

[eshton]

I learned my chinese in university in Shanghai, mostly I used pleco, textbooks and anki. Nowadays I just read my uni course textbooks (written for native speakers) and check characters with youdao. Interestingly the methods I use now are the methods my chinese classmates use to study

[mandarina]

In my uni the classes were based mostly on De Francis and NPCR series but I have always done some serious self-studying on the side. I have been using Pleco as a dictionary/flashcard app (I bought an old iPod touch just for that), and Wenlin for reading,

 

... and the thousands upon thousands of those sheets with little squares (I would write on both sides just to get that fabulous "whoosh" sound when turning pages...)

[Elizabeth_rb]

First of all, thanks Ania for directing me to that list.  That looks like being worth spending some time on, esp. for friends who are learning Chinese and want electronic resources.  

 

Speaking for myself, I really am happy with the old fashioned approach and don't mind looking up the odd character here and there in my paper dictionaries (I don't need that many at the mo).  When I was going to classes in Taiwan as recently as 2009/10, I was the only one who didn't have an electronic dictionary and just popped a small paper one in my bag each time.  It was rarely lacking and, when it was, I could just look something up later or use Sir's electronic one too.  His has the handwriting recognition function too.

 

I guess I kind of feel the same as Francis101, that I feel I'm really learning if I sit down to some books and notepaper etc.  If I'm doing on-screen stuff, I feel like I'm just playing rather than doing any serious study.  Perhaps it's an age related thing as I'm over 40 already and I didn't come across much beyond paper based stuff in my formal education.  CALL (computer aided language learning) packages were really just beginning when I graduated as a mature student aged 29 and I've never got into them since.

 

Other than age, finances make a big difference.  When I read deathtraps list of materials/platforms, I could list three of them as being in my possession: the paper textbook, the paper grammar book and one laptop.  I don't own a tablet, an i-anything (just a basic smartphone about 6 months old and which seems to have a fault), a PC etc etc. So, I suppose not having these things, one doesn't really think of apps etc to run on them, 'cos it's a non-issue.  (BTW I don't think there's anything wrong with these things, I just have never had any real need for them and couldn't afford any of them anyway!! ).

 

It's been really interesting to read your comments and thoughts.  Thanks so much to all who've joined in!

 

PS I thought some of you would enjoy the bookshelf peek!  I would too!  There's about another shelf's worth of other things, esp. better dictionaries, in our own rooms and those two have changed a bit too now. It's a fairly old pic now.  Maybe I should start a 'post a photo of your Chinese bookshelves' thread.  Tee-hee!

[kikosun]

I also highly recommend Pleco. I use the flashcard feature every day, for at least a few small sessions a day. I also really like the document reader feature for reading short stories and passages. I always go through the extra step of taking passages or stories from the internet and converting it to txt to put into pleco before I read. It's nice being able to make flashcards as you go, so I can just look up a word and continue reading without too much interruption, but still be able to go back and study the words I didn't know later. I also use pleco as my main dictionary, and actually dont' have a paper dictionary, but I might get the ABC ECCE as per Gharial's suggestion in another thread. I do use paper books such as Harbaugh's geneology and TK Ann's Cracking the Chinese Puzzles. I think those books definitely add to my electronic pleco based study routine. But I have to actually carve out time to study my paper books, whereas I can to Pleco flashcards anywhere on the go.

[roddy]

I'm probably kidding myself, but I like to think that when I used to look something up in a paper dictionary I gosh-darned remembered the thing, to avoid the danger of having to go through the whole rigmarole again and further ruining my eyesight. 

[Elizabeth_rb]

 

 

I'm probably kidding myself, but I like to think that when I used to look something up in a paper dictionary I gosh-darned remembered the thing, to avoid the danger of having to go through the whole rigmarole again and further ruining my eyesight.