Suggestions for a Grammar Book to Memorize

[hedwards]

@imron, I don't agree with that. Reading out loud is a bad habit for virtually everybody. There's probably a small percentage of the people that can't store words visually, and for them it might be somewhat beneficial, but for the majority  of folks that are capable of storing words visually it's a really bad idea.

 

This is a bit like that silly practice of meditating in silence far away from distraction, if we were always in such a distraction free environment there'd be no need to meditate. Likewise translating the written word into sounds that are then translated into meaning is a ton of wasted effort only to have to then put more work into re-establishing which homophones are which. As bad as that is in English, it's even worse in Chinese where they have a small fraction of the possible unique syllables that we do in English. If you're going to do that, you might as well not even bother with characters and just read and write pinyin.

 

Speech should be practiced by speaking and reading should be practiced by reading. There's a critical period early on when learning to read when habits are initially formed. Yes, you can form new habits later on, but it's a lot more work and if your method "works" there's not necessarily going to be the incentive to throw it out and start over. Even though it would be better if I didn't subvocalize my English reading, the fact is that I've gotten that so ingrained over the years that it's going to take me a long time to generate the symbols necessary to read purely visually. But, had I not developed such a bad set of habits to begin with, I wouldn't be facing that dilemma now, I'd be reading efficiently and effectively and free of the problems that adding that abstraction layer creates.

 

Like I said, commit the patterns to memory and drill those, you'll get a ton of experience and practice using them out loud without developing the sort of bad habits that you develop reading other people's words out loud directly from their writing.

[roddy]

Has anyone ever been proved (anecdotal evidence from speed-reading touts doesn't count) to eliminate subvocalisation? Not just to make it subconscious, but to stop doing it (which you'd need to check in a lab, because you can't report on what you're doing subconsciously), or not start doing it. Even the profoundly deaf, I think, 'subvocalise' sign language. Where are these übermensch who think on such an abstract level? 

 

The trick is not to avoid the phonological layer. It's to get so damned good at it that it takes as little time and cognitive effort as possible. Practice, just like so much else in language learning. You don't need to forget the link between 我,wǒ, and however the mind represents the idea of 'I' - you need to make it so strong and so automatic that its like a piano player finding middle C or a tennis player getting his racket in the way of the ball.

 

You're on a wild goose chase. Try not to take too many people with you.

[Guest realmayo]

I have successfully eliminated subvocalisation when reading Chinese.

Happens every time I read a character whose pronunciation I have completely forgotten.

Or occasionally words comprising two or more characters that I'm too lazy to parse but do remember the word's meaning.

 

 

 

Not sure what happens when I read English quickly. Perhaps a few words slip through the subvocalisation net.

 

[imron]

it's even worse in Chinese where they have a small fraction of the possible unique syllables that we do in English

When you take in to account tones, the number of unique syllables goes up dramatically - and you absolutely should be doing this.  For example, you wouldn't think of English as having a single b*t sound with 5 vowels making b*t+a, b*t+e, b*t+i, b*t+o and b*t+u.  That's just far too complicated.  Instead, you would rightly think of it as 5 sounds bat, bet, bit, bot, but.  Chinese is the same, and if you don't treat tone differences as individual sounds you are just complicating things for yourself later on (in exchange for easier learning in the short term).

 

And even then, the problem of not enough unique sounds is further simplified if you don't learn by syllables, but rather by words.  Just like you wouldn't learn a b*t syllable followed by t*r syllable, and then try to put them together to form words, instead you'd just learn the words batter, better, bitter, butter etc.  When you are dealing at the word level, the number of unique sounds for separate words increases significantly enough that there's very few collisions.  By all mean learn the characters for the words as you go, but focus on words as the primary unit.  It just simplifies things greatly.

 

The problem I then have with not associating Chinese sounds with the characters is that you're going to end up associating the characters with something, and if it's not Chinese, it's likely to end up as English (or your native language).  It's all well and good for grammar books to have explanations like you mentioned previously such as:

 

今天 21 号。

Today 21 date.

 

Because it can help to understand how to piece the language together, but if you are reading you are mentally going 'Today 21 date.', then you are doing yourself a far greater disservice than sub-vocalising. 

 

I agree with Roddy that the trick is just to get so good at it that it happens instantly.  In my experience, I think it's difficult to get your reading speed above native speaking speed if you can't yet read aloud at native speaking speed.

 

I know that for me, improving my reading aloud speed, greatly helped improved my silent reading speed.

[Demonic_Duck]

@imron: to be fair, he didn't mention anything about tones, and even when they're taken into account, Chinese still has far less possible syllables than English.

 

On the whole I agree, though - whether or not it's desirable to reduce/eliminate subvocalisation for one's native language, it's certainly not desirable to eliminate it for a foreign language. This is not only because of the need to cut out the reliance on the sounds of one's native language as carriers of meaning, but also in order to further strengthen the relationship between the sounds of the other language and meaning.

[imron]

@imron: to be fair, he didn't mention anything about tones,

Correct.  I was partially referencing another post he made making a similar point about how few unique syllables Mandarin has, but that wasn't including tones in the amount.

[renzhe]

In case anyone is wondering about the actual numbers, here is the total number of syllables per language:

English: 8000+

Southern Min: ??? -- 773 "toneless"

Cantonese: 1813 -- 664 "toneless"

Mandarin: 1277 -- ~400 "toneless"

Japanese: 113

For what it's worth. I, of course, agree that tone is an essential property of the syllable and that "toneless" syllables are meaningless when it comes to tonal languages.

Source: J. DeFrancis, "The Chinese Language", pp. 42. University of Hawaii Press. 1984.

[imron]

Interesting stats.  Especially interesting to see Japanese has an order of magnitude less syllables than the next language.

[roddy]

Anyway, getting back on topic - Yadang, have you memorised a grammar book? Or what have you ended up doing instead?

[Coys1991]

I have found a book called Chinese and English Grammar Side by Side.  Each page shows the difference in English grammar and Chinese grammar.

[Yadang]

Well, my main purpose for wanting to do this was to get sentences ingrained in my head and internalize the grammar along with them. About the same time I posted this, I learned about Glossika. One of my main concerns with this whole grammar book idea was if the sentences in the grammar book were actually natural and useful. Upon inquiring about Glossika, people on the forums here who know what they're talking about said the Glossika sentences are in fact quite natural and not textbooky. I figured I'd use Glossika instead, which already has the benefit of having audio (which I would have wanted to do, had I gone with this grammar book idea anyways, so Gossika is much more cost effective, and time efficient). For now, I'm thinking I'll work though pretty much everything Glossika has to offer on Chinese. Then I'll have a nice foundation of sentences I've memorized and some grammar patterns are bound to internalize themselves with all of that memorization. I'll use grammar books as a reference, and will maybe still memorize a grammar book later on, but that will be a while.