Chairman Bao

[i__forget]

Apologies if this is not the right forum.

Context: This is about a couple from Shenzhen who adopted 100 stray dogs:
有人想帮他们，但是他们不想要钱。有人想养狗，但是他们不喜欢流浪狗。这对夫妻要花钱请人养这些狗。

So this is from the Chairman Bao, HSK level 1. My translation of the bold text is:
Some people would like to get a dog but they don't like stray dogs. This couple wants to spend money to invite someone to raise these dogs.
Google translation:
Some people want to keep a dog, but they do not like stray dogs. The couple should spend money to keep these dogs

I'm thinking about giving up Chairman Bao as this is extremely unproductive for my studies, even though I just paid for a yearly subscription (!). I can't be comming to this forum asking for a translation for each sentence I encounter. I need the English translation for each sentence to learn this language!

How do people in this forum deal with uncertain translations? This is by far the most difficult obstacle I'm encountering. 
 

[陳德聰]

Are you taking a duolinguo-esque approach to your studies? I would have thought Chairman Bao was a graded reader of sorts, but I've never really given it a good look... If you're supplementing your studies with this reading material as practice and vocabulary, then I think you're probably on the right track. If not, I'd suggest doing that, available translations or not.

 

I'm sure folks here wouldn't mind answering all the questions you encounter while working through Chairman Bao, perhaps just put them all in one thread and make it a "my learning experiment using Chairman Bao" thread.

 

When you are unsure of a translation and you don't have anyone to ask, you could run it through multiple online translators (not just google translate but also bing, youdao, etc) and try breaking it down into phrases, running the chunks through a search engine for other example sentences and see if it gives you any leads.

 

Your translation beats Google Translate this time though!

[艾墨本]

3 hours ago, i__forget said:

How dopeopleinthisforumdealwithuncertaintranslations?

Honestly, I just skip them and move on, especially in instances like learning from a graded reader. I just assume I'm not ready for it yet and move on and enjoy reading the text and getting out of it what I can. I will try at first, but I won't spend too much time on a single phrase or sentence. I haven't ever tried learning through translation, though. I was told early on to try to keep everything in Chinese. Think about the sentence in terms of Chinese, not in terms of English. This helped me a lot. If I didn't understand a sentence I would go through and make sure I knew all the parts and just roughly estimate the meaning but my goal wasn't creating a good sentence in English.

[imron]

4 hours ago, i__forget said:

I need the English translation for each sentence to learn this language!

You don't!

 

I agree with 艾墨本 that you should try to keep everything in Chinese.  Learning by translating - especially with Google Translate as your primary translation is going to be a doomed exercise.

 

How long have you been learning, and what is your current level?  In an article like the one above how many words would you say you know before you begin the article? (you can use a program I wrote - Chinese Text Analyser - to help you figure that out).

[Kherith]

Hi, it's funny because Ive heard of this website today so I was logging here to get some information about it. Didn't find anything else (tho I'm on my phone now so it's not easy for me to search haha) so I'd like some reviews. I think I would be willing to pay to access thr graded reads, but is it worth it ? Any feedback on your experiences ? Thanks.

[Publius]

这对夫妻要花钱请人养这些狗。

I have a feeling that this sentence probably means "This couple have to hire someone to (help) take care of these dogs." Because, well, paying money for people to adopt a stray dog is a bit too unusual, in my opinion.

When in doubt, check the source. The Chairman's Bao wouldn't show me the rest of the article, so I located a Xinhuanet article. It mentioned 他们雇了一个阿姨，专门给狗狗做狗食, thus confirmed my suspicion.

Modal verb is a tricky part of the language. Chinese people learning English also struggle with should/would/can/must etc.

 

As for the more general question, I agree with other posters that learning by translating is not a good idea. At school we are used to a lot of translation exercises. Because that's the easiest way a teacher knows whether the students have learned what's being taught in classroom. It's also necessary if you're training to be a translator/interpreter. But you cannot master a language by constantly translating it. You need to think in that language. It may not be easy at the beginning, so it's okay to use translation as a crutch. But the end goal is not a good translation. It's to make sure you understand the source text.

Try to better understand a text by translating it is a common but misguided notion. It should always be understand first, translate later. You understand a sentence by dissecting it, looking up unfamiliar words, applying grammar rules you've learned, looking for clues that there might be something you haven't learned. When you're unsure of your understanding, provide a translation and ask other people whether it's correct. But translating itself won't help you understand better. That's my opinion.

[imron]

2 hours ago, Kherith said:

Didn't find anything else (tho I'm on my phone now so it's not easy for me to search haha) so I'd like some reviews

Here are the two main threads discussing it:

 

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/47247-the-chairmans-bao/

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/50831-the-charimans-bao-app/

[i__forget]

Thanks a lot for you answers! 

@imron My current level is HSK 1 - 2. I have almost finished Complete Mandarin Chinese. It was a waste of time/money, hence the "almost". Now my main learning resources are: 1. Du Chinese app (paid subscription), 2. AnkiDroid "Chinese spoonfed" (free) and 3. Chairman Bao (paid). I don't use DuoLingo.

@陳德聰 I will make sure to checkout Bing and youdao next time! Edit: Tried them and not impressed!

@Publius About the translation, there may have been a misunderstanding. The point of translating a sentence from Chinese to English is to see if I can understand it. In other words, forget about translating. I'm just trying to understand a sentence. The closest I can get to understanding it is by the means of translation to a language I already speak. Google translate helped me enormously when I was learning Spanish, almost 4 years ago, it's actually quite good for Spanish and I still use it today to translate both phrases and words. However for a language like Spanish it really is not needed, because in general a word by word manual translation will probably make a lot of sense in English. With Chinese this approach doesn't work, a word by word translation will not explain to me what the Chinese author means.

DuChinese, the mobile app, does exactly this. It provides stories in Chinese with audio, plus an English translation of the whole sentence, it really is what I'm looking for but their stories are not as interesting as the ones you can find in ChairmanBao.

@Kherith yes I think ChairmanBao is quite good but I find the lack of English translations very annoying. They do have a section about grammatical patterns but they may skip something you don't know, and add something you already know, or that is super simple (measure words for example are not needed, my popup dictionary will identify and report them).

[Publius]

Well in that case, just ask. People around here are very nice and ready to help.

 

BTW, I find Chairman's Bao's paraphrasing sometimes makes things incredibly vague. Written language is generally more wordy for a reason. We lack the non-verbal clues and shared knowledge in face-to-face communication. And condense a story too much you may lose the logical flow. :/

[艾墨本]

@i__forget You might consider looking at the resources section of this forum. There are a lot of good sources for studying for free. At your level, the online courses on edx and coursera provided by Peking University are very suitable. This would be a nice source of material if you need something more structured. At the earlier stages, having something structured was very important to me. It would also provide you an opportunity to train your listening skills. 

 

If you want a textbook that is well suited to self-study, check out the Integrated Chinese series. Pair that with the Grammar Wiki and Oxford's elementary Chinese course and you should be able to learn the first couple years of a college-level course. These are all listed on  A Short List of Resources for Studying Chinese.

 

Side note, there is no duolingo for learning Chinese, though there is a Chinese version of the app for learning English.

 

If you want something like relies on translation to learn, you may consider an application like Hello Chinese. It also has a built-in speech trainer that will grade your pronunciation. I've found this feature quite helpful even at the later stages of learning Chinese. 

 

 

[i__forget]

Yes I´m using HelloTalk but it´s not particularly useful at my level. Where is the speech trainer feature located? Thanks for the Integrated Chinese  suggestion but I'm not planning to return to a beginners book again!

[艾墨本]

10 minutes ago, i__forget said:

Thanks for the Integrated Chinese  suggestion but I'm not planning to return to a beginners book again!

 

They have more than one book. It has many levels going up through mid/upper intermediate.

 

11 minutes ago, i__forget said:

Yes I´m using HelloTalk but it´s not particularly useful at my level. Where is the speech trainer feature located?

1

I think @Shelley might be able to speak on that.

[Shelley]

I don't know about Hello Talk.

 

HelloChinese has a speech training feature. There are speech training sections with each lesson and you can choose a more difficult speech training section at any time.

There is a lot of information about this on the web site http://www.hellochinese.cc/

 

i also did a review of it here http://www.livethelanguage.cn/review-hello-chinese/

[艾墨本]

It would seem I mixed up hello talk and hello Chinese.

[Shelley]

6 hours ago, 艾墨本 said:

It would seem I mixed up hello talk and hello Chinese.

 

21 hours ago, 艾墨本 said:

you may consider an application like Hello Chinese

You got it right in your earlier post, so no worries. I think @i__forget may have confused them.

[i__forget]

Sorry to bring up this kind of old already topic but I would like to write an update. I've continued with the Chairman Bao! Now reading the HSK 2 level stories and I have to say it's quite enjoyable! While not having the full translation of a sentence can be annoying, it certainly isn't an insuperable impediment when it comes to understanding the story and learning the language on the long run. I recommend it to others as well!