A Bump from the Past: "Stop Teaching Me to Write, I Tell You!"

[889]

No, the textbooks of the era certainly had a bit of flavor, but I don't recall the examples on the flashcards as being especially political. Still very useful today if you can find a set.

 

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41isKXDBfbL._AC_SY780_.jpg

[Guest realmayo]

On 7/18/2022 at 11:25 AM, sanchuan said:

It means fewer and fewer people will even notice, let alone be bothered, by the fact that the higher levels of the new HSK (3.0) seem to require knowledge and competences usually reserved for citizenship/naturalisation tests.

 

I'm not sure I'm too worried about that except from a would-it-get-in-the-way-of-learning-the-language point of view. Partially absorbing cultural norms - intentionally or unintentionally - is probably an unavoidable part of speaking a foreign language. But I agree it would be good to go in eyes-open if that is the case with HSK3.

 

On 7/18/2022 at 1:38 PM, imron said:

How many people were talking about flashcards before Anki was invented? 

 

Supermemo! Oh what a breath of fresh air Anki felt like....

[Woodford]

On 7/18/2022 at 8:01 AM, malazann said:

when stumbling across old posts on this forum (circa 2005-2010), i always wonder how their chinese journey is going.

This is totally my feeling with a lot of posts.  I'm left in a total state of suspense, thinking, "Well? How did it turn out? How is your Chinese now?"
 

I've posted a lot on this forum in the past couple of years, but I don't anticipate it will last forever, and someday, even long before I'm personally dead, my account will become quiet. Precisely for the reason you cited above, I like to leave some indications of how I've progressed. I love seeing when other people share the results from their stories. 

[889]

Even more so, posters with various problems concerning their visas, bosses, landlords, etc. Well, what happened you always want to ask after they go silent.

[sanchuan]

On 7/18/2022 at 4:32 PM, realmayo said:

I'm not sure I'm too worried about that except from a would-it-get-in-the-way-of-learning-the-language point of view

Only in terms of time spent. Not a trivial concern when trying to teach or learn Chinese. After all, subjects like history, literature or civics aren't prerequisites of language learning any more than motorcycle engineering is; they're what language learning, if properly done, equips you to go on and learn about. Someone upthread said it's like learning French without learning Rabelais. But, if you think about it, millions of French speakers and writers, both native and non-native, living or long dead, have reached virtuoso heights in their command of the French language without prior knowledge of a lick of Rabelais - right down to Rabelais himself.

 

Speaking of heights of proficiency, I'm also curious to know what became of our sempais here. I would expect that, much like with learners of a complex musical instrument, the majority will have chucked it down as a nice hobby/extracurricular they'd maybe like to pick back up in retirement, a vanishingly small minority will be publishing or performing to audiences on the regular, and the rest will just think of themselves as proficient users and always have a Chinese novel (/TV/groupchat/etc) on their bedside table. Sure would be good to know which study route led to which finishing line, though I doubt there's a science to that. 

 

 

[Guest realmayo]

On 7/18/2022 at 6:14 PM, sanchuan said:

Only in terms of time spent.

 

Ah I see. Fair enough, though if we're talking about post-HSK6 level I don't have a problem with the cultural content side of things: intermediate language proficiency should have been achieved by that stage, where it perhaps makes sense to spend time on a range of mini-specialisations. One other point may be that as a speaker of common European languages learning another common European language, you will reach that level of language proficiency much quicker -- and therefore it makes sense to be introduced to that material at a much earlier timeline -- than if you're learning Chinese.

 

One other thought: it has been put to me that for a 散文 (i.e. prose essay) to be judged well-written, the content is as important as the language. And by good content, this includes having a "lesson-learned" final paragraph: for example, after reading about, say, the accidental discovery of penicillin, there should be a kicker such as: "so we should all live our lives in a less rigid way and be more ready to embrace good luck etc etc".

 

I don't know if， say， @Kenny同志 or @Publius have a view on how widespread this attitude towards 'what is good prose' is. But I wonder if that kind of attitude to 'learning should have a moral message' also informs the choice of content in Chinese language teaching for foreigners.

 

 

[Lu]

On 7/18/2022 at 3:53 PM, imron said:

Not software based flashcards with spaced repetition.

I used flashcards on the computer in German class, in the late 1990s. There was a repetition method to that program, too, though it wasn't spaced repetition (something with moving the cards from one box to the next, to the next, to the next.). I made paper flashcards long before that. What was new about Anki was spaced repetition and the idea of reminding yourself just before you were about to forget.

[imron]

On 7/18/2022 at 2:32 PM, realmayo said:

Supermemo! Oh what a breath of fresh air Anki felt like....

I know right!  self-taught-mba used another piece of software - I think it was called vtrain or something, my memory is hazy on the specifics.

 

On 7/18/2022 at 7:46 PM, Lu said:

What was new about Anki was spaced repetition and the idea of reminding yourself just before you were about to forget.

It was Supermemo that pioneered this, and the author of super memo invented all the of the spacing algorithms that most other SRS software are based on (Anki uses the SM-2 variant).

 

Anyway yes flashcards existed, and yes in use even on computers, but their use was not nearly as common or ubiquitous as they are today, and self-taught-mba was using software based flashcarding as one of the key learning methods at his school, based on vocabulary the student would have picked up that morning on a excursion to the market with their tutor (or some other real life situation with highly practical/relevant vocabulary).

 

Back then, this was not a common approach at all.

[889]

Edit: Wrong thread.

[Woodford]

On 7/18/2022 at 12:14 PM, sanchuan said:

Speaking of heights of proficiency, I'm also curious to know what became of our sempais here. I would expect that, much like with learners of a complex musical instrument, the majority will have chucked it down as a nice hobby/extracurricular they'd maybe like to pick back up in retirement, a vanishingly small minority will be publishing or performing to audiences on the regular, and the rest will just think of themselves as proficient users and always have a Chinese novel (/TV/groupchat/etc) on their bedside table. Sure would be good to know which study route led to which finishing line, though I doubt there's a science to that. 

I think that's likely the correct answer, as sobering as it is! If we could call these people back and ask them about their long-term progress, they probably wouldn't have much to say, anyway. This portion of our lives (i.e., when we're active on the forum) is likely the apex of Chinese-related activity and practice, and then it just fades into the background after that. When I imagine what my "final" phase will be like, I imagine myself being able to read a Chinese news article or two in the morning, enjoy a Chinese podcast/video from time to time, and gather the chutzpah to talk with more natives. I'm now closing in on that goal, which, at my intensity of practicing, takes the greater part of a decade to achieve. But anyway, I won't hijack this thread!

[abcdefg]

On 7/18/2022 at 8:01 AM, malazann said:

This dude's insane independent 3 months in Taiwan 2014 is something I often think back on.

 

@malazann-- I learned a lot from him too. And I admired his vigor and focus. Inspirational, actually. 

[malazann]

i hope everyone involved in this thread doesn't disappear without a signing off post. should be obligatory after 3+ years of participating in this amazing unique community. We have 5000 20 years of history here

[TheBigZaboon]

When I first went to Japan in the early (very, very early) 1970's, there was already an excellent and a very complete set of flashcards to accompany the Naganuma texts which were almost the only commercial textbooks available at that time. A spaced repetition feature was available if you bought a certain brand of teabag, and saved the boxes after you'd used all the teabags. If you were clever enough, after you reached a certain predetermined point with a card, you put it into one of three boxes, and then after a predetermined space of time, you would repeat the study of the flashcards in each of the boxes until you learned them to your or your teacher's satisfaction.

 

Spaced repetition, with a built-in algorithm...

 

C'est la vie, c'est la guerre, say no more...

 

Kek, kek, kek...

 

TBZ

[Guest realmayo]

There was this method in use at the same time, dubbed VOLATS, invented by Durham professor of Chinese Archie Barnes:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060617164934/http://www.earthcallingdavid.com/page5/files/page5_1.pdf

 

VOLATS was a paper-based system, each item of vocabulary written on a square of paper. Groups of these papers were separated by cut-down index cards; the whole lot was stored in a shoe-box that had been cut to half-width. Each piece of vocabulary would slowly move back through the box as you ran your daily tests, and be tested less frequently as it went - from daily, to weekly, to monthly, and eventually (about a year after you first entered the word in the system) yearly.