Laowai Chinese 老外中文

HSK Vocabulary Levels Added to MDBG

2008 July 3 – 8:33 am

Categories: Dictionaries, Resources | 3 Comments »

Keeping with dictionary review week, there’s a new feature on my favorite online dictionary that deserves some mention.  MDBG has added the HSK vocabulary levels.  While this isn’t exactly what everyone needs, it’s a step in the right direction.

Which Chinese Word Should I Use?

Even though the HSK info isn’t designed to be used like this, we can use this to help us know which Chinese synonym is more commonly used.  I’m talking about “How do you say ____ in English?” when the answer could be multiple words.

For example, do a search for the English word “difference.”  There are about 27 results, but only 6 have HSK ratings.  Look for the lowest number and that’s probably the most common word.  In this case, “fēnbié” 分别 and “qūbié” 区别 come in ahead of chābié 差别.  In my experience, that’s pretty accurate.  A Chinese person will use those two before chābié 差别 when asking a question like:

“What’s the difference?” = yǒu shénme qūbié? 有什么区别?

Warning:

Just because a word has a lower rating, doesn’t mean it’s more commonly used.  Here are a few ways the HSK info isn’t useful (to those of us not preparing to take the test):

1. HSK rating has nothing to do with spoken/written or formal/informal frequencies.  For example, in my experience, computer is spoken much more frequently as “diànnǎo” 电脑 but is formally referred to (like if your major is computers in collge) as “jìsuànjī” 计算机.  Both of these words appear on HSK list 3.

2. The difference between 1 and 2 is negligible.  Vocabulary lists 1 and 2 are both covered by the Basic (lowest) test, so a word may appear on list 2 simply because they ran out of room on list 1.  For example, “yǎnjing” 眼睛 gets an HSK rating of 1, but yǎn 眼 by itself is 2.  Surely you’d know the single character before learning the two of them together.

The bottom line is: if a word has a HSK rating in the dictionary, it’s more likely to be a common word than one without a rating.  Also, if I’ve got to choose between two synonyms (that really can be used interchangeably) I’m going to choose the one with the lower HSK number.

Now, if MDBG will only add a little “sort by column” feature, we’ll be in business.

Can anyone else think of a good way to use those HSK ratings?

Nciku.com - My Review

2008 June 29 – 6:41 am

Categories: Computer, Dictionaries, Listening, Resources | 10 Comments »

I’ve been getting more and more requests to mention www.nciku.com, so now I finally am.

Before I even start, I have to say it’s a really, really hard website name to remember, which is a shame because there are some good things on it.  This will not be a comprehensive review, but just a few of the highlights (and lowlights).

The dictionary itself is colorful, but I find it difficult to use and difficult to read.  Here are my complaints about the dictionary portion:

1. The English and Chinese are all mixed in together, which leads to a whole lot of scrolling down before you find what you’re looking for.
2. Sometimes there is no pinyin for hanzi examples.  It was only after using the site for a while that I discovered there is a mouse-over feature that displays the pinyin.  Even so, it’s often long and hard to read in a bubble-tip format.
3. Sometimes the tones don’t appear for the pinyin.
4. Mixed pinyin and English searches are not allowed.

Overall, the dictionary has a little too much geegaw and clutter for my liking (like stars and green icons).  But then again, I prefer a meat-and-potatoes dictionary display (like MDBG).

Now let’s move on to what I consider the best part of the site: the conversation bank.

Good Things:

1. Every conversation has a transcript in English, pinyin, and hanzi.
2. Every conversation has an automated text-to-speech bot that lets you hear the Chinese or English pronounced.
3. The pronunciation, while automated, is pretty good with only a few problems (see below).
4. You can browse conversations by topic or search for conversations that use a single English word or compound hanzi word.
5. The translations are pretty good.  If I had to guess, I’d say most conversations were written first in Chinese by Chinese speakers and then translated into English, but I’m not sure.
6. You can submit your own conversations.  I didn’t do this, because you have to sign up, but that’s a very cool feature.

Pronunciation Problems:

All of these occur in this conversation about feeling cold.  I suppose the developers of this site are borrowing some automated text-to-speech program, so they’re not responsible for these problems.  But I still want readers to be aware that these are some non-authentic elements of the pronunciation on this site.

1. The initial “h” sounds like a “p” to me sometimes.
2. Can’t pronounce “érhuà” 儿化, like in “bǎo bèir” 宝贝儿.  It should be two syllables but it is read as three.
3. Tone changes are not exactly correct.  For example “wǒ juéde” 我觉得  sounds like “wó juéde.”  Really, the 3rd tone before a 2nd tone should be really low, and not like another 2nd tone.  Also the 5th tone “ba” 吧 after a 3rd tone (hǎo ba  好吧) should be higher than it is after the other three tones.

Technical Problems:

1. The “Auto play” option for sound files seems to really be “auto repeat.”  But actually, if you clear the little check box, it doesn’t play at all.  Can’t quite figure out what that’s for.
2. The “Auto play” bubble often blocks your view of the transcript.  If you move your mouse so that the bubble disappears, the sound file stops playing immediately.
3. Pinyin is not allowed in searches.
4. Multiple English words in searches doesn’t show conversations containing all words.
5. Putting multiple English search terms “in quotes” breaks something.

The site’s still in “beta,” which means we’re supposed to give them a break and be patient while they work out these little issues.

It is cool to have this growing bank of conversations.  This sort of corpus is exactly what Chinese-English dictionaries need.  Does anyone know of any other sites that have conversations or sentence examples in Chinese and English?

Banana Shoes

2008 May 18 – 7:04 am

Categories: Pronunciation, Tones | 5 Comments »

A few weeks ago in my English classes, I was doing lightning safety (it was stormy here, ok?). I ended up using the following joke in each class.

One of the tips from the students would inevitably be: “Always wear shoes if you’re outside.” I would follow that up by asking why. They’d say something about the shoes being made of plastic (which I thought was strange) and I’d say (in English), “No they’re not. The bottoms of your shoes are made of BANANAS!” The class always thought it was hilarious.

Someone would correct me and say, “rubber” and I’d make a big mockery of myself saying things like, “Oh no! Oops! I guess I made a mistake with my pronunciation!”

Now, here’s what I want to know from any Chinese reader(s):

Were my students laughing because:

1. They thought of the very subtle difference between the Chinese word for “banana” (xiāngjiāo 香蕉) and “rubber” (xiàngjiāo 橡胶)–a difference of only one tone?

OR

2. They actually imagined someone walking along the street wearing banana peels on their feet?

I know it’s asking a lot to tell me what my students were thinking. But perhaps you could just give your own response to my little joke. Which did you think of?

For us laowai, here’s the point:

Regardless of why Chinese speakers laugh (or don’t laugh) at that little joke, that’s a little taste of what it must sound like to them when we’re speaking Chinese and we get a tone wrong.

It’s not like in English when you put the stress on the wrong syllable and it’s a little harder to understand (for example saying “relatives” with the stress on the second syllable instead of the first). No. When we get the tones wrong, it’s a whole new word that could be just as nonsensical to Chinese listeners as shoes made of bananas. So we’ve got to get those tones right.

Related Posts:

• Funnest Things to Say
• Master the Tones
• Tone Changes
• Tone Wars