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Japanese & Chinese Flashcards

The first thing I wanted to look at is just a few modifications for chinese and japanese uh because these two languages use local grams they use symbols that mean words as opposed to having sound information in it now that's not one hundred percent true uh many of these traditional chinese characters actually contain a little bit of sound information in them as you get more and more familiar with them you can start guessing what sounds they actually made which is kind of neat it's a really meet need need uh writing system but generally you're not going to look at one of these symbols and say oh that smile like you're not going to get that information from it you're going to need to split this up a bit and so there are a few subtle modifications they're going to make if your learning one of these languages I have included this stuff in the model dex we'll talk about that in a sec but let's first talk about the flash cards we just talked about the ones that were in the previous segment f...

or normal flashcards quote unquote uh you're gonna have a comprehension card you're gonna have one car that says shot what is this thing your job is to spit out oh yeah that's a cat you thinking french cats you have another card that shows you a french cat and says what is that and you have to spit out shop and there's another card that shows you a picture of a cat gives you a recording of a cat of shot actually it's just a picture of a shot and a recording of shot and says, how do you spell this word? And you say ch so this is how you're going to deal with most of the language is that you're going to be studying but some of you out there are studying mandarin chinese or japanese and needs some more help with things like guns in your country um and so we're gonna be splitting things up a bit in terms of the comprehension cards I want you to comprehend the word in two different ways I want you to be able to see the symbol for mao which I'm not pronouncing right sorry and I want you to spit out oh yeah that's a particularly chinese cat I want you to be able to see the thing written out in fanatics this is pinion for chinese and japanese you're going to be seeing this in kana kana which are the two japanese alphabets that give you fanatic information. Yeah, ramadi actually, in the case of japanese I'm gonna want you to use instead of ramadi her magic is thie roman alphabet where you would write out k a t a k a I would want you to actually learn it in in the car okay uh, in the native japanese outfit because that's, what you're going to see that we're going to see in the real world on dh so by this stage, I want you to have mastered the to cut the kind off the two kind of alphabets had a gun on the counter uh, which is not that long of a process? I mean, yes, there are a lot of symbols with donkey this this goes very quickly if you choose examples for every single one of those symbols you pick example words for each one and then you make flash cards for all of them it's just a two three week process and in the process you learn like, one hundred something words vocabulary it's not like you're just sort of wasting time with sounds like you're learning it's fun, but yes, so for japanese, I want you to be doing this in the kana for chinese. I want you to be doing this in opinion with the tone markers and everything, and I want you to be able to recognize from the pinion to the word too, whether it means and again if their opinion chinese actually has a lot of ah ha min ims a lot of words where it sounds like one thing, but it could mean ten different things uh, when you're right, you're right is always the golden rule if you see mouth and that means ten different possible possibilities as long as it's the right tone uh then if you're right then you see captain you think oh yeah that's another definition of that same word it's great the production card is basically the same I want you to look at a picture of a cat and pronounced the word same thing is the french cat you see a french cat and you say shot you are correct if you can spell it right great who cares that's fine but I want you to be able in chinese or in japanese to say the word out loud correctly that is my main priority here but then we have a few other little variance spelling the spelling card has now turned into can you generate the character okay see wincing over there from sally yeah. This is challenging and one of the reasons that one of the things that actually makes this a lot easier is the fact that you are getting this much stimulation with one card with one word for every single word you're saying five different flash cards and you were spending the time to make these flashcards. This is what allows these words to stick generally I've found that with with french for instance I could handle having one or two flash cards in the beginning with one word and I found when I started russian I would freak out I would look at these single single flash cards for my words for abstract vocabulary that we're going to talk about later and I could not remember any of them, but as soon as I made two flashcards per word or per concept or three, the more flash cards I had, the easier everything god and so this is how you handle the learning curve for chinese and japanese, you make more flashcards for single concepts, you break up the information of the more pieces because there's more information to learn the spelling card for four chinese or japanese when there is a symbol, japanese has some words that don't have symbols and act just like the stuff that you learn for french. But for for japanese words with conscience for all mandarin chinese words, you're going to be given the pronunciation it's going to say, now you're gonna be given opinion in this case, you're going to get your picture of your particularly chinese cat, you're going to get a recording of that, it will say mouth better than I can and then you will. Your job is to spit out the symbol what is the character for this word? Your last thing is stroke order stroke order is a sort of completely separate thing that shows up in these languages it is how do you write this word? It is kind of helpful this sort of internalized the structure of of all of these symbols stroke order looks like this to make this symbol there is actually a particular order with which you make each part of it you start up in the top left there's like they're generally are rules for this that show up in your textbook that are mostly followed this is kind of spelling is kind of a learning spelling for chinese is the stroke order in many ways on so there are sort of step by step instructions on how to make each of these symbols you go sideways and then you go down you go again down and then you go sideways in this case like there are these sort of pads that you follow by memorizing stroke order you internalize the symbol you make it a lot easier to memorize and so those air generally how you're going to do things slightly differently for these two languages yeah similar is but it would would sew for the japanese chinese passports could you do something like hindi and that with modifications yeah okay yeah hindi doesn't he used more oven what each character what does each character represent a syllable or a word I'm not I'm not sure okay yeah generally as faras I know this is the main local gramling set of languages that exist still like hae ra cliff ix used to be a but no one speaks egyptian anymore um and so I think the main language we had languages we have left that used these types of characters are chinese and japanese korean it's phasing out korean the alfa the alphabet in korean is is heaven I mean there's no alphabet that is easier to learn korean but for chinese and japanese they have this particular challenge that is really particular to themselves I don't think I mean I've looked for this and I don't think I found another language that's had this particular challenge what's very likely to happen in hindi is you're going to have either an alphabet where each thing each letter even if it's a new symbol corresponds to a single phoning or ah something like that or you're gonna have each character responds to a single type of syllable those are the sort of the two options I believe that are left in terms of like what categories air left you either have alphabets like in english where you have a k that responds to one sound you have alfa scylla berries like in japanese or you have one symbol that is ka one symbol that is good things like that where it's sort of a full syllable all in itself and then you have these local grams so I suspect with hindi it's gonna be one of the other two one neither an alphabet ursula berry and in that case you would learn them just like normal flashcards normal um the two things to note in terms of practicalities in the model dex for the course, the ones I was just blabbing about for the r s v p there is a chinese version, and there is a japanese version. Um, those have those will generate these five cards for you. You don't need to sit there and make five cards by hand, unless you're doing them by hand. If you're doing them in the computer, it will just ask you, what is the character? What is the picture? What is the pronunciation? What is the recording? And if you want to test stroke order, if you need that and that you will only need in the beginning, just like the spelling cards, you will get bored of stroke order at a certain point. And then you stopped doing it. But in the beginning, when you need stroke order, you stick in a stroke order diagram, which is a freely available on a ton of websites. I think I have. Resource is in my language resource is guide on my website. Uh, which will, you know it can automatically search for stroke order diagrams. You drop them into donkey, just like a picture, and it will quiz you on stroke order, so all of this stuff is basically will take you to safe amount of time as any other language and this will automatically spit out all five flash cards. It's really handy. Another thing I want to sort of mention is there is an author called high sick, I believe. It's james hi, sick. But I'm sure the class with folks in the chatter will correct me. Um, who has written a set of books called remember the congee? Remember the huns eat remember the carnage basic remember the blake and what he has is a system of no monix of visual na monix for every single character and the parts of the characters. And so when you look at a character like this from now, he will have a discussion of this part of the character, this little slash all the way down. He will have a discussion about this box, which is a mouth, and so he will be using these books. You get to sort of dissect these characters into their component pieces. You pick up the structure of these characters. So it isn't just ah, whole bunch of lines it's that is mouth caine slash, you know, person, this is they have components that have you, you develop an alphabet inside of these letters inside of these characters, you do develop a sort of language of a visual sort of language for these things, I very much like his techniques. It's probably what I'm going to be doing when I start japanese. These are books that are worth getting, and it is worth memorizing the component parts of those things. He hasn't monies for everything he has, like, I think, thousands of new monix for all of these characters, but he generally has a set of, like one hundred or two hundred monix for the parts, the inside parts of these characters, the individual's lines on those air definitely worth learning. That's. What I would start any, any sort of study of chinese or japanese with