Labelling the House
Something I should have done a long time ago is to label everything in our flat in Chinese. Alicia was out quite a bit over the weekend and so I took the opportunity to run around the flat labelling everything in Chinese. She came back last night and just laughed: “You forgot 镜子 [jìngzi], mirror.”
In doing this, I’m under no illusions that I’ll somehow memorise all these words without actually making an effort. The aim is to prompt me to use the words in daily conversation. I’m also hoping they’ll act as a prompt for Alicia so that she knows what she can and can’t say to me in Mandarin. Whenever I’m put on the spot and asked to “说中文！” I struggle to know what I can say. By placing prompts around the house I’m hoping that I can work some Chinese into my daily routine and not find myself stuck wondering, 说什么?
Do you have any tricks for working Chinese into your daily routine? I’d love to hear them as I desperately need to work on my spoken Chinese ahead of our trip in October.
[ad#ChinesePod 001]
Hey Bill
Well done. Lots of people talk about it, not many people do it.
In terms of ideas for daily improvement, I mention a few of them in my blog post from last week, if you find it is useful.
By the way, if you want to go one better than than your labels around the house, how about full sentences that include that word?
So, instead of just “盘子 (pánzi)” in your plate cupboard, how about “我洗盘子 (I wash plates)”? “Is that me in the mirror?” “Switch on the light.” etc. Just an idea …
October? Am very jealous!
Thanks Greg,
Actually I had thought about putting some sample sentences on the cards. The original intention was to write out all the cards by hand. The trouble was, I spent so long practising writing the characters (not entirely a bad thing) that I would only have been able to make three of the cards.
In the interests of actually making the cards before the inspiration was lost, I quickly printed off 12 and stuck them up. I’m hoping to create a template I can use to generate these more easily. I’ll definitely include some sample sentences on these. Watch this space.
Talking to myself has helped me tremendously. Sinosplice has a post about it, and it basically outlines what I do (which makes sense, seeing as it was Pasden all those years ago that introduced me to it).
I find I still use it to rehearse particularly complex interactions I expect to have in the future, and it has helped a lot in working on small talk.
Thanks for the link to the post on Sinosplice.
Surprisingly, I’ve occasionally noticed myself doing this. It was only this morning that I (the only conscious person in the house) found myself seeing my label for 抽屉 [chōuti] drawer and saying: 我把毛衣放在抽屉里。 [wǒ bǎ máoyī fàngzàichōuti lǐ.] I do this in my head all the time, but maybe I need to start speaking to myself out loud more often.
Hey Bill
One of the side effects of *you* labelling your house, now that you’ve blogged about it, is that *I* am learning new words too! (And no, I’m not peaking in the window.)
Your word for drawer 抽屉 (chōuti) caught my attention because I learned the hanzi ‘抽’ last night – meaning ‘to pull out’. As you know, I’m learning to read Chinese through the Heisig approach, so I wondered how well I’d be able to work out the word myself. So I looked more carefully …
The second hanzi is made up of a flag-looking radical which means ‘corpse’ (picture a flag wrapped around a military corpse, for burial), and the hanzi for ‘world’. Corpse world? What? Nope, in this case my reading skills (now just over 900 hanzi) was not enough to work out what the word meant.
The dictionary tells me 屉 means drawer/tray, so maybe from now on I’ll visualise a mortuary – the world of corpses – with drawers of bodies to pull out.
(Perhaps it sounds a little complicated, but the thinking process behind the above email, including use of the dictionary, probably took 30 seconds – and I don’t think I’ll ever forget the hanzi ‘抽屉’ or it’s components!)
Bill, do let us know when you glance at a different label, I’m ready for another …
Greg,
I’ve heard you mention the Heisig Approach before and will admit that every time I’ve read the words “Heisig Approach” my eyes glazed over and I’ve skipped on by. I can only think that this is because the name has always reminded me of one of those new-age diet books that seem to populate book stores in the run up to Christmas.
But, hearing you describe your reaction to seeing the characters 抽屉, I felt compelled to dig deeper. You are describing the way I like to work. I like to understand rather than memorize. As I’ve said before, if I can explain “why” then I am far more likely to remember something. I’ve ordered myself a copy of Heisig’s Remembering Simplified Hanzi, more out of curiosity than any sense of commitment at this stage, but I’ll be sure to let you know how I get on.
Bill, good luck. I’m sure you’ll enjoy Heisig. However, make sure you get to see it for what it actually is, not what you currently expect it will be. I crossed 950 last night, and will definitely reach 1000 this weekend.
If it helps to create additional context, go back to some of my blog posts about Learning to read Chinese over the last couple of months.
Good luck!