The Chinese tree
christian
October 23, 2007, 09:29 AM posted in General DiscussionI've been thinking a bit about how the lessons might be better presented so as to aid their navigation. With their numbers growing, the problem is less and less one of a lack of material, and increasingly one of finding what to do next.
CP presents its content as lessons which are classified according to level and function. The functional aspect is there to enable users to choose study material which is relevant to them, and the classification of level should enable one to choose lessons which are challenging and ulitmately enable one to later do lessons from a higher level.
The vocabulary which occurs in newbie lessons is presumably vocab which occurs more frequently in natural speech, and therefore enables you to understand more of the language you come across in daily life.
It may be worthwhile, though, to think of presenting a structure for the lessons themselves which mimics the structure of the language itself. Consider the following simple example:
你 is one of the most common words in the language. If I do a lesson on greetings, I will learn 你好, a very common phrase. However, 你 is also used in a bunch of other patterns, such as 你们, 你的, etc. Learning those next will reinforce the word in my mind and often highlight the ways in which a word's meanings change with context. This is what I do right now in that when I learn a word I look for other lessons in my level which include it, but perhaps more can be done to make this easier and more systematic by presenting the vocabulary in the lessons as a word tree. It seems to me this may make more sense than using tag clouds or other such tools because it classifies things according to their function.
However, I am not a linguist, so I'm not sure this makes sense from a linguistic point of view. I also wonder how detailed such a tree would have to be. Though there is probably value in providing such a high level overview of the language, clearly including too many branches makes it unwieldy and opaque.
Curious to hear what you guys think...
Kyle
October 23, 2007, 09:40 AMGood idea. The NPCR series, volumes 2 - 4, use this type of approach at the end of each chapter. Good vocabulary-building exercise.
christian
October 23, 2007, 04:31 PMLunetta, it's possible we should share notes someday. This got me wondering if we ever make the same jumps from one lesson to another at times. Kyle, I have all six volumes of Practical Chinese Reader, which I think is the precursor to NPCR, published by the Beijing Languages Institute. I checked again and this edition has no word maps, unfortunately. Would you say NPCR is worth the investment? By the way, have a look at this, you guys. It seems really interesting. Imagine getting a display like that every time your mouse hovered over a hanzi in the dialogues or expansion sentences :-)
lunetta
October 23, 2007, 05:20 PMI've been having a look at 'Many Eyes' and it's a very interesting site. If the word tree idea could be combined with the Cpod dictionary in some way, the dictionary could become an even better tool for learning Chinese. As the dictionary is now it gives you a lot of sample sentences and a list of related lessons. It doesn't give you the same visual connection between the word and the frequency of different collocations that the word tree does. E.g. I did a search on the word play in 'Terry Pratchett books' and when I add play to it I get three sentences with three words for different musical instruments. That way you get a whole lot more of different vocabulary and see how the word collocates as well. Of course these sentences has to come from the Cpod corpus of lessons and maybe it could be used in some way to handle vocab clusters that Goulniky talked about in another thread. (Sorry if I don't link, haven't figured out how to yet.) It also should be easier to jump directly to the lesson where the sentence(s) occur instead of having to guess which one on the list.
lunetta
October 23, 2007, 05:44 PMChristian, maybe we should. :-) Usually I go for the high frequency words, e.g. 来 or 打 and then I choose a lesson based on either a topic, e.g. sports or dating or eating, or whatever I just happen to want to know more about. I usually don't choose on the basis of function, right now I'm just trying to build up a basic vocabulary that will cover the basics of everyday speech which of course may include very useful words like 超人，啤酒, 放屁。 The great thing about Cpod is that the newbie and elementary lessons contain a limited range of basic sentence structures and vocabulary and yet manage to keep it interesting by making the dialogues seem very real, including things that actually are said in everyday conversations but sometimes are not thought of in traditional language teaching.
lunetta
October 23, 2007, 09:35 AMVery interesting idea. I search for and structure my lessons in a similar way and I'm sure we're not the only ones. Right now I'm not able to add anything else to the discussion but it's something I'll think about.