Tae Kim’s Blog

Staring from the beginning of this month, ChinesePod and other podcast sites run by Praxis Languages stopped offering access to all podcasts for non-paying members except for the Newbie level. I had not intended to write anything about it because how they decide to make revenue to sustain their business is none of my business and something they would know much better about. However, after seeing how they actually implemented the changes, I feel like I need to say something because I actually care about ChinesePod and its continued success/existence (especially if they’re going to introduce JapanesePod). It might be better to email them directly and I might do that but for now I’m putting up my thoughts here for everybody to see and to keep it separate from the very long discussions that are already going on at the site itself.

A personal perspective

First of all, I have to fess up to say that I’m not a paying subscriber and have never really gotten involved in the comments or discussions on the site. The simple reason for this is because I am studying Chinese rather passively and very slowly. I even stop studying altogether for long periods of time and while their slogan is, “Learn Chinese on Your Terms”, you can never really stop studying their material without feeling like you’re wasting money. In addition, I’m not much of a subscriber of anything outside of essential or near-essential services such as electricity and my cell phone. I prefer to buy things to own and I have bought several books on learning Chinese, some comic books, and a very expensive electronic dictionary. I would certainly consider buying a DVD of the lessons, grammar points, and transcripts in a good quality print. However, my major problem right now is time and to a certain degree interest and necessity not a lack of resources.

Basically, I’m just not part of their target market demographic. But really, my personal circumstances are irrelevant in relation to their business model as a whole and I bring it up here just to separate my personal view from my analysis of their decision in general.

An objective/business perspective

From a business perspective, there are several revenue models Praxis could have gone with.

1. Advertising (including marketing actual goods and affiliate partnerships)
2. Pay by usage
3. Subscription

As for the first option, I don’t think general ad revenue is really sustainable in the market of language learning. I highly doubt you can keep an outfit like ChinesePod going without a significantly large audience. And based on my personal site statistics, language learning is not a big enough market for general ads as compared to classifieds and news sites.

However, an interesting idea is to use advertising as marketing for their own products such as printed transcripts, language software, and lesson DVDs. Unfortunately, production and distribution costs are a large problem and again in a small market such as foreign language learning, I see this as an option for boosting revenues but not viable for running a whole company. In addition, I think the people at ChinesePod want to be more innovative than just selling static and stale physical goods like Rosetta Stone.

The second model of paying for what you use would certainly appeal to me more but wouldn’t have worked when they just started out, since they didn’t have anything. It’s also a much bigger hassle to keep track of who payed for what so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. They could maybe sell the podcasts as songs in iTunes but that ties them to Apple’s platform and I’m pretty sure they want people to visit the site, not just get everything form iTunes.

So while people may suggest some other ways to make money while keeping things free, I think ChinesePod has gone with the only model that really makes sense for what they’re doing. Obviously, if the accounting books say they need to close some stuff off for non-paying users to motivate them to subscribe, that’s their business. However, the details in how they decided to go about it seems… to put it politely, misguided.

Suggestions

The first problem is they went with the bait-and-switch and nobody likes to be treated like a fish. When I design and develop features or upgrades in software, as a general rule, I never take features away. If you don’t think you can maintain or support the features in the long-term, you should never give it to them in the first place. In the software/SaaS world, people would rather not have something in the first place than have it taken away from them. In this case, ignorance really is bliss.

They already gave away all the lessons up to now anyway. They should have started closing access to the new lesson only. Especially in the digital world, once you open Pandora’s box, you can never get it back in. So I see no point in trying to close off all the old lessons, when all somebody has to do is release a torrent with all the old files anyway. People who don’t want to pay won’t, no matter what you try to do. I hate to say this, but in this case JapanesePod101 has made the right decision in releasing Premium subscriber-only lessons incrementally.

If the argument is really about focusing on providing more for the paying customers, then prove it by releasing new stuff only for them that makes non-subscribers want to join. Right now, it just sounds like vague promises and nobody can deny that they’re now providing far less, no matter how you try to dress up the situation.

The second major problem is not only did they take away the podcast audio, they closed the comments to non-paying members. BIG MISTAKE. I’m not too familiar with the community features since I don’t participate, but I have never seen a paying community take off. In fact, I think that’s almost an oxymoron. The idea that you have to pay to discuss things with other people online is just ridiculous. Non-paying members won’t have access to the lesson anyway, why block other people such as native Chinese speakers from answering the questions and comments by paying members, with the understanding that they haven’t heard the actual podcast? In fact, native Chinese speakers probably didn’t waste their time listening to the podcasts anyway ever. Really, I’d rather not waste my time discussing things with other clueless paying members if that’s the only people that can respond.

It will be interesting to see what this effect will have on the community around ChinesePod. In my opinion, it will be devastating and irreversible pretty soon. The clock is ticking. Reopen all the community features for everybody before it’s too late!

Again, I’m not saying their decision is right or wrong, I’m just saying that some of the details in the change is not what I would call good business sense.

A short post today since real life is starting to be more demanding and clamoring for attention.

Today, I learned a new word: 【準える】

I’m always surprised to see a completely new word based on a Kanji that I’ve probably known for well over 6 years. 「準備」 was probably one of the first few words I learned with Kanji (it helped that the same word in Korean sounds identical). I later picked up other words such as 「基準」、「水準」、「標準」、and 「準決勝」. Later on, I even picked up more advanced vocabulary such as 「準じる」 and the older style: 「準ずる」. And now, after over 8 years since I started studying Japanese, I just learned a completely different word based on the same Kanji.

Another similar example happened to me several years ago with 「集う」, which as far as I can tell is virtually identical to 「集まる」 except used like almost never. At that time, I came upon the word at a local community event at 「川口市」 called 「新年の集い」.

The moral of the story is: don’t worry about learning everything about a given Kanji at once. Relax, give it time, and learn things in context as you go. And whatever you do, DO NOT try to remember all the readings at once. You’ll eventually get to all the various readings and associated vocabulary in time. It might take over 8 years but hey, I’ve been using Japanese happily all these years without knowing 「準える」 precisely because it’s so rare to see it used anywhere.

As an interesting aside, 「なずらえる」 seems to have 3 possible kanji: 「準える・准える・擬える」 but the 「なぞらえる」 reading seems to only accept 「準える」. Probably a modern upgrade, as indicated by older usage of 「ず」 (similar to 「生ずる」、「準ずる」、etc).

If you read the title of this post and thought, “How can Japanese not have hot water?!” then this post is for you. Those of you who are familiar with this topic will know that Japan has hot water, of course. How can the bath and tea loving Japanese not have hot water. It’s just the complete opposite, in fact. Japanese people love hot water so much that they have a completely different word reserved just for water that’s hot. In fact, they even put an honorific 「お」 on top of it to make sure hot water realizes how awesome it is.

お湯 - Honorific hot water who blesses us with its holy gift of tasty tea and relaxing baths

Cold water just gets the shaft because it sucks and is just 「冷たい水」 if you want to be specific or just 「水」 as coldness is often implied (remember, hot water gets its own word).

The moral of this post is that you should never take anything for granted in a new language. That’s why, when I try to say something I’m unfamiliar with, I always try to find some real world examples and usages using various dictionaries and Google. There’s also Lang-8 to get your work checked by other people.

I’ve compiled a list of some word usages that might seem odd to us only because of the way we’re used to saying it in English. Can you think of other examples that have caught you unawares in the past?

1. 電気をつける／消す - Attaching and erasing electricity to turn the lights and electronic devices on or off.
2. 傘を差す - Pointing an umbrella to open it.
3. シャワーを浴びる - Japanese uses a special verb for showering, also used for basking in the sun.
4. 量が多い／少ない - Amount uses discrete measurement adjectives of numerous and few. I’ve often made the mistake of using 大きい and 小さい.
5. 背が低い - Height is low NOT short.
6. 教える - You don’t have to be a teacher to teach. You can use 「教える」 just for telling someone something they don’t know.
7. うそ - Not always used for fibbing, you can say “lie!” to express disbelief as in “no way!”

I’ve touched on this topic in an earlier post but it’s really sad to see the crappy resources we’re supposed to be using as English speakers learning Japanese. If you ever see me at a regular bookstore such as Barnes & Nobles going through the Japanese foreign language section, you’ll hear me mutter, “crap, crap, complete crap, crap, oooh! An utter piece of shit!”. I’m going to pick on the Kodansha Kanji Learners Dictionary because it has the word “Learner” in it but the same things apply to dictionaries commonly seen at most US bookstores. The first dictionary I bought (before I knew any better) was Random House Japanese-English English-Japanese Dictionary and it was also a complete piece of shit and a total waste of my precious and meager college money.

Anyway, going back to the Kodansha Kanji Dictionary, the product description on Amazon starts like this.

The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary answers the urgent need for an easy-to-use kanji dictionary compact enough to be easily carried around, yet detailed enough to satisfy the practical needs of the beginning and intermediate learner.

The “detailed enough” is the ultimate oxymoron of all these resources “designed” for English speakers learning Japanese. Beginner and intermediate learners need the most complete coverage possible even more so than native speakers, not less! If a native or advanced student needs to find out about something, they can search on Google, Wikipedia, local bookstores, libraries, ask around, and a whole wealth of other sources in the native language that are not available for people who can’t speak the language! If you’re a beginner like I was and equipped only with these crappy dictionaries, your only options when it doesn’t have the word you’re looking for are:

1. Say, “oh well” and quit.
2. Feel sad or frustrated and maybe cry or punch something/somebody.
3. Throw your crap dictionary at the wall and yell expletives at it.
4. Take your dictionary back to the store and demand your money back.

My point is when you’re looking at some Japanese text and you have no idea what it means, the last thing you need is a dictionary that should have all the definitions but don’t. You also need lots of example sentences, related idioms, detailed definitions, and an easy way to look up Kanji. This is a huge contrast to native speakers who understand most of everything and can figure out the rest from context without even opening a dictionary.

For comparison, the Kodansha’s Leaner Dictionary has 2,230 characters compared to my 改訂新版
漢字源 which as 13,112. The Random House Japanese<->English Dictionary claims to have over 50,000 entries, which I assume is about half that since it has both Japanese to English and English to Japanese. Currently, I have ジーニアス英和大辞典 which has 255,000 entries and ジーニアス
和英辞典 which has 82,000 entries. I admit the Japanese-English dictionary is a bit weak since my dictionary is for Japanese people but that’s still over 3x larger than the Random House dictionary and I also have 大辞林 which has 252,000 Japanese-Japanese entries. Overall, the difference is around a factor of 10. That’s a lot of information you’re missing out on!

Please, enough with the romaji!!!

Here’s the funniest quote in the product description for the Random House Dictionary.

The romanized entries are listed in alphabetical order, so no knowledge of Japanese is required.

So you don’t need to have any knowledge of Japanese to use a Japanese dictionary? Nice trick! What does it do, upload all the data directly to your brain Matrix-style?

And what is up with these romaji dictionaries? How the hell are you supposed to look up a word written in Kanji with a romaji dictionary?? For example, if I wanted to look up 「実際」, do I have to use a separate dictionary to look up 「実」 and 「際」 and THEN try a hit-or-miss guessing game at the reading? Ok, let’s try “jitsusai”, “jitusai”, “makotogiwa”, “mokotokiwa”, “minorikiwa”, “minorigiwa” and then proceed to the 4 options listed above. You MIGHT get lucky and find “jissai” with “jitsusai” because in this case, “s” comes right before “t” but what about 「間際」？ In Japanese dictionaries, 「き」 is right next to 「ぎ」 so it doesn’t matter whether you look for 「まきわ」 or 「まぎわ」, they’re right next to each other. But in romaji, “k” and “g” are pretty far apart. The same goes for 「じつさい」 vs 「じっさい」. In fact, 「じつざい」 （実在） comes right after 「じっさい」（実際） while “jissai” is nowhere near “jitsuzai”. It’s hard enough in Japanese when words like 「時間」、「間際」、「間」、and 「眉間」 all use different readings for 「間」. They also expect us to deal with voiced consonants and small つ being all over the place, no thanks to romaji? No wonder people think learning Japanese is hard!

Do yourself a favor and copy-paste the characters into an online dictionary. Otherwise, I don’t know how you’re going to find words like 「生粋」、「仲人」、「気質」、 and 「行方」.

Why do the Asians have it so good?

Take a look at those Japanese kids learning English. You don’t see them using crippled J<->E dictionaries. I’m sure many of you have seen Japanese exchange students, tutors, or whatnot with fancy electronic dictionaries. Those things have Genius and Progressive J<->E dictionaries with almost 100,000 entries each! But for some reason, I have never seen these dictionaries in any bookstores in the US except in 紀伊国屋 (no surprise there).

Many of those Japanese electronic dictionaries even have regular Oxford and Longman English dictionaries that are just as good as the ones we use. Some are even designed for learning other languages such as Korean and Chinese. When I started learning Chinese, this time I knew better than to completely waste my money on crap like the Concise English-Chinese / Chinese-English Dictionary so I plunked down some serious change for a Canon G90. Oh, the little paper dictionary has more than 20,000 entries in both sections? My 講談社 C<->J dictionaries have a total of 163,000 entries and a 中日大辞典 that has 150,000 entries for Chinese to Japanese alone. Booyah!

To top it off, all of the dictionaries I mentioned owning are all in one tiny electronic device, which has a whole bunch of other dictionaries I didn’t even mention. I have used this dictionary for years and haven’t regretted buying it since. Almost every entry has examples sentences in both Chinese and Japanese. You can also use the stylus pen to write and search for kanji along with animated stroke order diagrams. These features are critical for learners that are simply unnecessary for advanced or native speakers and the Japanese makers understand that. My only relatively minor complaints are poor support for traditional characters (they’re in there but only as separate characters) and the dark screen.

So what’s the deal here? Why do I have to buy an J<->E dictionary from Japan to get anything decent? And even worse, why do I need to know Japanese to get a decent Chinese dictionary? I’ve already given up on the Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary, which is also on my G90 after it failed me one too many times. But I bet you can find great C<->E dictionaries in China. It’s almost too depressing.

But I’m too cheap to buy an expensive dictionary!

If you’re too cheap to buy an electronic dictionary that can cost several hundred dollars, you can use several online dictionaries for free!

However, if you’re really serious about learning Japanese, the extra money is totally worth it. You can get reasonably cheap ones with less features, you just need to make sure it comes with quality and beefy dictionaries. Personally, I prefer the Canon WordTank or Casio Ex-word brands.

Seriously, I feel sorry for those people who don’t know enough to actually waste their money on these crappy paper dictionaries perhaps unaware that you can get something infinitely better for free (minus cost of computer+internet). Lets spread the message that these things aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on and hopefully get some real dictionaries that are actually usable.

DEATH to the useless Learner dictionaries!!!

(Sorry, I recently watched eXistenZ. That’s one weird movie.)

According to Wikipedia, revision of the 常用漢字 (Jōyō kanji) was first proposed in February 2005 and work began in September of the same year.

2005年2月に国語分科会が「情報化時代に対応するために常用漢字のあり方を検討すべき」であるとした報告書を文化審議会に提出した。これを受けて、同年3月、中山文部科学相は常用漢字表の見直しの検討などを文化審議会に諮問した。同年9月から文化審議会・国語分科会の漢字小委員会が常用漢字見直しの審議に入った。
- Wikipedia

Three years later, there was news as recently as last month of a tentative list to be released in February of 2009. The new list is currently said to have removed 5 kanji and added 188 new ones, bringing the new total from 1945 to 2128 characters.

文化審議会国語分科会の漢字小委員会は１５日、常用漢字表に新たに入れる可能性の高い漢字１８８字からなる字種候補案を承認した。話題になった「俺（おれ）」も含まれる。今後、音訓を決める段階や、来年２月に作成される新常用漢字表（仮称）試案を修正する段階で、この追加字種の数は若干変わる可能性もあるが、ほぼ固まった。

現行の常用漢字表からはずす可能性が高いのは銑・錘・勺・匁・脹。１９４５字からなる常用漢字表からこの５字をはずし、新たに１８８字を追加すれば、新常用漢字表は２１２８字となる。
- 朝日（２００８年7月15日）

The new additions apparently also include the “controversial” character 「俺」. Personally, it seems crazy to not include it based on how often it’s used. And what is so controversial about 「俺」 anyway especially considering the fact that they’re adding kanji like 「勃」 and 「淫」? That’s just my opinion in any case and I think the difficulty they are having in determining the criteria for what goes in the list is indicative of fundamental problems with the whole idea behind the list in the first place.

Never let the 常用漢字表 tell you which kanji to learn or not learn

What is the purpose of the 常用漢字表 anyway? To tell you which kanji to learn? So I’m supposed to learn 「斤」, some obscure unit of measurement but not the kanji for the word “who” （誰）? That makes perfect sense, right?!

Also, why did they even have the removed characters （銑・錘・勺・匁・脹） in the first place? Was “pig iron” commonly used at some point in time? I mean, the list came out the year I was born and I don’t think I’m THAT old. And why haven’t they removed stuff like 畝 or 逓 yet? I don’t think they come even close to falling in the category of “common usage” no matter how you define it.

And now, almost 30 years later they’re finally going to add kanji for words like “smell” （匂い）, “loose” （緩い）, “nail” （爪）, and “butt” （お尻） in 2010? What kind of crap list were we using all these years?

The list burned me personally when I bought my first kanji dictionary. It only had the 常用漢字 because after all, that’s all we need to know, right? Well, one of the FIRST words I encountered in my self-study was 「瞳」 and guess what, it’s not in the list! If I had known better, I would have never wasted money on anything that only covered the 常用漢字.

Thankfully, I later found an online dictionary that didn’t use the 常用漢字表 as an excuse to be lazy and saved me from quitting Japanese in frustration. For comparison, the 漢字源 in my Canon G90 has 13,112 characters, almost 16x what my first crap dictionary had.

Don’t fall into the trap of learning from a list

In my opinion, the worst problem with the list is that it fools innocent learners such as you and I into thinking we should use it somehow in our studies. The thinking goes, “Hey here’s a list of (supposedly) common kanji. I should make up some index cards and memorize them one by one.”

However, what many beginners don’t realize is that you have to be some kind of super-genius to memorize 1945 characters with absolutely no context. Even if you DID somehow manage to memorize them all, you’re not learning any real words, you have no idea which readings are used and when, and you have no sense of when and how it’s used. Where’s the reading material, vocabulary, and conversation practice? It’s like putting the cart before the horse AND sitting in the seat backwards.

The first character on the list is 「亜」 for crying out loud! For all you know, that’s the most useful character in the world when in fact I have never used it in all my years of study. Do YOU write 「アジア」 and 「アメリカ」 as 「亜細亜」 and 「亜米利加」? I sure hope not! I thought for a second that maybe it’s used in the word 「唖然」 but no, not even! If anything, 「唖」 belongs in the list much more than 「亜」 if you ask me. Obviously, they never consulted me (I was -2 months old at the time) and no, it’s not in the list.

Conclusion

I don’t know, maybe the list has some good uses for educators, policy makers, publishers, and whatnot. It’s certainly better to have an improved version over the crappy one we have now. But I can’t help but think it was overused throughout the years and caused more harm than good for people learning Japanese. Personally, I think we would have been better off without the damn list in the first place.

The bottom line is whatever new list they come up with and no matter how “good” it is (whatever that means), we should always think of it as a guide and never forget to use good ol’ common sense.

This is yet another post that’s been picking up cruft in my draft folder for over three years.

Stroke order is one of those things that might seem difficult at first but actually comes quite naturally with a bit of practice. You just have to make sure you learn the the correct order of the most important radicals such as 口 and 田. You should also pay careful attention to radicals like 厂 that have more stroke orders than you would think. (Hint, it’s more than 1.)

Once you learn the stroke order for the most common radicals, you can figure out the rest for most kanji by yourself with general principles like the following.

1. Stroke orders generally go from top to bottom and left to right (from the top-left corner to bottom-right corner.
2. Vertical lines that go straight through is written last as opposed to those that connect (十 vs 土）.
3. Stuff that encloses something else gets drawn first but closed last （回 and 団）.

When in doubt or for weird kanji like 必, you can always check the stroke order on the WWWJDIC by looking up the kanji and clicking on the SOD link. You’ll get a nice animated gif like this one.

However, the problem with these animations is that it only gives you the order and not the direction of each stroke. If you’re confused about stroke direction, another site you might want to try is gahoh, which has animated .mov files with the direction and order. Here’s one for 必.

Their collection isn’t as complete as the WWWJDIC but it is useful for odd or crazy and complicated kanji like 龜. The request page in particular has some of the odder and trickier kanji like 凸、凹、飛、 and 卵 so you might want to check it out and double-check your stroke order.

So how useful is it to learn the proper stroke order of 龜? Not very but hey it’s fun times for everybody, right? Right? Hello? ………anybody?

I recently received this question via email from Shiki.

To: taekim.japanese AT gmail.com
Date: Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 11:39 AM

Subject: Some questions about your method…

You said that when you were learning Japanese you didn’t study kanji, but the words made of them. So when you encountered a new word, what did you do to “drill” it into your memory? I’m just wondering what steps to take when I encounter a new word.

Also, how often did you find yourself reviewing? When I say reviewing, I mean like SRS/flashcard reviewing. I ask this because the method you described yourself using for learning Japanese is very appealing to me, as I think it’s in line with what will help me learn Japanese successfully. It’s not that I don’t have the time to review, but I just find reviewing for long periods of time very boring. I’m not really interested in coming home and having to do 4 hours of reviewing that my SRS scheduled for me today. I’d rather just jump straight into reading manga, looking for new words and kanji, having fun while learning.

Thanks.

I do not have a method, I do not play monopoly

I did not do any review, I did not use an SRS, I did not pass Go, I did not collect $200, and I definitely did not use flashcards. Or more accurately, I did try to use flashcards early on but all my efforts at making and reviewing flashcards soon petered out due to boredom.

Here are some of the things I did do depending on my mood and how much interest I had for any given vocabulary.

1. I skipped the word if I was lazy or too absorbed into the story to stop reading. (Usually when it didn’t hinder my comprehension too much)
2. I looked up the word, found the definition, and moved on.
3. I remembered other words that used the same Kanji, and looked those up as well.
4. For new Kanji, I looked up the meaning for the individual Kanji and practiced writing the odder ones like 「飛」.
5. For fairly abstract concepts such as 「関して」 or 「かつて」, I looked up other example sentences similar to the steps described in this post.
6. In conversation practice, I asked my partner to write down words I didn’t recognize and reviewed my notes later (or not depending on how lazy I was).

The only thing that could be considered review was going back and reading something over again for the fun of it. On reading it over, I might look up words I skipped previously or have forgotten since then.

Here, let me put words in your mouth

While that’s what I did to study Japanese, I’m going to read a bit between the lines here and answer what I think the question is really asking, “How should you study Japanese?”

Here’s the short answer:

Do what works for you.

Similar to diet fads, people seem to want to gravitate toward some magical method for mastering Japanese. Various books and software try to reel these people in with claims like, “Learn Japanese the Easy Way!” or “The Fastest Way to Learn Japanese!”. In my opinion, 99.9% of these products are complete crap. I won’t say which ones because I rather not say anything rather than being overly negative.

Regardless of whether you think Japanese is more or less difficult than learning other languages, the bottom line is that mastering any foreign language is a large task. So do yourself a favor and take an approach that makes learning Japanese enjoyable and interesting for you.

Are you having trouble writing the Kanji? Try the Heisig method. Are you having trouble recalling vocabulary? Try an SRS. Are you getting bored with the study material? Try new kinds of material such as dramas, movies, books, comics. Or here’s a crazy idea. How about making some Japanese friends to practice with? The important thing to realize is that no single method is going to cover everything.

The point is, I can’t advocate a single method or steps to learning Japanese because we all learn in different ways and have different goals. Here are some questions that might affect how you want to approach Japanese.

1. What is your desired pace and average study time?
2. What are your areas of interest?
3. How best do you learn: visual, audio, or mechanical? You need to incorporate all three but you can use your natural disposition to your advantage.
4. Do you like to learn in an organized or unorganized fashion?

I also suggest you read my post on studying tips. Practice makes perfect, so you should not forget that eventually you’ll have to use Japanese in the real world to get better at it. Feed Me Japanese also has some good posts about learning methods.

Finally, my last piece of advice is this.

If it’s painful, boring, or frustrating, stop doing it and try something else.

And if everything starts to feel that way, try taking a little break. But don’t let it last too long otherwise it might became a hiatus and you start forgetting what you’ve worked so hard to learn. Remember, like proper dieting and exercise, the importance is in consistency and not speed.

Conclusion

So Shiki, it sounds like you answered your own question. If you don’t like reviewing for long periods of time and prefer to jump straight into reading manga, then go do that! It worked for me! (In addition to having Japanese friends to converse with.)

The edict dictionary is one of best online dictionaries available, better than any print E->J dictionaries I know of. It is also continuously being expanded from user submissions. Even in the rare instance that it doesn’t have what you’re looking for, you’re covered with the monster huge 大辞泉 and 大辞林 J->J dictionaries available for free at Yahoo!辞書. If you have the patience to work through the Japanese definition, you should be able to find a definition for every word in any print dictionary available to native speakers. However, with new words and slang being invented all the time, you might run into words that are not in any traditional dictionary. The good news is that a lot of Japanese people won’t be familiar with them either. Here’s a quick tip from me to easily find Japanese sites that explain and define words of this nature. In the process, I’ll also discuss a very special double particle.

The 「とは」 double particle

While you can guess the meaning of most double particles from the sum of it’s parts such as 「には」 (a target that’s also a topic), 「とは」 really has a meaning of its own. Simply put, it is a somewhat formal and concise way to define something. For example, try searching on Google for 「とは」 and you’ll get pages with titles like 「ITとは」 and 「WWWとは」. If you go to the site itself, it’ll give you a short definition of the relevant term.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. When I run into a term that’s not in the dictionary (which in my case is usually new expressions or slang too stupid to put in a real dictionary), I search the term in Google with 「とは」.

For example, when I was listening to 眞鍋かをり’s podcast titled あなたの周りのＫＹな人, I had forgotten what “KY” meant. Now, looking up a term like “KY” is usually very difficult because there isn’t a lick of Japanese in the “word” (and I use that term loosely). But all I had to do was attach 「とは」 and soon found this neat and in-depth definition in no time.

From http://zokugo-dict.com/09ke/ky.htm

その場の雰囲気や状況などを察する（感じる・掴む）ことを「空気を読む」とも表現する。KYはこの「空気」と「読む」の頭文字で、主に空気が読めない人を意味する。また、逆にそういった人に「空気を読め」と提言する際にも「KY」と耳元で囁くなどして使われる。女子高生がメールのやりとりで使い、普及した。

若者の間では以前から使われているが、2007年、こういった頭文字略語の存在が話題となり、広く知られる。

In fact, thanks to this search, I found the 「日本語俗語辞書」 with all sorts of stupid slang that I’ll probably end up wishing I’d kept to myself. Please don’t send me an email along the lines of, “Hey, after reading your blog, I called my boss an AY for fun and he actually knew what it meant! He totally MMed on me and now I’m out of a job. What should I do?”

Anyway, in addition to the regular KY語 (God, it’s turning into its own language now?), this tactic was also useful for looking up Internet slang when I wrote about 電車男. For instance, the first search result for 「ROMとは」 turned up this nice little definition.

From http://d.hatena.ne.jp/keyword/ROM

書き込みをしない人のこと。あるいは書き込みをせずにいること。（「ROMる」、「ロムる」などと表現する）

ネット上のコミュニティでその場の雰囲気をつかむために「ROMったり」、「ROMになったり」する。

他人に対して「ROMってろよ」と発言するのは「黙ってろよ」と発言するのと同義。

So there you have it, a simple neat tip from me to you. I just wish I had better examples that won’t turn your cute little 「ます／です」 classroom Japanese to the dark side. Just don’t be using this stuff when you’re talking to me. You’ll totally get the hand and I mean that.

LOL! KTNXBYE

My current favorite online Chinese dictionary, Dict.cn has recently been upgraded with lots of new features. For instance, while Chinese Perapera-kun already takes care of this for me, non-Firefox users will appreciate the automatic look-up of highlighted words.

Personally, my favorite feature is the 每日课堂, which will allow you to learn a little bit of Chinese every day with a little story or even just a simple sentence. While this site and most of its features are obviously geared for Chinese speakers learning English, the fact that 每日课堂 has both English and Chinese makes it a valuable resource for us learning Chinese as well.

[2008-08-01] 每日学口语

I have been putting on weight.
我开始发胖了。

I have in fact, been putting on some weight lately so the sentence above is nice to know. 我要少吃多运动。

Finally, this might have been there already, but they also have a 繁体字 dictionary. Technologically, there should be no reason why it would need to be split up but I guess I shouldn’t complain since the site is already free and useful.

I ran into this sentence while trying to read a little bit from a Chinese blog.

何为感觉？

The sentence intrigued me because it was using 「何」, a character I’m sure most of you learning Japanese are already familiar with. I was curious to see how it was used in Chinese and decided to do some digging. In the process, I thought it would be a neat idea to outline some of the steps I take when trying to figure this kind of thing out for any language including Japanese.

Breaking down “何”

I first looked it up in Dict.CN and came up with the following.

1. why
2. which
3. what
4. carry
5. how

Wow, it looks like ”何” can mean just about every question word there is. How is it that I don’t see it more often? As usual, the English definitions are pretty much useless for clarifying anything. Unless I’m looking up very simple concepts or objects such as “friend” or “car”, I don’t even bother with the English definitions. Instead, the real value is in the example sentences. Here are a few samples.

1. 你这次考试的结果如何？
How did you do on your test?

2. 你跟你的新上司处得如何？
How are you doing with your new boss?

Ok, in this case, all the examples seem to be referring to another word “如何”. Looking at the sentence, it seems pretty clear that it means something like “how is”. My first thought is, how is that different from “怎么样”? But since this is a whole other direction, I decided to drop it and go back to finding more information about “何” by itself.

So this time, the example sentences from Dict.CN didn’t turn up much. Ah well, time to whip out my trusty Wordtank G90. The definition and example sentences given by the G90 were a lot more useful and seemed closer to what I was looking for.

①疑問を表す

That explanation was further broken up into １．何、２．どこ、and ３．どうして with examples for each. Here are just a few samples.

1. 他为何不来？
彼はなぜこないのか。

2. 你有何高见
あなたにはどんなお考えがおありでしょうか？

I interpreted these examples to mean that “何” is a general question word to increase the level of questioning similar to but probably not as strong as 「一体」 in Japanese.

Now, example sentences are great but I like to have a little more context. So I tried searching “何” in ChinesePod. It turned up a bunch of Media and Advanced lessons which I was too lazy to dig through, one Elementary lesson that had no mention of “何” at all (maybe a bug?), and finally a promising Upper Intermediate lesson called Drinking Ability. And sure enough the dialogue had the following line, referring to a manager out-drinking the whole company.

何止一桌，是一个公司！
Way more than one table. It was the whole company!

Ok, so this usage didn’t seem to fit with my initial interpretation. In Chinese, because what constitutes a “word” is so flexible, you have to always be careful to consider whether you’re looking at a combination of characters or a set phrase. So I looked up “何止” in my Wordtank to make sure it wasn’t a set phrase. And sure enough:

【何止】 ・・・にとどまらない。ただ・・・だけではない。
例文）
他的作品何止这些
彼の作品はこれだけにとどまらない。

So this was different from just “何” and my original interpretation was safe. By the way, Dict.CN returned no results for “何止” so you definitely want to get the best dictionary you can with the most comprehensive coverage. (My G90 C->J dictionary has about 150,000 entries.)

Breaking down “何为”

Now that I had a general idea of how “何” works, I took a closer look at “何为” from the original sentence that started this whole thing. I noticed an interesting, and as it turns out, deceptive similarity between my original sentence and one of the example sentences for “何” in my dictionary.

他为何不来？
何为感觉？

Since the first example came with a Japanese translation, I concluded that it was roughly equivalent to “他为什么不来？” but with a more questioning tone like, “Why in the world isn’t he coming?” But “为什么感觉？” doesn’t really make much sense by itself or in the context of the original text.

I guessed that the key was in the difference of order between “为何” and “何为”. My hunch was that the first, “为” is an abbreviation of “为什么” while the second “为” is an abbreviation of “为了”. The translation “What is the feeling for?” seems to fit the context of the original text better.

I searched Google and Baidu for “何为” to verify my hunch and found this page. It looks like “何为” can be a person’s name as well? I don’t really know. At this point, I’m was starting to get frustrated. Who said Chinese was easier than Japanese?? (Oh right, that was me.)

A little more digging up turned up an article titled 何为Hibernate. Alright, I know about Hibernate (it’s a Java O/R mapping framework) and the title “What is Hibernate for?” seems to make sense. I found another article 小泉三次参拜靖国神社意欲何为？. Again the title, “What is Koizumi’s intention for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine?” makes sense. I was too lazy to actually read the articles to verify so in the end I just went and asked a Chinese coworker to confirm my hunch. I seemed to be right though he did mention that the use of “何为” was very high-level and not common.

[Correction]
According to your comments, 何为 is another way to say “what”. so “何为感觉” means “What is feeling?” And “意欲何为” comes from Classical Chinese meaning “干什么”. I admit, I still don’t get it really but I’ll just leave it at that for now.

Conclusion

This is pretty much the approach I take when I run into anything new that can’t be easily learned from a dictionary and when I’m too lazy or impatient to just ask a native speaker. It gets a lot easier to go through all the example sentences and search results as you get better in the language. But the difficulty just means that you’re learning more since you know less.

Today, I learned some useful and perhaps not so useful stuff about “何” in Chinese. Spending so much time digging around for information really helps me remember it better than any flashcard and presents opportunities to learn about other stuff such as “如何”， “何止”， and “为何”. All this extra work will also ensure that I won’t forget that the reading for “何” is “hé” for a long time. While I still don’t completely understand all the nuances yet, I’ll be able to recognize it in the future until I can eventually get a feel for how and when to use it.

And hey, what do you know. I just ran into “何” again for today’s 每日学口语 (8月2日).

上大学有何用？
What’s the point of going to college?

In conclusion, I’d like to say that Chinese is a um… interesting… to put it politely. Sigh… Again, please feel free to make any corrections if I’m getting any of this wrong.