French:
Debout le Morts par(?) Fred Vargas
Réflexions sur le langage par Noam Chomsky
Hominescence par Michel Serres
Les utopies posthumaines par Rémi Sussan
and a few issues of Écoute

Spanish:
El Reino des Dragón de Oro por Isabel Allende
La Sombra del Viento por Carlos Ruiz Zafón
plus several issues of Ecos

Chinese/Japanese:
Quite a few DVDs in each language and a couple of textbooks to work with. Plus tons of ANKI flashcards (>10000 for Chinese alone).

Vietnamese:

http://www.seasite.niu.edu/vietnamese/uniLesson1/Lesson1_main.htm

Le Vietnamien sans peine (Assimil)

In addition, I got a huge stack of photography-related books from the library to use as reference and inspiration for my own photographic attempts that will be published over at my other blog, Dawn Lotus .
Obviously, I’m so pissed about my (prospective) grades that I want to forget about clocked sequential systems, torque and linear algebra for a while.

Dictonaries & Word lists
HSK Vocabulary on Wikipedia (full list with more than 8000 items, both simplified and traditional)
nciku – probably the best, most up-to-date dictionary with lots of additional tools
MDBG dictionary, very useful, especially for sentences/pinyin, offers nice tools like flashcards and quizzes
Character list covering about 4000 commonly used hanzi, with sample uses and stroke order, both traditional and simplified
Another character list (3000 entries)
Taeglich Chinesisch (A daily dose of Chinese) German website introducing characters through mnemonics.
Characters by School Grade (Taiwan, so everything’s in traditional characters)
Animated Characters
Chinese Etymology Apart from being very revealing, this dictionary might provide clues for mnemonics.

Note: You may want to work with several frequency lists because they seem to have been compiled in a somewhat arbitrary fashion. Of course, that is not the case, but the algorithms used to create them do not necessarily reflect everyday usage. In this respect, the HSK categories are particularly at odds with actual usage.

Grammar & Sample Sentences
Chinese Usage Dictionary Excellent resource on grammar patterns, distinctions between near-homonyms and how to avoid common mistakes
Chengyu Idioms Chengyu explained in English.

Music & Media
Taiwan Panorama Read about Taiwan to your heart’s content
Anti-CNN The name says it all. Unusual points of view, in Chinese.
Neocha A popular Chinese music database, inspired by MySpace
Chinese Voice Recordings of short essays and stories. Suitable for intermediate students.
ERF International Inspirational Christian audio material , published weekly. More advanced. Admittedly, that’s a somewhat unusual way to improve your Chinese, but at least the quality is better than that of most bilingual sermons you’ll find on iTunes.
Youku, Sogou MP3 and Tudou host lots of movies/news reports/mp3 files, much more extensive than YouTube cause no one gives a damn about copyright, but due to that they are not entirely legal (I’m only including them for the sake of completeness, I’m not advocating using these websites).
小i An entertaining little chat bot.
CCTV 4 online stream. In contrast to all other CCTV channels, CCTV 4 is available most of the time.

Literature & Poetry
Chinese Poems Chinese, pinyin and English texts of poems by some of the greatest Chinese poets
Read Novels Complete novels online. It could hardly get any better. No audio, afaik, though.
QQ Blogs Gateway to a gazillion of weblogs, written by Chinese. Topics ranging from technology over fashion to society. Highly recommended. (To read a blog, just click on any link, really. )
Sina Blogs see above
Harry Potter translations errors Funny analyses of mistakes in the Chinese translations of the books as well as a guide to specific vocabulary.
Chinese Classics (Translation) Translations as well as some original texts.
Classical Literature (Chinese) Full texts, including well-known classics like A Dream of the Red Mansion, Romance of Three Kingdoms or Water Margin.
China Youth Net Encyclopedia Educational material on a variety of topics (literature, history, philosophy, art, military, sport)

Food & Travel
How to Order Chinese Food If you’ve ever wanted to know how to say “mangostane” (or wondered how to ask “What on earth IS a mangostane?”) in Chinese or if you’re interested in vegetarian/regional cuisine, this place is a goldmine. The best part: Includes pictures of most dishes, and both characters and pinyin.

To be continued…(My Favorites folder contains more than 700 links, so sorting through all of them might take a little while.)

For my first post, I’m going to venture into familiar territory, so familiar, in fact, that my musings may seem trivial (I hope they aren’t!). It is part of a series of post on the subject. Because it deals with my own experience, it will contain less in-depth analysis of the issue.

To my mind, there’s a crucial difference between memorising a set of characters (Hanzi in Chinese, Kanji and Kana in Japanese) and learning a new alphabet (Arabic, Kyrillic). Well, duh!, you might say. But why do most people employ the same methods in both cases?

First of all, having to cram 2000+ or 10000+ seemingly random characters into one’s brain is a far more daunting task than dealing with 20-50 “placeholders” for certain consonants and, usually, a few vowels. Psychology aside, characters are typically more complex than letters, but the Japanese kana and the many forms of Arabic writing may be borderline cases.

Still, most books and classes dealing with languages whose writing is alphabetic devote at least a few weeks to learning the alphabet. Why is it then, that I (and the majority of Japanese/Chinese learners) are able to learn anywhere between 10 to 100 characters a day? In my third week of Chinese (my first actual exposure to the written language) , I learned approximately 500 Hanzi – at about 95% retention. On the other hand, I tried to memorize the 96 kana (this term refers to the “fluid”-looking Hiragana and the more “edgy” Katakana in Japanese) for over 6 months (on and off, of course). I even spent New Year’s Eve (admittedly, not the *whole* night) using my flashcards. In retrospect, maybe, if I hadn’t got a bit tipsy, my retention rate might have been better. As time passed by, I got creative – and increasingly desperate. Flashcards*, SRS, rote memorisation, mnemonics, sticking sheets of paper on my walls to draw the kana on when I felt like it – none of these varied approaches worked.

So I thought back to when I had just started learning to read Chinese a little less than 2 years ago. Surprisingly, apart from that first week of intense cramming, I couldn’t remember ever formally attempting to memorize the Hanzi until I stumbled upon SRSing in May 2009, a method that seems to agree well with me now I’ve got the basics down.

At the very beginning, I felt extremely lost, not even in translation because with all those odd characters, attempting to extract any meaning was far from my mind. I’m not going to say that everything eventually fell into place, mostly because it didn’t. It took me months to feel at ease when reading, but I didn’t want to devote any time specifically to memorizing the characters, even though that time was extremely frustrating. Like most beginners, I started out by learning pinyin – wait… I’ll be honest – at that time, I had no clue pinyin existed. I figured there had to be some kind of romanisation, but I wasn’t familiar with it and probably too lazy to do any research, given that I didn’t expect Chinese to take any root in my life. So I fiddled around a bit and made up my own, horribly, horribly inaccurate and wrong romanisation. This phase helped me remember some very basic phrases. Fed up with that DIY-pinyin, I didn’t even bother using the real version. Granted, someone with more linguistic insight must have come up with pinyin , but I had experienced the trouble with romanisation first-hand and wasn’t willing to make any sacrifices again. So I took a somewhat unusual path that included squinting at simple texts as if they were paintings instead of writing created to convey (limited) information. And things still didn’t fall into place, as they did with pronunciation. Yet, gradually, I began recognising a few characters, very fundamental ones like 我,你,的,他, 是,不,有 (I, you, [possessive particle], he, is, not, have), you get the picture. Context helped with the others, but . When encountering them in isolation any familiarity was gone. I remained at this stage for several months, until enough characters had crept into my brain to enable me to read without having to rely on context to fill the gaps.

Fast-forward half a year, and context wasn’t enough to make up for new characters in advanced texts, which forced me to start learning the characters in isolation. Ever since that, the rate of confusing characters has gone up, partly because now know more look-alike Hanzi, but also because they aren’t “tied” to a specific context anymore.

I am, in general, very happy with the study method I employed. It bears some semblance to the “Sight Word” method, but that would mean neglecting the influence of phonetic markers and other morphosyllabic elements and falling prey to the fallacy of Hanzi being (nothing but) ideograms. But acquisition speed comes at a price – while I recognize approximetely 5000 characters (meaning I can comfortably read newspapers), my writing ability is very limited**, to about 300 characters. That would change if I made an effort to actually learn how to write the other 4700, but I used the term “dauting task” above, didn’t I? Well, the writing part certainly is.

*Generally, working  with flashcards is very convenient, so convenient in fact, that I do most of my reviewing in lectures. Admittedly, this does not further my understanding of the intracacies of flip-flops (also charmingly referred to as bistable multivibrator) or eigenvalue calculation. Reminiscent of Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel, I even took my cards along when I hit the bars with a few friends. Again, alcohol consumption is detrimental to linguistic progress, even though beer is said to loosen one’s tongue.

**As far as I can tell, most fellow learners of Chinese follow what in primary education is called the (integrated) synthetic approach (as opposed to more analytical methods), thus learning reading and writing at the same time, resulting a better ratio between the number of Hanzi they can write and those they recognize correctly. The total number of familiar characters tends to be much lower, though. But at least they won’t get laughed at for not knowing how to write  衣服 (clothes) at the 中国邮政 China Post office, I suppose.

Of course, with a gazillon blogs floating in the www, there’s no necessity to read mine. Really.

Or is there? Nevertheless, let me give you a brief introduction to myself and the purpose of this blog.

I’m a university student majoring in engineering (a totally unrelated subject, I know) who’s obsessive about foreign languages.

I have to confess: When I entered high school, I abhorred foreign languages. The courses were boring, repetitive and certainly didn’t spark any interest in the language. So I was a rather passive student, unenthusiastic yet still somehow scraping good marks in my second language and Latin, which I favoured over French (not much choice at my school back then, I hear they introduced Russian a few years ago). I don’t remember what made me decide to study Spanish on my own at age 14. Within a year, I was functionally fluent, reading Isabel Allende, Borges and technical articles. Whilst randomly browsing for podcasts (which were still quite exotic back then), I stumbled upon ChinesePod and decided to learn Chinese, for no other reason than finding out what the language is like. The first weeks were rather awkward, I felt absolutely stupid trying to reproduce the sounds. After little more than six months, though, I participated in a Chinese language competition (admittedly aimed at intermediate learners) and won a scholarship. During my second-to-last year at high school, I took a Finnish class, taught by a fellow student (non-native speaker). Again, at the beginning I had very interest in the country, its history or any other aspect that normally entices people to take up a language. Unfortunately, because of my exams, I didn’t get very far, but I’m determined to. At 17, I started studying Japanese (on my own) and French (relying to the great support of a francophile friend). At 18, I began to learn Biblical Hebrew. In the near future, I will start studying Russian, Arabic, Vietnamese and Cantonese. My goal is to become functionally fluent in all of them.

Follow me along as I step up my studying a notch and try to cram several languages at once into my schedule. Expect tips, recommendations of learning materials, linguistic (or pseudo-linguistic) insights and (hopefully) helpful comments that may help in your own progress.