KanaBalls Lite is now available for free in the App Store. Go try it now! It has all of the great gameplay of the full version of KanaBalls, but is limited to 30 kana (the あ, か, and さ rows, in both hiragana and katakana) and four simultaneous balls, and does not record high scores. Of course, if you want the full KanaBalls experience, it will only set you back the cost of a decent latte.

Related posts:

1. Learn Japanese kana with Kanaballs for the iPhone (+15 promo codes)

My family has been in the United States visiting my parents for a couple of weeks, and generally enjoying our time. Though I grew up in Orlando, after my brother and I grew up and moved out my parents relocated to a big chunk of land in a very rural part of the Florida panhandle.

Because, as the above-linked Wikipedia article indicates, “[c]ulturally and in terms of history and climate … [the Florida panhandle] is more closely tied to the Deep South than to the Peninsula of Florida,” I’ve enjoyed an extra dose of reverse culture shock this time around^*. Linguistically, this is the first time I’ve lived in an English speaking area in which the people speak with a substantially different accent than my own, and I’ve been finding that, in a lot of cases, my English listening comprehension simply isn’t up to snuff, having lived overseas for almost 7 years and tuned my ears to that bland international English everyone speaks so as to be understood. There have been a number of interactions over the last fortnight that, had they taken place in Mandarin, even badly pronounced Mandarin, would have been no problem whatsoever, but that I fumbled because they were in English. Disconcerting, to say the least.

Two observations:

1. The importance of dialects. When you’re first getting started with a language, learning the ’standard,’ most widely understood version of the language makes the most sense, because you’ll get the most bang for you buck that way. However, if you want to be anywhere near proficient, you need to be able to understand at least the major dialects that are spoken in your area. In a place like China, where the ‘dialects’ are languages unto themselves, this means at very least understanding Mandarin as is spoken by the locals, and maybe some rudimentary knowledge of the local language (i.e., my store/restaurant, otherwise totally nonfunctional, Shanghainese).
2. The importance of practice. More than anything, I’m just really out of practice using English for day-to-day activities. As the quote goes (by Ignacy Paderewski, if the intertubes aren’t lying this morning) “If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it.” If my native language can suffer from a deficit in listening and speaking practice over the last seven years, then how fast will my Chinese fade away if I were to stop using it daily (PDQ, if I had to guess)?

My third observation is that, save for home cooked food, American food is seriously lacking in flavor. Yet another “well, we do this much better in America” fantasy shot to pieces… but that’s a story for another time.

* Amusingly, that Wikipedia article also quotes the postbellum Alabama legislature as saying that the panhandle was “a sand bank and gopher region” in their decision not to purchase the the region from Florida for $1 million. The more things change…

Related posts:

1. One language or many, take two
2. Pronouncing Uyghur proper nouns
3. Feeling overwhelmed? Stop trying so damn hard!

Greetings from sunny north Florida, where the Global Maverick team is spending our Chinese New Year (nothing says festive like a jetlagged baby!) in style. Posting will continue to be light as we enjoy mom’s cooking and air that doesn’t taste like anything at all, but I wanted to take a second to announce that Qingxi Labs‘ first learning game for the iPhone or iPod Touch, Kanaballs, is now available in the App Store (view in your browser | view in iTunes).

We spent a lot of time making KanaBalls visually appealing as well as educational, and we’re quite pleased with how it turned out. If you’re learning the Japanese kana (both hiragana and katakana), this app will help drill them in a way that’s a lot more fun than simple flashcards, and will ensure that you really know them by testing your recognition of them in six different directions (hiragana -> romaji, romaji -> hiragana, hiragana -> katakana, katakana -> romaji, romaji -> katakana, and katakana -> hiragana). Below are some screenshots from the game (a video demo is coming soon).

The app normally retails for $3.99 (or the equivalent), but I’m happy to offer 15 promo codes good for a free download to my readers here. All that I ask is that if you use one of the codes that you leave a review and rating in the App Store (be honest in your feedback — honest feedback is how we improve — but please leave one). Unfortunately the promo codes only work for customers with a US iTunes Store account.

1. NJL4HPX64FAX
2. NRF6HJWKXTAF
3. 9RR73NT67EYT
4. YT3PJ63F4PFH
5. NKTT4N77346N
6. 9K6YTMENLEMR
7. WPMLKP7AFX9F
8. 4TYKEELN7JE4
9. 9FT6XL9E6NRH
10. HXF4LJJRTT44
11. PXKLJRH7TFW6
12. ARM7LJKWRR9F
13. TLRTJXF9ERE3
14. 6L3KLTMAWRPA
15. AYAK7H43XM4K

Let us know what you think!

Related posts:

1. KanaBalls Lite is now available for free in the App Store
2. Using your iPhone to create a language immersion environment
3. Creating a foreign language listening environment

It’s been a really, painfully hectic January – a repeatedly sick toddler (and a nagging, low-level but just won’t go away head cold for me), a mountain of work deadlines, not to mention all of the other responsibilities of life – and I’ve neglected Global Maverick in a way that I wasn’t expecting to ever do (I really like writing here!). On a good note, though, this post – which I was planning to write at the beginning of the month – has taken on even more significance for me, as I’ve gone through my own little sustainability / resilience crisis.

Back in late December, I was scanning through the various TED Talks available online when I found “Transition to a world without oil” by Rob Hopkins. It’s a good talk, and I encourage you to watch the whole thing, but the part I want to talk about now is his point about difference between sustainability (making what we do have less impact on our resources, so we can keep it going for longer) and resilience (making what we do flexible so that it can survive resource shocks).

And I think, in many ways, the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability. The idea of resilience comes from the study of ecology. And it’s really about how systems, settlements, withstand shock from the outside. When they encounter shock from the outside that they don’t just unravel, and fall to pieces. And I think it’s a more useful concept than sustainability, as I said.

When our supermarkets have only two or three days worth of food in them at any one time, often sustainability tends to focus on the energy efficiency of the freezers and the packaging that the lettuces are wrapped up in. Looking through the lens of resilience, we really question how we’ve let ourselves get into a situation that’s so vulnerable. Resilience runs much deeper: it’s about building modularity into what we do, building surge breakers into how we organize the basic things that support us.

I think one major trap that learners fall into (and by this, I mean that I fall into, and I’m just extrapolating onto the rest of you) is making plans for the best of times, with absolutely no consideration of what will happen when those plans hit the worst of times. When major external resource shocks (normally in the form of other, plausibly more important things that demand our time) occur, those plans, to use Hopkins’ word, unravel. Once they unravel, it’s very hard to get them going again.

What we need are more resilient ways to learn languages. I’ve outlined some of them here – the foreign language listening environment is one of the best, because most things you can do while listening to something else. If you’re SRSing, take care to not burn out, set your software up in a way that minimizes the pain of reduced study time, and stop caring so much if you can’t get to it as much as you’d like. To be totally honest, though, I’ve found SRS to be much more sustainable than resilient – you can do a lot to reduce the workload to a level that you can maintain pretty easily, but as soon as there is some external pressure that absolutely crushes your available time, it tends to not survive (of course, unlike peak oil, time pressure should eventually relieve itself, and you’ll be able to get back on the horse).

One thing that has become more and more obvious is the need for games as part of my study. While things like SRS can (and should) be reduced to the level of a game (instant gratification, variable reward, etc.), I’m talking about explicit games. There’s a reason I was able to finish several Madden seasons with my friends in college each semester while maintaining a full course load. Games are fun – even repetitive little puzzle games, so long as they have a decent dose of challenge and can be easily replayed (<hint>there aren’t many options out there right now for Mandarin, but if you own an iPhone, my company and I are going to change that situation over the next couple of months.</hint>).

What I’m really interested in is how you, my readers, have handled situations like this. What strategies do you have for getting back on the horse after a serious time crunch, or never falling off the horse in the first place?

Related posts:

1. Maintaining one language while learning another
2. Success → Confidence → More Success
3. Heisig, SRS, and my experience with learning Chinese characters

After an incredibly short approval wait, China Plates 1.1 for the iPhone is now available for download. It’s a total rewrite of the original, and this time includes native speaker pronunciation for all items. It is, as with the initial version, free to download and use. Check it out!

Related posts:

1. AJATT for Chinese
2. Taking your learning out into the wild
3. Learn Japanese kana with Kanaballs for the iPhone (+15 promo codes)

Welcome to 2010, dear readers.

So, no new year’s resolutions for us (right?) because we know they don’t work. Success is made of lots of little, discrete nudges, piled up on top of one another.

Instead of resolutions (big, bright, discrete points in the misty future, the path to which is far from clear), I’m trying to do directions (general rules that help inform the algorithm that makes the choices for those little, discrete nudges). My directions for 2010 (which are basically the same as they were for 2009) are:

1. Code
2. Cantonese
3. Mandarin

For 2010, if I can write code, I’ll be writing code. If I can be listening/watching things, I’ll be listening/watching Cantonese things. If there’s nothing in Cantonese around me, I’ll be listening/watching Mandarin things. If those aren’t available, I’ll change my environment to make sure that I have those things available.

In which directions are you moving in 2010?

Related posts:

1. Cantoneasy
2. The great debate: simplified v. traditional
3. My Cantonese tutor

Seriously, where did the last two weeks go? It was here a minute ago, and now it’s gone. I don’t know what to tell you.

Anyway, things have been busy here in the Shanghai headquarters of Global Maverick (aka, a circle four meters in radius, centered on my desk, and including a bed and a space heater that’s on full blast 24-7), and I’ve been slowly implementing a number of changes to the way I learn (like in software development, these changes are done as part of small experiments, evaluated, and then merged back into main study method trunk if deemed worthwhile) that should make good posts in 2010.

What I want to comment on today, though, is Khatzumoto’s post about learning more than one language simultaneously, and specifically the comment that prompted it, which is as follows:

Surely, if a child can be raised natively in three languages, it would be just as possible and in fact easier as an adult to do the same thing? Surely one could simultaneously learn, say, Japanese, Chinese and…I dunno, French? Why just one at a time?

Now that I have a a test subject toddler of my own, I’m convinced that everyone who talks about “learning a language effortlessly, just like a baby,” either doesn’t have children or has the observational skills of a salted slug. There is absolutely nothing effortless about the way a child learns a language. It just seems effortless because the kid, unlike an adult put in a similar situation, doesn’t bitch about how hard it all is, probably because he/she doesn’t have any concept of what life is like as a fully communicating adult.

My son being raised English/Mandarin bilingual. His Mandarin is clearly outpacing his English at this point (he’s 18 months old today, and three of his four primary caregivers speak to him in Mandarin, so that’s to be expected). I would estimate that something is said to him every 20 seconds (give or take) during the day, and it all is directly related to his current environment. He’s been trying — and mostly failing, with some exceptions — to speak for the last six months, and he still hasn’t managed to string much more than a couple of syllables together. After four or five years of this effort, day in and day out, he’ll be able to speak… as well as a four or five year old child.

Also, even for a baby, learning multiple languages at once is not without penalty. Several of the little boys and girls that he plays with regularly that are monolingual (Mandarin or Shanghainese) can vocalize much more than he can, though he can follow instructions in both languages whereas I have to speak to the other little ones in Mandarin to get any response at all. I know that he’ll catch up with all of those monolingual brats by the time he’s 3 or 4, but still — even for the infinitely moldable baby brain — there’s a price to be paid for learning multiple languages at once.

Of course, adults have advantages over children — we’re not having to learn all of the concepts behind the physical world while at the same time learning how to express those concepts, for one thing, and we already have the success of learning at least one language behind us. What most of us (myself most definitely included) don’t have, though, is the patience that a little baby — perhaps simply because they don’t know any better — to suck for years on end without any knowledge of what success. As Khatzumoto said:

[Learning more than one language simultaneously] is totally doable. It’s not really a matter of the raw capability of the human hardware, more one of PPL: patience, priorities and logistics: the patience to continue priority-investing in the time and infrastructure necessary to acquire a language, all for no immediately visible return over an indeterminate timescale, against any and all significantly deleterious objections and interruptions from other people, because it’s going to take as long as it’s freaking going to take, and if you stop, you lose.

I’ve covered this ground before, and I don’t have anything particularly substantive to add to my previous posts. It just irks me when I hear people talk about language learning and and infants as if they just sit there playing with the toys all day and magically learn how to speak. As soon as I find an adult that has put in the sort of effort a baby does, maybe I’ll listen to them (that is, perhaps, why I listen to Khatzumoto — he seems to be the closest example of what I’m talking about I’ve found).

P.S.: One of the reasons I’ve been so quiet on this blog has been released in the App Store: Beijing Air, an interface to the US Embassy in Beijing’s air quality monitoring info. If you’re in Beijing, or plan on traveling there, check it out — it’s free!

Related posts:

1. Heisig, SRS, and my experience with learning Chinese characters
2. Maintaining one language while learning another
3. Sustainability vs. resilience in learning

I intended to write this post about the Shanghainese being used in Google advertisements of its (somewhat) new G.cn domain on Shanghai subways. However, after seeing them plastered all over the subway for months, in the last few days that I’ve been taking my DSLR with me to get some photos of them, I’ve yet to find one. Frustrating.

If I see one again I’ll snap a picture of it with whatever device I have with me, but for now, from memory, the Google ads went something like, “哪能找到最格算的饭店，G.cn老灵.” 哪能 is the equivalent of 怎么 in Mandarin (MandMX.com have a short little podcast that talks a bit about 哪能). I don’t know 格算, but from the context I assume it means 合算 or 划算. 老 is used in Shanghainese like 很 is used in Mandarin or 好 is used in Cantonese before adjectives. Finally, I think 灵 here just means “good,” though in Mandarin it also means “intelligent, quick-witted,” so it works that way, too.

Another example (this time, with pictures!) from an advertisement for the Shanghaining BBS:

侬白相啥 is Shanghaining’s tag line. 侬 is 你, and 白相 means, according to this Baidu Zhidao post, 玩 or 玩耍. I’m not sure of the exact connotation, but I get the feeling it means something like “hey, what are you doing?”

I’m curious if in other major Chinese cities the use of the local dialect in print advertising is prevalent. It’s not exactly common in Shanghai, but you see it frequently enough. A recently article in the South China Morning Post (mirrored here, as I couldn’t find a working link to even a page where you could buy a copy of the original) about the revival of Cantonese in Shenzhen made some buzz a couple of months ago when it came out, making one think that, despite the 请讲文明，请讲普通话 campaigns, local dialects aren’t going away, but might even be getting stronger as they become prestige languages in China’s new financial and development centers.

Below, some photos from the Hong Kong MTR of Cantonese in print advertisements:

Also, though I’m pretty sure I’ve linked to this before, if you’re in a place where you can access Youku, here is a 10-part course in Shanghainese (for Mandarin speakers).

Related posts:

1. Cantoneasy
2. AJATT for Chinese
3. Fumbling in English

The intersection between language and technology is one of my personal and professional interests. I use technology quite heavily, and I’d like to hear how technology affects your language studies?

What software do you use? Do you use, and if so how do you use, various online language learning tools? Are there any “best kept secrets” for sites or tools you’d like to share? If you were somehow totally cut off from your tools, how would you cope?

Related posts:

1. Creating a foreign language listening environment
2. AJATT for Chinese
3. Using your iPhone to create a language immersion environment

If you’re an Anki user and having trouble with repetition overload, I (strongly, fiercely even!) recommend the below study options:

They’re only slightly different than the default settings, but they result in what amounts to a self-regulating system of repetitions. Here’s how (from the top of the settings to the bottom):

1. Let Anki bring as many new cards into your repetition cycle as you can manage. If you have more time today, review more cards. If tomorrow you’re busy, review fewer.
2. Split your review session into 10 minute blocks (see: timeboxing), and do as many of these blocks as you can. Don’t do them all at once — don’t kid yourself into thinking your attention span is somehow superhuman — but spread them out during the day. Do as many as you can, but no more.
3. Don’t worry about the session question limit: just do as many as you can in the 10 minutes you have.
4. Show new cards in random order. You don’t have to do this, but it makes things more interesting.
5. Show new cards after all other cards. This setting is key. Crucial. Critical. By putting new cards after all of your reviews, if you don’t have time to finish your existing cards, you won’t add any more. This is important — the cards you’ve already added to your review cycle are more important than new cards, because you’ve already invested time into learning those.
6. Review cards from largest interval. Basically, the cards you know the best should come first. The reason for this is that, because of the way that spaced repetition works, your intervals are spaced to the point that they appear right before you forget them. Since cards with the largest interval have had the most time invested into them, you don’t want to miss them because you were super busy and missed their review date by several days and forgot them. Update: In the comments, rm makes a good case for changing this setting to the opposite, where cards with the shortest interval are shown first. Depending on your conditions, this may well be the right move.
7. Show failed cards soon. This is the default setting, and I’ve never seen a reason to change it.

These settings allow your repetition load to flex according to the amount of time you have. On days when you have plenty of time, you’ll be adding new cards, and when you’re busy you’ll just focus on cards that you’ve already studied. Over time, if you’re always flush with time, your daily repetitions will increase to fill that time, and if you’re always busy your daily repetitions will decrease as the space between your existing cards increases.

You still have to put in some minimum amount of work to keep your cards from piling up to the point that you’ll never be able to clear them, but these settings have been enough to keep me from the horrors of SRS burnout.

Related posts:

1. Avoiding SRS burnout and repetition hell
2. Maintaining one language while learning another
3. Spaced repetition for beginners