I was quite surprised at what I saw.  I recognized the script, and had long thought it would be perfect for this sort of thing because I haven’t found many people in China who can identify it, let alone read or write it.

Of course this is the “bopomofo” script, more formally known as 注音符号 (zhùyīn fúhào).  It’s quite ironic that most people in mainland China cannot even identify it, given that it appears in most dictionaries here (that I’ve seen).  Headings for every syllable are introduced in both hanyu pinyin and bopomofo (although of course only hanyu pinyin is used in the individual entries).

No tone mark is given for the first tone, but an overdot is given for qīngshēng (no tone).  How the text runs is interesting.  The syllables are constructed vertically, and then the text runs left to right.  This is different from how I’ve ever seen it, either in ruby script, or just horizontally (not grouped vertically in syllables), or purely vertically.  When I asked them about it, they said this is how they learned it in school (in Taiwan).

Also, note that “ê” is used as a sentence-final modal particle twice, and with two different tones!

The content is less interesting, being exactly what one would expect from 6th grade girls passing notes, but if you’re really curious, here’s a pinyin transcription followed by a hanzi transcription and an ill-thought-out English translation (attempting to conserve the mistakes in the original, while of course introducing some of my own):

A: wǒ jué dé tā zhēn de hěn qí guài, tā shi bú shi nà ge lái suó yǐ cái zhè me mǐn gǎn ya?

B: yǒu kě néng!  bài tuō ~ tā shēng qì jiù bā le, nà wèi shé me yào qì nà me jiù wú liǎo, hái yǒu wèi shé mè lián lèi dào wǒ.  hěn wú liáo ê(2) [I don't have a way to put a tone mark above that ê, so I put the tone number in parentheses.]

A: duì ma, jiù shì shuō ya.  xiao sǐ rén le, wǒ shì wèn le tā hǎo ê(3).  hái zài nà lǐ

A: 我觉得tā镇的很奇怪，tā是不是那个来所以才这么敏感呀？

B:有可能！拜托～tā生气就罢了，那为什么要气那么久无聊，还有为什么连累到我。很无聊ê(2)

A: 对嘛，就是说呀。笑死人了，我是问了tā好ê(3)。还在那里。

A: I think s/he’s really weird.  S/he’s that way so s/he’s so sensitive? [I'm guessing on that one.]

B: Maybe! Please~ if s/he’s mad, then fine.  Why be mad for that long?  It’s stupid.  And why involve me?  So stupid.

A: Right, just like that.  Ridiculous.  I asked her.  [More guessing.]

I have no idea what the context was (and don’t really want to), but I’m glad to see bopomofo being used as a secret code for passing notes.  Very cool indeed.

Kellen and I are very excited to announce, first to our Sinoglot friends, the beta launch of an entirely new project* that we hope will be a rich source of scholarship, activity, and (geeky) entertainment for years to come.

Phonemica (乡音苑, xiāngyīnyuàn), to quote the tagline, is “a panorama of Chinese, painted by its speakers through their stories.” In less poetic terms, the website is a group-sourced collection of carefully transcribed, high-quality recordings of both Standard Mandarin (putonghua) and local varieties of Chinese.

Since it’s up and running, you could (should?) skip my description below and get started:

• Get a username (so you can edit transcripts)
• Listen to some recordings
• Read the Get Involved page for an intro, then go edit a transcript: putonghua, or, say, Changzhou dialect (a form of Wu)
• Subscribe to the Phonemica blog**

Overview

But if you want to get acquainted with the Phonemica concept first, the front page map is a good place to start. Here’s how it looks today with 12 recordings:

As you might imagine, each flag on the map indicates a recording. The location of the flag is the speaker’s hometown — where they grew up. If the interviewee told a story in their local version of Chinese, it’s flagged as “土 vernacular”. If it’s a version of Standard Mandarin, it gets the “普 putonghua” flag.

From the map and description, some of the long-term goals are probably evident — that Phonemica will provide…

1. A language tour of Chinese. By this I mean simply that you’ll be able to fly, virtually, to every corner of the world where a version of Chinese is spoken, listening to the sounds. How different from Mandarin is Sichuan “dialect”, really? What does the putonghua of a speaker from Hunan sound like?
2. Linguistic analysis. Many scholars and observers have written about differences between varieties of Chinese, differences in how Standard Mandarin is spoken from locale to locale, and so on. We want to build on that past work and pair it up with empirical data. How often does a Hunan putonghua speaker overcorrect /c/ to /ch/? Phonemica will have the analysis, and the samples.
3. Language preservation. Anyone in China with an interest in language diversity is keenly aware that economic and social forces are rapidly sweeping away even sizable communities of speakers. Kellen explored this some in his blog about Wu Chinese, especially the variety spoken in Changzhou. On Beijing Sounds, I’ve talked a bit about distinct language communities that exist even within what is called “Beijing”. Phonemica is partly an effort to capture the enormous variety that still exists.

Considering the goals, it’s equally evident that the Phonemica undertaking is, well, hefty. We limit the scope somewhat as follows:

• Recordings only in the Chinese family of languages: Mandarin, Wu, Yue, Xiang, Hakka, Southern Min, Gan and Northern Min
• Linguistic analysis mostly limited to Standard Mandarin, for the time being
• Single-speaker recordings only (though obviously with questions from an interviewer); no dialogs or group recordings
• Native or near-native speakers only

That said, the endeavor is still epic, so I’ll talk a bit about how we’re approaching it through group collaboration.

How Phonemica is possible

Only the participation of many will make this project possible, so we’ve designed everything as a group effort. Start by taking a look at the collectively-edited transcript. Here’s a snippet from our first recording:

1. transcription in Chinese characters
2. a romanization (e.g. Hanyu Pinyin for Mandarin)
3. IPA
4. a translation into English.

Every piece, 1-4, is editable online by any user — just click on the segment (when signed in), make your changes, and save. Voila! Do as little or as much as you want. Those who want to focus on any particular task (say, just translation) are welcome to do that, or you can attack everything at once.

But the collaboration doesn’t stop at the transcript. Recordings, too, will be group-sourced. We have drafted some standards and a system, and eventually envision having dozens of people involved in gathering high-quality recordings. In particular, we will be working to get donated recording equipment and enlist local help from both interested foreigners and Chinese. One of the ideas we may borrow from Basic Oral Language Documentation, for example, is to collaborate with university programs and send students back to their hometowns with borrowed recorders, all the better to encourage recordings in local vernaculars.

Help wanted

That’s the grand plan, but we need to get people involved and helping us with the working and thinking. That’s where we’re hoping some of our Sinoglot readers come in. Of course we expect  you to be excited about the basic tasks of recording, editing and translating — but if you want to be further involved, here are just a few areas we know we need help in:

PS: Infrequently Asked Questions

I’ve got something I want to use Phonemica content for, can I? Probably yes. One of our goals, in fact, is to create great recordings, transcripts and so on, then to encourage people to use them in ways we haven’t thought of or don’t have time for. To that end we’re making all content on Phonemica — including recordings, transcriptions, comments, blogposts — available for public use under this Creative Commons copyright license, which should cover almost any non-profit / educational usage. If in doubt, send us a note.

What’s Phonemica built on? Well, it’s not software you’ll find on a virtual shelf somewhere. Kellen has built from scratch everything you see on the site — editing system, scrolling transcript, audio playback, history tracking, user functionality etc. — and a lot more that you can’t see that’s even more impressive: audio segmenting comes to mind. There’s a lot of great stuff in the pipeline, but feel free to send us thoughts about what you’d most like to see.

What’s not working yet in Beta? Plenty. The most obvious thing for many users in China, where Internet Explorer reigns supreme, is that the site doesn’t work at all with IE < 9.0. This is a big limiter to Chinese participation, but it’s also a programming nightmare, so we’re not sure yet how to approach it. Another critical piece that’s missing right now is the tools for doing linguistic analysis on putonghua recordings, marking features such as L/N swapping, sh/s blending, and so on. Kellen’s actually programmed a lot of it, but it will still be a while before it’s ready for primetime. Beyond that, there’s loads of smaller stuff. Eventually I’m hoping to make public a list of developments that are in the pipeline.

——–

*Yes, a project that was pre-announced at least as early as Dec 12 when I said we were “about to unveil” this project. If you held your breath, please have the bereaved contact our legal department for appropriate compensation.

**Another blog?! Believe me, the Phonemica blog will be a service to those Sinoglot readers who want to keep out of the details. No doubt Sinoglot will have plenty of posts that reference Phonemica work, but we’ll try to keep nuts-and-bolts articles (e.g. “how to get a good recording”) limited to the Phonemica blog.

怀着激动的心情，我和柯祎蓝（Kellen Parker） 向《神州万语》（Sinoglot）的朋友们郑重宣布：《乡音苑》测试版正式上线了！我们希望在未来的日子里，乡音苑能成为大家共同学习、交流和娱乐的园地。

乡音苑就是“所有讲中国话的人们用他们的故事绘制的一幅中国话全景图。”讲得直白一点，这个网站就是一个经过多方收集、精心录制整理的，包括普通话和各种方言在内的所有中国话的集合体。

您可以现在就开始：

• 注册一个用户名（以便您可以参与一些编辑工作）
• 听一些录音
• 先读一读“加入我们”的介绍，然后可以去做一些编辑工作，比如普通话或者常州话（吴语的一种）等
• 提交给乡音苑的博客

如果您想先对我们的理念有个大致了解，可以从下图开始。这是目前12段录音的地域分布图。

如图，每个小旗子表示一段录音。小旗子所在的位置是被录音者的家乡 ，也就是他们长大成人的地方。如果被录音者是用他们的家乡话讲述的，小旗子上就标示“土”字；如果是用普通话讲述的，就标示“普”字。

看了以上的介绍，您或许就是明白我们做这个网站的目的：

1. 进行一次汉语语言的旅行。我的意思是您差不多可以畅游世界上任何使用汉语语族的角落，倾听它们的发音。四川方言跟普通话到底有什么不同？湖南人说起普通话来是什么味道？
2. 进行语言学分析。许多学者对于汉语各语族之间的差异、对于不同地域的人说标准普通话时的差异等等已经作了很多论述。我们希望利用这些已有的研究成果，并为之配上生动活泼的实例。湖南人说普通话的时候，经常把/c/发成 /ch/吗？我们将在这里进行分析，并举出实例。
3. 保存语言。在中国，任何对语言差异有兴趣的人都会发现，随着经济和社会的迅速发展，一些弱势语言族群的使用空间被极大地压缩，甚至走向消亡。柯祎蓝已经在自己的博客里对吴语，特别是对其中的常州话进行了探讨。关于《北京的声儿》，我也曾指出过，即使在“北京”这个地面儿上，也存在着口音的明显差异。我们力图记录并保留这些鲜活的声音资料。

通过以上说明可以看出，我们的任务十分繁重。因此，我们做了以下几点规定：

• 录音只限于汉语语族，包括普通话、吴语、粤语、湘语、客家话、闽南语、赣语、闽北语等。
• 目前语言学分析一般只针对标准普通话
• 只进行单人录音（当然还有采访者提问的问题），不进行对话和多人录音
• 只录母语者或近似母语者

为什么乡音苑是可行的？

答案很简单：通过大家的参与。首先来看个经过大家编辑的例子，下面是我们第一个录音的一个片段：

大家可以很清楚地看到，录音被分成了几秒钟一小段的很多部分，每个小段都包括：

1. 中文笔录
2. 注音（比如汉语拼音）
3. 国际音标
4. 英文翻译

用户对1-4项中的每一项都能进行在线编辑：登录——点击要编辑的片段——进行编辑——保存。想编辑多少随您意。如果您只想专注其中的一项（比如翻译），或者1-4项都想尝试，都没有问题。

但是合作并不仅限于编辑，录音本身也将通过大家来搜集。我们建立了一个系统和若干标准，最终将有数十人参与高质量录音的收集。特别是我们将接受有共同兴趣的中外朋友在录音设备方面对我们的捐助。我们的做法借鉴了“基础口语文献”的做法，他们跟大学合作，指派学生携带借来的录音设备回到各自的家乡，从而促进了各种地方口音的收集工作。

我们想要的帮助

以上就是我们的宏伟计划，但我们也需要大家的积极参与，群策群力完成它，所以我们希望《神州万语》的老朋友们能参与进来。如果您愿意做一些诸如录音、编辑、翻译等基础工作，我们当然欢迎之至；如果您想做更多工作，我们希望在下面几个方面能得到您的帮助：

• 与中外学术项目取得联系
• 带头捐献录音设备
• 普通话母语者帮忙将《乡音苑》网页翻译成简体字和繁体字的普通话。

这些工作开始后，我们还需要管理和后勤方面的帮助。如果您觉得自己在某方面能帮助我们，请发信息告知我们(“steve” or “kellen” <at> phonemica.net)。感谢您对过去几个月Sinoglot更新缓慢的谅解，我们希望您能时刻关注我们的新工作。

补充问题

• 我能自由使用乡音苑中的内容吗？可以。我们所有工作的目的之一，就是希望鼓励大家将它们用于我们没有想到或者没有时间去做的地方。因此，我们网站上的所有内容（包括录音、笔录、评论、博客等等）都将对公众开放，具体请参阅Creative Commons copyright license条款。如有疑问，请联系我们。
• 测试版还有哪些未实现的功能？很多。最明显的就是很多中国用户不能使用IE低于9.0的版本，这极大限制了很多中国人的参与，对项目本身也极为不利。另外还缺了很重要的对录音进行语言学分析的工具。柯祎蓝已经做了很多努力，但全部就绪尚需时日。其他还有很多小的地方需要改进。我希望最终能将这些改进公之于众。

Many people will be aware that Chinese students of English initially have considerable difficulty with the two English dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/, the ‘th’ sounds in ‘thin’ and ‘then’. Indeed, many Chinese students are very aware of this, and use the humorous Chinglish abbreviation, 3Q (sān - Q  = thank you).

The difficulty with these sounds is not simply that they don’t exist in Chinese. The real difficulty is that there’s a whole bunch of dental sounds in Chinese and some of them are really quite similar to the English sounds. For most Standard Mandarin speakers, the following sounds, written in Pinyin, are dental:

z, c, s, d, t, n, l

Of course, there can be some variation. But z, c, s are generally made with the tongue tip touching (or, in the case of s, near) the back of the lower and upper teeth. These can be classified in straightforward fashion as dentals. The usual description used in Chinese texts is 舌尖前 or front apical.

Diagram of Pinyin 's' from 普通话发音图谱*

The sound represented by s in Pinyin is a voiceless dental fricative. So it should hardly be surprising that it should seem an awful lot like /θ/, a voiceless dental fricative.

Have a look at this diagram of /θ/ from Daniel Jones’ An Outline of English Phonetics, page182.

If you try bringing your teeth together as you make a /θ/ (you don’t need to stick your tongue out when you do this), you’ll note that it’s quite hard to stop the sibilance creeping in.

The sounds represented in Pinyin as d, t, n, l are generally made a little higher, usually with tongue-tip contact on the back of the upper teeth and gum. Traditionally, these sounds have been classified as 舌尖中 or mid apical. I guess denti-alveolar is a reasonable description.

Diagram of Pinyin 'd' from 普通话发音图谱*

One can see that Pinyin d, lacking the plosive force of its English counterpart, might easily sound like /ð/ or possibly /z/.

Now, for the majority of native English speakers, /z/, /s/, /d/, /t/, /n/ and /l/ are made with the tongue tip at the alveolar ridge – no contact is made with the teeth. If an English speaker does make these sounds on the back of the teeth, he is usually described as having a lisp. Or, if you will, a liθp. Theta’s a wonderfully evocative letter, don’t you think?

For English speakers learning Chinese it seems pretty easy to ignore the fact they’re most likely making those seven dentals, Pinyin: z, c, s, d, t, n, l, on the alveolar ridge instead of the back of the teeth. Does it matter? I’d be interested to know how people feel about this. But I intend to argue that English speaking learners of Mandarin should indeed practise making these sounds against the teeth, early in their language studies.

In the next post we’ll look more closely at zh, ch, sh, r.

* The diagrams for Pinyin s and d are from 普通话发音图谱 (Pǔtōnghuà Fāyīn Túpǔ) by 周殿福 (Zhōu Diànfú) and 吴宗济 (Wú Zōngjì), published by 商务印书馆 (Shāngwù Yìnshūguǎn). I hope to post on this beautiful little book at some point.

Getting it wrong from the start

One of my clearest memories of those early baby steps in Pinyin was the strange obsession some teachers had with the difference between two groups of easily distinguished sounds:

zhi chi shi

zi ci si

Obviously, these syllables seemed pretty exotic with the so-called vowel represented by the letter ‘i‘ being nothing like any vowel I’d ever heard. But even as I started to make that fricative-cum-vowel, I was regularly reminded that the distinction between the 平舌 (píngshé, flat tongue) and 翘舌 (qiàoshé, cacuminal or retroflex, sometimes called 卷舌, juǎnshé) sounds was terribly important.

Any mention of 翘舌 would be accompanied by this sort of gesture.

Books listed minimal pairs to test the student on his ability to recognise the difference between words like 山 (shān – mountain) and 三 (sān – three)…

Obviously, for many Chinese speakers, learning this distinction is important; many dialects simply don’t employ it, but if you want to pass your 普通话考试 (Pǔtōnghuà Kǎoshì, Standard Mandarin Exam) and become, say, a teacher, you’d better be able to make these sounds.

I’m an English speaker. Where I come from, only drunks mix up those sounds.

I thought I’d pretty much discounted such distractions. I was much more worried about the distinction between 商 (shāng) and 香 (xiāng). Maybe that was where I went wrong. Producing a passable ‘xi‘ had in itself been no great problem. But I guess, at some stage I must have thought, if only I could make that sh, with my tongue curled right up, maybe then I’d get that sh-x distinction. After all, it’s called a retroflex.

Oh dear. Perhaps a little bit of linguistic knowledge is a dangerous thing.

However it happened, I somehow came to believe that I needed to make the sounds zh, ch, and sh way up in the roof of my mouth.

Now, I don’t think I was alone in this. I know at least some other foreign learners of Chinese find themselves exhausted by the attempt to produce these sounds, and gradually realise they’re going to have to relax a little. Maybe they even notice, as I did, that the sound produced right up there is just not very much like that of their Chinese friends. Besides, most of those friends don’t dribble that much during conversation.

So, gradually, I found a position with my tongue tip no longer turned up, but turned down a little, just above the alveolar ridge. This was easier, and it seemed to sound a little better.

Of course, this isn’t the whole story. It wasn’t that I’d started off wrong, and then got it right; it was that I’d started off completely wrong, and then managed to get it slightly less wrong.

These sounds are simply not produced that far back or that high up.

If you’re one of those who made the same mistake as me, and then adjusted a little, as I did, maybe you’re saying to yourself, “But, if I made those sounds any further forward, my tongue would be in basically the same place that it is for those English sounds!”

Uh huh…

You’re catching on.

In the next few posts, I intend to show why English speakers should simply not be taught how to pronounce the Pinyin sounds zh, ch, and sh when they start learning Chinese.

Note: I appreciate many that many foreign learners of Chinese have a mother tongue other than English and that may well affect their Chinese pronunciation quite differently. Please do feel free to share any insights below.

You might recall that after a break-in several months ago, we decided to move SG headquarters to a more hopeful neighborhood*.

Problem was, in our haste, we left some things behind at the old place, such as email subscriptions. No problem, right? We’ll just have folks resubscribe, as soon as they notice something missing in their life. Great solution, except for the minor issue of having no working email subscription system.

We fought valiantly with the WordPress theme about getting the subscription box to show up, to no avail. So for now, it’s out with the old WordPress theme, and in with, well, the most unimaginative theme available. Yes, thememaster Kellen is going to kill me, but there you go.

However, email subscriptions are up and running again. Just put your address in the box on the top right of the home page and enjoy months of low-cost subscription goodness.

——–

*WebFaction is the name of our hosting service. So far so good, with appropriate incantations against webhosting’s evil spirits.

What’s this then?

Answers on a post card…

It’s the roof of your mouth.

Well, that’s not exactly true. I didn’t steal in there in the middle of the night while you were asleep. I’ve suffered enough for this post as it is. I should say, it’s the inside of my mouth.

It’s a sagittal profile – the contour running down the centre line of the mouth, from front to back.

That point at the left side is at the tip of the upper teeth; the short flat, running up at about 30 degrees is the back of my incisors; there is then a nearly flat area behind the teeth before the contour breaks up toward the roof of the mouth.

The suffering… well that was down to having my wonderful dentist take an impression of my upper teeth and palate. The dentist was keen to ensure that the mould was as near complete as possible, and I gagged and gagged and gagged.

This is a model taken from that mould.

Pretty, huh?

That mess of wrinkles and lumps behind the incisors, on what is often called the alveolar ridge, feels almost perfectly smooth to the tongue, but the dentist was able to show me that area on the video screen and it really does look like that.

I suppose you’ll have guessed by now that I have a passing interest in pronunciation.

When discussing pronunciation, and even sometimes when teaching it, we might use a diagram like this.

Of course, this is a diagram  – a representation. It highlights features relevant to the matter in hand. It doesn’t claim to be a life-like image.

Having referred to diagrams like this, and indeed drawn them, for a good number of years, it was a slightly strange feeling to be able to examine part of my own vocal tract, albeit in model form.

The angle of the back of the teeth surprised me greatly, as did the depth of the ripples on the alveolar ridge but, otherwise, it was much as I’d always assumed.

Then I had the chance to make a comparison with someone else’s mould. Let’s call her Anonymous.

In each of the following pictures, the one on the left is me. On the right is Anonymous.

Front view

Looking up from the left side

Profiles

What interests me here is that the alveolar ridge is nothing like as well defined on Anonymous’s model. What I’d always assumed was a very clear feature and a very useful marker in describing pronunciation suddenly looks much less clear.

From the profile, you can see that there is still a bump above or behind the incisors, but not the clear ‘shelf’ visible in my profile.

I’d be most interested to know whether these two models are extreme cases, in which case most people would be somewhere in between, or whether we might expect to find some people with either a more pronounced alveolar ridge or no ridge at all.

Do you think your profile feels more like mine, the one on the left, or the one on the right, Anonymous?

If someone were to say to you, “First, place your tongue against the back of the upper teeth. Now, draw the tongue back until you feel a ridge,” would that feature or position be immediately obvious?

In the coming days, I’ll be posting about Chinese pronunciation.

In the past few months, I’ve been building the Leiden Weibo Corpus (LWC), and I’m now proud to announce it has become publicly available. The LWC is an annotated linguistic 100-million word corpus containing 5.1 million messages from Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging service. It’s freely available online at http://lwc.daanvanesch.nl/.

Because I collected the data for the LWC in January 2012, the LWC contains many linguistic phenomena that may not be found in older corpora, such as suffixation with “-ing”, an aspectual marker borrowed from English (covered on the Log and on Pinyin.info). Furthermore, Sina Weibo messages come with valuable meta data, such as the gender of the user and their location. This means the LWC can show how often words are used in different provinces and cities across China, which may be useful if you’ve always been wondering where that pesky 方 word in your dictionary is really used

Naturally, the LWC also supports searching for single words or grammar patterns, such as “any verb followed by an aspectual particle and then a noun”, or “any 被 construction followed by a noun and a verb“. Students and teachers of Mandarin who are looking for example sentences may like this feature.

Another feature you may like is the map of China where you can click every city to see what its Sina Weibo users posted back in January. And there’s more, so why not go and explore for yourself? I’d love to hear what you think!

In the next few weeks, I’ll be posting about a few interesting  words or grammatical phenomena I came across in the LWC. For example, did you know that -men 们 is very commonly attached to entire noun phrases? Here’s a few examples to whet your appetite:

• shēngbìng de men 生病的们 ‘people who are ill’
• zài zuò chīkuáng mèng de men 在做痴狂梦的们  ‘people who are having crazy dreams’
• ài fā bú ài fā duǎnxìn de men 爱不爱发短信的们 ‘people who like sending text messages and people who dislike sending text messages’
• zuò èr hào xiàn de men 做二号线的们 ‘people who regularly take subway line 2’.

Mysteriously, you even find shéimen kàndào le jiù zhùfú shéimen! 谁们看到了，就祝福谁们！which seems to mean something like ‘congratulations to everyone who saw this!’ – but really?! ye olde shéi 谁 with -men 们?

I’d love to hear what you think, both about these examples and about the LWC! What interesting stuff can you find?

Steve and I have been working our asses off on a new project that should be good to go next month. I think it’s save to say that it’s consumed all of our free time, and lately there’s been less free time than usual anyway.

Irregularity kills blogs because the audience gives up. We’ll make it up to you I promise.

Title: 500 Common Chinese Idioms (成语五百条)

I first found out about this book from Carl Gene, who gave it a ringing endorsement. When I received it for Christmas last year and started thumbing through, it wasn’t hard to see why: they have done chengyu right for the second language learner! The 500 are selected by frequency from six corpuses* of spoken and written language. For each chengyu, two example sentences are constructed – and very well constructed! And of course there is lots of detailed explanation about history and usage.

I was so smitten I wrote the authors a mash letter and asked for a Sinoglot** interview, which they were kind enough to accede to. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Liwei Jiao and Cornelius Kubler:

SG: Can you tell us what got you interested in producing this book? Was there any specific a-ha moment that gave you the idea?

Jiao: About eight years ago I began teaching more learners of Chinese at intermediate and above levels. Interestingly enough I found many students like to use a quasi-idiom ‘马马虎虎’ (literally ‘just so-so’) to describe their own Chinese and they quite enjoyed using this idiom [For more on 马马虎虎, see Sinoglot post and many comments -- Steve]. Actually it is not completely appropriate. When a native speaker of Chinese uses ‘马马虎虎’ on himself, there is a connotation of refusing to give details, self-deprecating or sometimes even showing off. I knew those learners did not really understand the connotation of this idiom.

Many students asked me to recommend a bilingual dictionary of Chinese idioms. I knew there were hundreds of dictionaries on Chinese idioms written in Chinese since a co-advisor of my master degree, Professor Liu Shuxin of Nankai University, is an authority on Chinese lexicology, but when I really searched for a bilingual dictionary I got only a few, and most of them are too simple or too hard since some of the examples are from the classical novel 《红楼梦》 (Dream of the Red Chamber). At that moment I knew it was time to write a dictionary specifically for intermediate and advanced learners of Chinese. To be specific, it was in the fall of 2006. This idea was supported by Professor Cornelius C. Kubler who is an expert on Chinese linguistics and a veteran of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and Professor Weiguo Zhang who is an expert on computational linguistics of Chinese.

Kubler: I have for many years believed that for non-native speakers to achieve high-level proficiency in spoken and written Chinese, they must be able to use appropriately several hundred chengyu. I had written articles about this and had implemented this in training programs under my supervision at the US State Department’s advanced Chinese school in Taipei in the 1980s. Thus I was delighted when Dr. Jiao approached me about joining as co-author with him and Prof. Zhang.

SG: How many chengyu do you think the average Chinese person knows (can produce in conversation)?

Jiao: We did the statistics. There are altogether 755 Chinese idioms that appear in all Chinese textbooks of 24 volumes to be read by a mainland Chinese student from kindergarten to the end of junior high. As to the number the average Chinese person knows, I think it is well over one thousand, but in terms of production in conversation, the number drops dramatically, perhaps to 300. This is quite understandable since chengyu appear mainly in written form.

SG: In terms of its usefulness in the long-term “acquisition” of chengyu, what do you think of the primary school exercise of memorizing chengyu chains (where the last character of the preceding chengyu is the same as the first of the following)?

Kubler: I don’t think this is very useful. Much more useful is wide reading of all kinds of written materials and exposure to chengyu in context.

Jiao: The Chengyu Chain, 成语接龙 in Chinese, is a game played mainly by native Chinese at parties or as a contest for high school or college students. It requires the ability to think up dozens of chengyu in a second to keep the game going. Frankly speaking, this game is not fun if one knows only a handful of chengyu. I think it is harder than the game of spelling in English like ‘Spelling Bee.’ As to memorizing chengyu to increase understanding, it might help a little but it’s surely not the best way to learn them.

SG: Are there chengyu that are palindromic or have other word-play patterns?

Jiao: It seems there are no strictly palindromic idioms, but if the criterion is broader to allow a CD-AB pattern (the most typical pattern of chengyu is AB-CD with A, B, C, D standing for a character respectively), there are quite a few, such as ‘日新月异’ (#42 in our book) and ‘月异日新’, ‘天涯海角’ (#396 in the book) and ‘海角天涯.’

As I mentioned earlier, 成语接龙 (chengyu chains/relay) is the most common chengyu game. Other games include antonymous chengyu, such as ‘相辅相成’ (#84 in this dictionary) and ‘两败俱伤.’

SG: There are a number of Chengyu attributed to the Zhan Guo Ce 战国策, many of which use animal imagery, for example 狐假虎威 and 鹬蚌相争. The stories explaining these Chengyu seem quite similar, in style and in the use of animal characteristics, to Aesop’s Fables. Are you aware of, or have you noted, any connections between the two?

Kubler: Most of this is coincidence. However, Aesop’s fables were translated into Chinese in the 19th century and most of them are well known. Not all Chinese are aware that those stories are Greek in origin, not Chinese.

SG: Are there any (comic) figures in Chinese literature famous for their misapplication or mis-production of Chengyu, similar to Sheridan’s Mrs Malaprop?

Jiao: No, I do not know any figures, but commercial advertisements utilize this approach by altering components of chengyu to enhance memorization of their products to the audience. Condemnation from educational circles and from parents of students has been so immense that relevant administrations of the Chinese government have imposed heavy fines on those advertisements.

SG: Are there some Chengyu which are commonly ‘misspelt’ or ‘mispronounced’ by native Chinese speakers? I understand that 昨日黄花 is often used in place of 明日黄花. Are there many examples like this, and are there any examples of Chengyu which have already been transformed in this way?

Jiao: Chinese idioms have a long history, so a small fraction of them have changed meaning or register along the line. For example, 天花乱坠 comes from an allusion that a monk is preaching so well that flowers fall from heaven /the sky. A famous tourist site 雨花台 in Nanjing, China got its name from this story. The idiom had a positive connotation originally; however, its connotation over several hundred years became negative. Now this idiom means ‘wild boast about something.’

According to a paper, there are 28 chengyu which changed register (complimentary or derogatory).

SG: Do you see Chengyu as dead metaphors, and do you think reliance on Chengyu inhibits creative thinking?

Kubler: Quite the contrary. I think appropriate use of chengyu is a creative process that improves the content and style of communications.

Jiao: Just the opposite. Chengyu can make your language more appropriate and more powerful. You can observe the New Year editorials of major newspapers in China use many chengyu.

SG: Why do you think the four-character (or four-syllable) format took on such importance?

Jiao: Four-character and two-disyllable is a primary characteristic of chengyu. The disyllabic tendency of Chinese influenced this evolution.

Kubler: Rhythm or prosody is especially important in Chinese. This may be related to the fact that the written system of Chinese consists largely of characters, and each character is, with few exceptions, exactly one syllable.

SG: Do you have any plans for other works in the vein of 500 Common Chinese Idioms (by “in that vein” I mean works that are intended for Mandarin learners and that draw on solid corpus research for their materials)?

Jiao: I am currently working on a dictionary named ‘500 Common Chinese Proverbs and Colloquial Expressions’ which is to be published by the same publisher, Routledge in the summer of 2013. The two dictionaries are sister pieces.

——–

*Not only that, but in the book itself the authors actually use the plural “corpuses” instead of the faux intellectual form so often favored in academia. The abolition of “corpora” is a quixotic campaign of mine, sure to be successful eventually, if only we are not foiled by the mocking enemy who keeps bringing up porpoises.

**The wise questions are from Randy and Sima; the rest are mine.