Adventures with Kake

I currently have a reading vocabulary of around 150 Chinese characters and probably around twice that many words. This is a pretty small number compared to what I'd need to be able to read something in a more general context, but it's enough to read a menu [see footnote].

As I've mentioned before, I've been using Anki to ensure that I don't forget previously-learned characters/words. It works pretty well in that it keeps track of how long it is since it last tested me on a given character, and tries to figure out the best time to test me on it again. However, a few months after I started using it, it gave me an alarming message — one of my characters had been "identified as a leech" and had been "suspended"!

Turns out, what this means is that I kept getting that character wrong, so Anki had decided I was spending a disproportionate amount of time on it and I'd be better off giving up on it for now. This was actually a reasonable assessment for it to make — the character was 房 (fáng), which basically means "house" or "room", and the only reason I'd added it to my vocab list was that it was in the name of a restaurant I'd come across very early on in my learning process, and I thought I may as well stick it in there just in case it turned out to be something I'd come across frequently in the future. It didn't.

However, there are some characters that may not appear very often on menus, but are still useful to know. The way I finally succeeded in learning these characters was to actively seek out names of dishes that included them, and add those dishes to my "Chinese dishes" Anki deck. The more contexts I saw them in, the easier it became to remember them.

I suppose my Anki decks deserve a digression of their own. I have three main ones — Chinese characters/words, Chinese dishes, and easily-confused character pairs. Regarding the dishes deck, I don't indiscriminately add every dish on every new menu I come across — I mainly add dishes if I already know all or most of the characters, or if it's a dish I particularly enjoyed or particularly want to try, or if it's a very common dish. However, I do relax this rule in the case mentioned above — that is, if I can use the dish to help cement a particular character in my head without adding too much of an unnecessary burden (e.g. if there are other "difficult" characters in the dish, it's not going to help).

The Sinosplice blog has a relevant post on this subject, and the followup is worth reading too.

Footnote: [0] When I say I can read a menu, I don't mean in the sense of being able to positively identify each and every dish on a menu I've never seen before — I often can't even do this on non-Chinese menus, as proved in the pub last weekend when I had to use my phone to Google for "agnolotti". I mean in the sense of being able to understand enough of it to order an interesting, varied, and well-balanced meal, and to pick out dishes that I've been meaning to try, rather than panicking and just picking the first thing I recognise.

In the first of my "concepts" posts, I briefly mentioned pronunciation, and linked to a couple of videos to demonstrate the four tones of Mandarin:

• China-8.com Chinese Lesson: Pinyin Tones (1 min 15 sec)
• Chinese sample lesson 1 - tones (5 mins 14 sec)

While I had trouble with the tones at first, I mostly have the hang of them now, in isolation. However! Syllables are not pronounced in isolation. In actual speech, certain changes take place when syllables come together to form words — and note that these phenomena occur in many languages (not just Mandarin) and in many aspects of pronunciation (not just tones).

The way that the tone of a syllable changes depending on its neighbours is known as tone sandhi, and in Mandarin it's governed by a number of rules. Perhaps the most apparent of these to the non-native speaker is the rule that deals with two third tones (falling-rising tones) in succession — the first of these tones becomes a second (rising) tone, and the second of them has its latter (rising) part de-emphasised. This is why the greeting 你好 is pronounced as "ní hǎo" even though the actual pinyin is "nǐ hǎo", and why the "ants" (螞蟻) in ants climbing a tree are pronounced as "má yǐ" rather than "mǎ yǐ". Note that the pinyin spellings remain unchanged, though.

Mandarin has several other tone sandhi rules, and there are a number of pages on the web which list them; here's one with embedded audio examples. The Sinosplice blog also has an interesting post on another way of thinking about Mandarin tones.

If you only want to learn to read menus, you don't actually need to know about this stuff. But I do think it's interesting! Not to mention that being able to pronounce the name of a dish as well as point to it will increase the chances of you actually getting what you intended to order...

When I first began pondering the thought of teaching myself to read Chinese menus, I asked a few people whether they thought it was a good idea. While some said "yes" immediately, others warned me that I might find it difficult or even impossible, due to the common use on menus of "flowery" or poetic descriptions of dishes.

I took this warning to heart, and gave up on the project for some time, but then I came to realise that this is not by any means an intractable problem. If I'm capable of learning that "spotted dick" is not a venereal disease, surely I'm also capable of learning that "ants climbing a tree" is actually mung bean thread noodles with minced pork; or that the "three freshnesses of the earth" are fried potato, green pepper, and aubergine; or that "lions' heads" are large meatballs, usually braised with cabbage or some other vegetable to represent the lion's mane.

Indeed, regular readers will already know that pockmarked old woman's beancurd is tofu in a spicy sauce with minced pork and chilli bean paste, golden sands corn is fried sweetcorn kernels seasoned with mashed salted egg yolk, and fish fragrant aubergine in fact contains no fish. Perhaps the best way to look at it is as having to learn two categories of knowledge: first, what the characters mean, and second, what the dish names mean. The second set of knowledge needs to be acquired regardless of the language you want to learn to read a menu in — even to read a menu in your native tongue.

So, how do you learn the things in the second category? Having identified the characters in the name of a dish, how do you find out what the dish actually is? I have three main strategies for this, all involving searches on the name (as written in Chinese characters):

• Search for it on Flickr (example) or on Google Images (example). With luck, this will throw up several photos of the completed dish.
• Search for it on YouTube (example). You're quite likely to find a video of someone making it. Note that unlike Google, YouTube sometimes gives different results depending on whether you search with traditional or simplified characters, so it's worth trying both.
• Do a regular web search but also include the English translation of one or more of the characters (example). Sometimes all you'll find is a succession of less-than-useful translations along the lines of "chicken in sauce", but other times you'll find recipes or even entire essays on the history of a dish.

These strategies aren't foolproof — I still have no idea what 老成都耙耙菜 is in English, for example — but I find it works way more often than not.

A fourth strategy, of course, is just to go along to the restaurant where you saw the dish advertised, and order it. There's a blog post on Sinosplice that backs me up on this one! In fact, the dish linked in the previous paragraph is one that I ordered partly because I had no idea what it was (other than that it involved vegetables) and I wanted to find out. It was pretty damned tasty.

As previously mentioned, I realised fairly early on in this whole project that I was going to need some way to make sure I got regular practice and reinforcement of the characters I'd learned. I got some of this from actually reading menus, and making translations to put up on Flickr, but I wanted something I could use every day.

I started off making physical flashcards, but because my writing skills are not great yet, I needed to print them, and it ended up being tricky to get everything lined up properly on both sides of the cardboard.

So I went looking for flashcard tools on the internet. Although I found some, I also found out that there is a more modern (as in, developed in recent decades) alternative — spaced repetition tools. These programs are intended for long-term use to fix stuff in your brain for practical use, rather than to help you cram for a test. They're generally intended for use every day, and they use your feedback on the difficulty of each card to figure out the optimal time to retest you on it.

Anki is the one I eventually settled on. It's available for Windows, OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD, and there are also ways of using it on various mobile devices. I use the OS X version. It was trivial to install and it was fairly easy to figure out how to work it. I had no trouble importing my existing vocab list from a text file, and it stores flashcards in an SQLite database, so I know I can get them back out again in any format I like. It was easy (see below) to increase the font size (important for me, as my eyesight is not brilliant), and the documentation on their wiki seems quite good.

I've changed a couple of the options — specifically, I changed the thing that shows you failed cards again, to make it show them at the end of the session instead of putting them before cards you've not seen in that session yet. I found the default setting annoying.

I also tried Mnemosyne but the font size was too small and I couldn't work out a sensible way to increase it (this comparison of Mnemosyne and Anki says there's a global option, but I couldn't find it). I didn't get as far as trying an import, since the font size thing is a dealbreaker for me.

Both Anki and Mnemosyne allow you to share your decks with others, and download decks that others have shared. I should point out though that I found the process of making vocab lists, looking things up in online dictionaries, and entering flashcards in Anki to be very useful in cementing stuff in my brain. I'd generally advise against using other people's flashcard decks — it's better to build your own. Other people's vocab lists are useful for looking things up or confirming things, but be wary of importing vast swathes of them into your own notes — do it one character/word/phrase at a time.

Update, July 2010: Here's another good article on Anki.

Update, March 2011: The method of changing font size in Anki has changed since I wrote this post. As of Anki 1.27, you need to be viewing an individual card in the deck to do this — so open a deck, start reviewing, then instead of clicking on "Show Answer" go to the Edit menu, choose Card Layout, choose Fields, and then under Size change the number in the Reviewing box. Click "Close", and your changes will be applied to all cards in that deck (but not other decks). (Tested on OS X.)

Update, May 2011: OK, it seems that changing font size is even more complicated than I thought. The method I describe in the previous paragraph works for freshly-created decks, and continues to work for a while after that. However, at some point (which is not immediately after you change your settings, nor is it after you quit and restart Anki, so I have no idea what triggers it), Anki uses your field settings to make a new template for your deck, and once it's done this, it ignores the sizes you set in the Fields tab, and you have to edit the Card Templates tab instead.

So when you're in Card Layout, and it's showing Card Templates, there should be something like this in the "Question" box:

<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 20px; color: #000000; white-space: pre-wrap;">{{{Front}}}</span>

Increase the font-size number in there, and you should be good to go.

One of the most important factors in successfully learning a new skill is practice. Lots of practice. Sadly, I have been unable to find even a single textbook full of example Chinese menus graded in order of difficulty with answers at the back. Clearly there is a gap in the market.

On the bright side, if you want to learn to read Chinese menus, there are quite possibly some specific menus you have in mind — perhaps, like me, you've noticed that your local Chinese restaurant has a separate Chinese-only menu with no translations, or a chalkboard of specials written in Chinese. The trick is to get a copy of this menu to study at your leisure! If you feel brave, you could ask if they have a copy you could take away with you, and build up a collection that way.

However, I was not brave when I began this whole learning project. So I started by taking photos of all the menus I encountered that had some Chinese on them — not necessarily when I was actually sitting in a restaurant, but also menus in the windows of restaurants that I happened to be passing. Obviously, the sharper the picture the better, and the higher resolution the better — trying to read blurry, tiny, out-of-focus characters is just self-defeating — so if a menu was large I'd photograph it in sections.

Often, I came across menus with both Chinese and English on them, which is great for ordering but less good for testing oneself. To get around this problem I made copies of all my menu photos, then blanked out the English parts. I used the GIMP for this (and jana has kindly posted a tutorial in gimp_gate to show you how to do it), but something simple like Paint would probably do the trick too. Obviously I had to set them aside for a while after this, so the English translations wouldn't be fresh in my mind, but I started building up my collection quite early on, when I hardly knew any characters at all, so I had them saved up for when I was ready to try out my skills.

Here's a Flickr photoset of various Chinese menus (mostly from restaurants in London) with the English cropped or blacked out. Feel free to use these for your own practice — I'll be adding more as time goes on. If you're not familiar with Flickr, click on the thumbnail to see the photo on its own page, then click on "Actions" and then "View all sizes" above the photo to see it bigger.

Other ways of finding menus to practise on:

• Google for the websites of different Chinese restaurants, and keep a list of the ones that have Chinese-only menus on them.
• Google for the names (in Chinese) of various dishes you're familiar with, along with the term "menu" (which often appears in URLs if not on the page itself).
• Search Flickr for photos of Chinese menus. Good search terms are 菜單 (cài dān) and 餐牌 (cān pái), both of which mean "menu".

When you're just starting out, you may struggle to recognise more than one or two characters on a given menu. Don't let this put you off! I found that actually trying to read menus was the very best way of building up my vocabulary. CantoDict's lists of common compounds are invaluable here — say you're looking at a menu and you recognise the character 菜 (cài), which means "vegetable" or "dish/course". Look it up on CantoDict, scroll down and click on "See all [n] compounds", and see if you can spot the characters to left and/or right of it on the menu in any of the words given there. If so, you've got another character and another word to add to your vocabulary list!

Another way of getting in a bit of practice is to read foodblogs that are mainly written in English but also include some Chinese. I've previously mentioned Red Cook and Sunflower's Food Galore. PigPig's Corner is another option (though not all posts are about Chinese food). Closer to home, there's thisisarestaurantblog, though again not all posts are about Chinese food. If you have any other suggestions, please leave a comment and let me know!

Finally, if you're in the habit of cooking with Chinese ingredients at home, you may find that you're able to recognise some of the characters that turn up on the packaging. I've found this useful for expanding my knowledge of the contexts a given character might appear in; for example, I knew that 牛柳 (niú liǔ) meant beef fillet, but it wasn't until I saw the phrase 蟹柳味 (xiè liǔ wèi) on a cup-a-noodles that I realised 柳 was also used as 蟹柳 (xiè liǔ) to mean crabmeat! (味/wèi means "flavour"; I am not sure there was any actual 蟹 in my noodles.)

Last week I posted about ways of looking up characters that you don't know, but that method only works for characters you can copy-paste from a menu on a restaurant's website. Next week I'll be describing another way of looking up characters that you may not have a copy-paste version of.

The basic unit of written Chinese is the character. Chinese characters are logograms; in other words, each character represents a specific concept (or set of concepts), rather than a specific sound (or set of sounds).

The advantage of this form of writing system is that the same characters can be used in different languages — for example, Mandarin and Cantonese both use 肉 to mean "meat"; however, in Mandarin it's pronounced roughly as "row" (as in rowing a boat) whereas in Cantonese it's pronounced roughly as "yuk".

This does raise the question of which of the Chinese languages is best to choose for a person learning to read Chinese menus! I've decided to learn the Mandarin pronunciations; this is partly because I live with doop, who already speaks some Mandarin, and partly because it doesn't actually matter all that much for my goal — if I end up in a restaurant where none of the staff can understand my Mandarin, I can always order by pointing at stuff on the menu. I did, however, want to learn a pronunciation, since it helps me make the characters stick in my brain when I can read them aloud as I'm learning them, and I may as well learn some real pronunciations as opposed to some made-up ones that only I understand.

Mandarin, like other Chinese languages, is a tonal language; this means that the meaning of what you say is affected by the pitch of your voice as well as the consonants and vowels you pronounce. This is a feature not present in any language I've ever previously learned, so it's something I'm paying special attention to.

Mandarin Chinese can be written not only with Chinese characters, but also in the Latin alphabet with the addition of accents to indicate the tones. The most common latinisation is called pinyin. Pinyin is kind of the opposite of characters, in that while characters carry information on meaning but not on pronunciation, pinyin is completely phonetic — if you know the pinyin for something, you know precisely how to pronounce it. However, you can't get the meaning from the pinyin; for example, 炸 and 榨 are both "zhà" in pinyin, but the former means "deep-fried" while the latter means "juiced" or "pressed".

I'll discuss pronunciation further as I go along in my Wednesday posts, but here are some YouTube video links for the interested:

• Mandarin Chinese Pinyin Pronunciation — covers consonants and vowels separately. Useful despite some audio encoding artefacts (4 mins 53 sec).
• China-8.com Chinese Lesson: Pinyin Tones — short, straightforward introduction to Mandarin tones (1 min 15 sec).
• Chinese sample lesson 1 - tones — tones again, longer than the above, and more entertaining (5 mins 14 sec).

Another decision I needed to make was whether to learn traditional or simplified characters. Wikipedia has an overview of character simplification, but in essence, simplified characters are quicker to write — for example, the traditional character for wheat noodles is 麵, while the simplified one is 面. In the end, it turned out that I would have to learn both — a quick survey of London menus revealed that some use traditional characters, others use simplified characters, and one or two use a mixture! However, it's generally considered easier for someone who can read traditional characters to learn the simplified forms than vice versa, so I decided to learn the traditional forms first.

I've covered quite a lot of ground in this post, but this is pretty much all the background knowledge you really need to get started. I'll look at the different aspects in greater detail in future posts. As always, I appreciate questions and corrections in comments.