中文版的猫和老鼠 (zhōngwén bǎn de māohélǎoshǔ) Tom and Jerry Cartoons Overdubbed in Chinese

Last week I was reading the forum thread about what else people use to study Mandarin and wanted to put in my own two cents here about using Tom and Jerry cartoons as study materials. If you’re a fan of Tom and Jerry cartoons you should definitely check out the Chinese dubbed versions. In Chinese the cartoons are called 猫和老鼠 (māohélǎoshǔ) which literally means Cat and Mouse. You might remember that there is almost no dialogue in the original American version. Not true in the Chinese dubbed versions which have Tom and Jerry talking almost non-stop. The talking is a little distracting at first, but after you get used to it you’ll see that it adds a whole new dimension of humor to the cartoons.

If you log on to one of the popular Chinese youtube knockoff sites like youkou or tudou and do a quick search for 方言 (fāngyán, dialect) you’ll see that some of the results that pop up on the first page are Tom and Jerry Cartoons dubbed in 四川话 (Sìchuānhuà, Sichuan dialect). If you surf for a while longer you’ll see that the cartoons have also been dubbed in tons of other dialects as well. Here are some links to a bunch of different 猫和老鼠 clips dubbed in different dialects:四川话: 河南话 东北话 兰州话 陕西话 潮汕话. Be forewarned that the video quality is generally not great on these sites. It would be awesome if they get up to speed with youtube sometime soon and start offering higher quality clips. If anyone knows of better Chinese video sites please share the links with us below.

About halfway through my first year at 山西农业大学 (Shānxī Nóngyè Dàxué, Shanxi Agricultural University) I decided to take a stab at learning some 四川话. So I asked around for students who came from Sichuan province that might be interested in tutoring me in some Sichuan dialect basics. Within a couple of weeks I had found myself a tutor. His English name was “Neat”. Neat and I used a couple of elementary 中文 textbooks and read through the dialogues in 成都话 (Chéngdūhuà, Chengdu dialect). I recorded my lessons and prepared a dialogue or two before each following meeting. After a while I asked Neat to speak only in 成都话 during our lessons, even when explaining the meaning of words or phrases. I enjoyed this type of instruction based on textbook dialogues, but I realized that I still didn’t have enough basic vocabulary under my belt so I asked Neat to bring in some cartoons and other movies.

After a while Neat and I started using Tom and Jerry cartoons as our main study material. We also watched a bunch of feature length movies featuring 四川话 (浮生, 疯狂的的石头, and 沿江而上) . An average lesson consisted of us watching the cartoons bit by bit, doing a lot of stopping and starting, giving me time to mimic the lines back and for Neat to correct my mistakes and explain the difficult parts. This method was great for learning some really basic phrases like “我饿了！(wǒ è le, I’m hungry), 这是什么？(zhè shì shénme, What is that?) , and 谁呀？(shéi ya, Who’s there?)”. It was also useful for learning a select group of phrases that tend to reoccur in slapstick cartoons like, “我要打死你！(wǒ yào dǎsǐ nǐ, I’ll beat you to death!), 我要收拾你！(wǒ yào shōushi nǐ, I’ll teach you a lesson!), and 打你的屁股！(dǎ nǐde pìgǔ, kick your butt!”).

There are a couple of problems with watching a whole bunch of Tom and Jerry cartoons as a study method. It doesn’t necessarily help you to learn many phrases that are actually useful in daily life. Another problem is that the voice actors in the cartoons don’t always speak a very standard style of the Chinese dialect. In the 四川话 Tom and Jerry cartoons there are three different voice actors who according to my teacher Neat, all sound like they come from different places in Sichuan, near 成都, but they sound fairly 土 (tǔ, not standard-speaking in a way that sounds like they come from a small village out in the country somewhere). The three voice actors often will have different pronunciations of the same word within a couple of seconds. For a good example of this check out the 四川话 version of 会飞的扫把 (huì fēi de sàobǎ, the flying broom) and listen carefully at 4:00-4:05 for when they say the word 飞 (fēi, fly). Tom says “huī”, then a second later Jerry says “fēi”. Apparently switching f and h is a fairly common occurrence in local dialects of 四川话. It is interesting to make note of small things like this when watching cartoons with a bunch of different voice actors who each speak their own type of non-standard dialects.

Watching dubbed cartoons can be a fun way to enhance your study program, but I wouldn’t suggest relying too heavily on it because of the limitations in vocabulary and the non-standard voice actors. Do any of you Skritter users out there use video as part of your study method? Are any of you working on Chinese dialects by way of cartoons or other videos?

Practice Lists And Sections

Okay, major new feature! You can now study a single list on its own, or a single section on its own, as opposed to studying everything at once as before. If you go to the vocab pages, you'll see shiny new green buttons you can click which will take you to a practice page for a list or section and it will let you use the same exact scheduling system for the given subset of words. This also comes with a new practice navigation page, where you can view recently studied lists and sections. You can check it out at http://www.skritter.com/practice. Here you can, at a glance, see what you've been studying recently and quickly choose what you want to work on.

This is the first of many steps being taken to streamline the way you choose what to study. As we've mentioned many times, users often trip over the existing vocabulary choosing system, so we're moving away from it. By and large, you will be able to do the same things as before, and more. We're going to be doing this step by step, so for the now consider the site in a transition phase as existing pieces will be phased out and replaced.

One thing in particular we're replacing is cram mode. There is no more 'cram mode' that you switch to and from. We still have cram lists, but those are going to be removed later, in about a month or so. We'll migrate all those lists to custom lists, so no one will lose any data. This will reduce complexity, so we only have one kind of vocab list. Until they're migrated over, you can choose to use cram lists with the new system from the cramlists page: http://www.skritter.com/cramlists.

But before we move on to the next phase of the vocabulary system overhaul, we're going to focus on polishing and improving list and section study and the practice navigation page. First we'll make sure all the bugs are ironed out; it is not as tested as we would have liked, but since I'll be on vacation next week, we wanted there to be enough time to fix any major bugs before I left.

The practice navigation page in particular is going to get a lot more work done on it. Nick and George are going to work on improving the design, but the layout should remain largely the same. And when I get back, I'm going to add more features to it, including the ability to remove lists from study, seeing at a glance when words are coming up in the future, and adding the ability to page through all the lists and sections you have studied (right now you can just see the first few).

So let us know what you think of the new organization of things. We've still got lots to do, but we're hoping just this much will go a long way toward making just choosing a list to study a lot more intuitive, and make it clearer what is being studied. Let us know what you think!

Wacom Store is Up!

It's been a long time in the coming, but you are now able to order Wacom pen tablets from us. You can check out the Wacom store via the button on the home page.


We decided to keep the store as simple as possible by only offering the two most cost-effective tablets that we can personally vouch for. We have all three been using the tablets we are selling for more than a year and have been really impressed. Scott uses his tablet for more than just Skrittering while Nick and I only use ours to write Chinese. We really can't recommend the tablets enough. If you are serious about learning to write Chinese and want to do it on the computer, the tablets are a no-brainer: you can write faster, easier, and more ergonomically than with a mouse. And take it from Scott, the tablets aren't just great for writing, they are excellent if you do any Photoshop or illustrating work.

We are selling the tablets at-price essentially as a benefit for Skritter users. We believe they have really helped us learn better and we want to open that option up for other Skritterers.

You will notice that the store does not support international shipping, and that is because as consumers, we happen to know that shipping costs from our reseller aren't terribly competitive abroad. So, if you still want the tablet goodness but live outside of the contiguous United States, we have recommended several international websites that will do a better job of shipping your goods for better rates.

Thanks for your patience with us in getting this up and running. We hope that the tablets improve your Skrittering experience.

Removing Japanese Sounds

Bad news Japanese Skritterers, it would appear that we misunderstood the terms of use for Smart.fm's Japanese audio files and they have asked us to take them down. The sounds will be disabled later today and we currently don't have a plan for replacing them. We would like to apologize to Smart.fm for violating their terms of use, and also to our users for promising a feature that we will have to remove (at least in the short-term).

We are still looking for ways to include Japanese audio on Skritter and will let everyone know when we can again offer Japanese sounds.

Forming a 重金属乐队 (zhòngjīnshǔ yuèduì, Heavy Metal Band) in Shanxi Province

My idea was to form the first ever heavy metal band at Shanxi Agricultural University. The first order of business was to locate the musically talented metal heads on campus. The preferred method of announcing things was to make giant red posters with handwritten 汉字 on them and post them up all over the campus using a liberal amount of thick gluey paste. So I asked a Chinese friend to help me out with the text and calligraphy for the posters. Here’s what our end product looked like:



In case you can’t make out some of his 草体 (cǎotǐ, cursive style) characters, here is the text of the poster and a translation:


海报 (hǎibào)
Announcement:

一个疯狂的美国人 (yígè fēngkuáng de měiguórén)
A crazy American hopes to share

带着他那炽热癫狂的激 (dàizhe tā nà chìrè diānkuáng de jī)
his insane enthusiasm for starting

情望与农大学子组建本 (qíng wàng yú nóngdà xuézǐ zǔjiàn běn)
this school’s first heavy metal

校第一个重金属乐队 (xiào dì yígè zhòngjīnshǔ yuèduì)
band with students.

(招募：主唱吉他手贝斯手 (zhāomù: zhǔchàng jítāshǒu bèisīshǒu)
(recruiting: a lead singer,guitar player, bass player,

鼓手) 有意者请联系：乔杰明 (gǔshǒu, yóuyìzhě qǐng liánxì: Qiáo Jiémíng)
and a drummer) Interested parties please contact: Qiao Jieming

电话：6287286 (diànhuà)
by phone at 6287286

A couple of days after posting my ads I met my first prospective guitar player. “你好。我叫乔杰明” (Nǐhǎo. Wǒ jiào Qiáo Jiémíng, Hi. my name is Qiao Jieming) I said, reaching out to shake his hand. “Hi,” he says in English, “Nice to meet you. My name is Hand.” I paused, thinking, “I’ve heard some pretty weird English names, but, really? Hand?” So just to be sure I asked him how he spells his name and he spelled it out for me, “H.U.N.T.” Not wanting to criticize his English pronunciation before we had even been properly introduced, I nodded my head in recognition and we got down to the business of the band.

My first question for him was what bands had he been listening to recently. This was part of my screening process. He mentioned the Backstreet Boys, Beyond (a rock band from Hong Kong popular in the late 80s and early 90s) and Westlife (An Irish ‘boyband’ style pop group). Hunt had already lost his chance at being in the band with his mention of Westlife (who’s smooth melodies and loverboy lyrics were the polar opposite of the type of heavy metal music I had in mind for the band. For a classic example of Westlife at their cheesiest, check out “Season’s in the Sun”, a song that was very 红 (hóng, popular, lit. red) last year in Shanxi Province.

For a couple of days I continued meeting a bunch of so-called metal enthusiasts who echoed Hunt’s musical taste. Luckily I did also meet a couple of true metal fans who put Metallica and Megadeth at the top of their lists. The band ended up as a three piece outfit with Dragon and me on guitars and Jack on drums. We had three original speed metal songs at the height of our rehearsal career. The band was short-lived because of our bad work ethic and also scheduling problems since Jack was already married and lived with his wife in 槊州 (Shuòzhōu), a small city a couple of hours to the North of the University.

As I went about choosing musicians for the metal band I became more aware of the “language power struggle” in friendships where both people are interested in practicing their 2nd languages. In my bandmates I was looking for heavy metal enthusiasts who were willing to speak Chinese with me. Hunt didn’t make the cut for two reasons: his musical taste and also because he insisted on only speaking English with me. In general during my time in 山西 (shānxī) I tried to become friends with people who were willing to speak with me in Chinese for at least part of the time. When I was getting to know a new Chinese friend, there was usually a period of time when we were still trying to figure out the right balance of English/Chinese to use in order to communicate most efficiently. It was always a delicate balance because I didn’t want to discourage my friends from learning English, but also I didn’t want to feel like I was being used all the time for English practice. On the flipside, I also didn’t want my Chinese friends to feel like I was using them all the time to practice my Chinese.

I’m wondering how other skritter users have navigated friendships where there is a give and take between Chinese and English(or other languages). What are your thoughts on the “language power struggle” in friendships?

Wacoms a'comin'

Is using the mouse for Skritter getting you down? We have talked for some time about introducing Wacom writing tablets on the website, and now we are days away from introducing them. I made a mockup for Scott a little while ago and he is now in the throes of creating a system that will allow people to purchase the tablets on Skritter. You will have the option to use a credit card that is on file or enter a new credit card, shipping will be done through FedEx, and we will be unable to offer international shipping (this is just because our reseller's shipping rates are much higher than larger companies like Amazon). If you, like 50% of our user base, are living abroad, we will provide you links to larger resellers that will offer more competitive shipping rates.

The Wacom store will be linked to from the home page. You can see how that interface will look below:


The Wacom store it self will look like this:


The prices have been intentionally blurred out because we are we have not finalized our pricing decisions. As we have mentioned before both in form topics and e-mails, we will be offering Wacom tablets at discounted prices. We will not be making any profit from selling the tablets, we see the real benefits of offering them as simply enhancing the user experience. All three of us have been using Skritter with tablets for quite a while and they make the accuracy, ergonomics, and general user experience dramatically better. If it costs us some lost profit to make your user experience that much better, we are willing to lose the money.

The challenge of 谦虚: learning to be a humble Chinese language student

Hello to the Skritter community! I’ve been lurking behind the scenes for the past half year, proofreading and translating entries in the skritter database. Now that Christopher and Gabriel are on board to handle the back end vocabulary linguistics work, I’ll be doing some guest blogging on a variety of topics related to learning Chinese.

A little background info first - I’ve studied Chinese for three and a half years. The first year was at Oberlin College and the second two were in China where I was teaching English at the Shanxi Agricultural University. Now I’m living back in Oberlin where I’m an ESL teacher (for Chinese high school students) by day and a heavy Skritter/Chinesepod user by night.

The challenge of 谦虚: learning to be a humble Chinese language student

To kick off the series of posts, I’d like to discuss humbleness in Chinese culture and how that affects the Chinese language learner. The roots of humbleness go way back in Chinese culture to Confucius. In China today being humble is still an encouraged and expected behaviour. Chinese people are taught to be 谦虚 (humble) and to avoid 吹牛 (lit. blowing the cow, meaning to brag). Chinese school children all learn the saying by Chairman Mao, “谦虚使人进步，骄傲使人落后” (Being humble makes people improve, and being arrogant causes one to fall behind).

During my time in China sometimes even the smallest conversations brought me face to face with the issue of being humble. Take for example a conversation at a bubble tea stand. I start it off: “I’d like a cup of bubble tea, please”. The seller responds, “Your Chinese is great!”. I have two choices now of how to reply. I could say, “Thanks!”, or I could say something humble like “No, actually my Chinese is very bad”. The danger with the “thanks!” response is that you run the risk of seeming too proud. I’ve found that the other choice is often met with a “Wow, you’re humble too!” comment, or at least a smile which probably means that the person is satisfied with my humbleness.

I remember one time I made the mistake of 吹牛 when I invited a couple of friends over for dinner at my house the night before I left for a vacation. I had “daizou-ed” (带走) a bunch of food from a restaurant near my house and prepared a goodbye meal. Towards the end of the meal when we were all past the point of being stuffed but still going strong my Chinese friends started to give me compliments, “You are a great friend to prepare all of this food for us! You are really are a generous guy!” All of a sudden a grammar pattern from language school popped into my mind and I spurted it out without thinking twice: “这到也是” (a slangy way of saying - this is true, I agree with you). My friends burst into laughter. They were expecting me to be humble and refute their praise but instead I had come off as a jerk with no sense of what is an appropriate response to compliments. Those friends and I remembered my faux pas fondly, often joking about it during the following year.

Compliments fly when foreigners speak Chinese in China. You need to be equipped with a set of humble ways to deflect those compliments. So for all of you Chinese speaking skritter users out there, what do you do in the face of a compliment about your language ability from a Chinese person? Do you have any embarrassing stories to share about forgetting to be humble in China?

Japanese Sounds Courtesy of Smart.fm

We've just seeded our database with over six thousand words worth of audio files for Japanese! These sounds were made available through Smart.fm's developer API and the Creative Commons License. This API is quite extensive, and we plan in the future to use it to make their lists available to search through and study here at Skritter, much like we offer ChinesePod lists for Chinese users now.

Thanks to Smart.fm for making these resources available!

Active Pinyin Practice, France

I've just uploaded the alpha version of the active pinyin practice that I've been working on. There are still several things I need to do to it, like making it look good, but it's got most of what we intend. If you're feeling adventurous, enable it on your practice settings, get some new words added with the pinyin part, and try it out! We need feedback on how usable it is and what would make it work better for you.

Here are the things it should be awesome at right now:

• Figuring out which characters' pinyins and tones you know. Although it only tells you if you got the whole word and tones right or wrong, behind the scenes it also updates a word's component characters' items when it makes sense to do so. Efficient!
• Turning the pinyin in your head into pinyin on the screen. Tone marks are handled with my elaborate scheme (tell me if you like it!), 儿化音 érhuàyīn are easy to input, and typos creating invalid pinyins should be prevented automatically.
• Going fast! I think you'll chew through these like 孟子 Mèngzǐ chews through marshmallows.

But there are a few things which I haven't been able to do yet:

• The prompt area outside the Flash looks weird.
• The Genius doesn't yet group together similar items, so if you have multiple parts active to study, they'll be all mixed in and you'll have to switch between keyboard and mouse/pen more frequently than ideal.
• The correct button and toggling grading indicators in the prompt don't work right yet, so don't use those on these pinyin prompts. If you want to change your score, retype the pinyin.
• Long pinyins go off the screen, no back button shortcut, no tone coloring, and a few other minor things.
• Not well tested. (Hope you can help here!)

I would wait to upload until I did those things, but I'm going to go explore France with my girlfriend tomorrow afternoon until the 15th, and I wanted to share the sweet taste of active pinyin before that. I'll be out of touch while hiking around, but George and Scott will be here cooking up more practice pizzas for y'all.

After I get back and upgrade this pupker, a similar mode for Japanese reading practice will follow, which should be a lot easier.

Oh, by the way: also on the practice page settings, there's now a "Use Wacom plugin" option. If you have a Wacom tablet, you can activate pressure-sensitive drawing there. I haven't used it to affect the recognition yet, but the squig drawing looks cooler. If you have the tip feel set to max softness, it will max out easily and draw really big. I set mine two notches down and it works better.

Payment System Up; What's Next

Just uploaded the new payment system! As we said, existing users will still be able to purchase at the old prices until March 26th. Interestingly, the two year purchase has become abnormally popular lately...

I've been spending quite a bit of time going over and testing everything that was shuffled around: user referrals, coupons, school validations, and alike, both with the old system and the new. I've been very careful with this, and I'll be keeping an extra careful eye on the payment system to make sure it's working correctly. One thing that can be sure though: while credit card information is being transferred through us to our credit card payment gateway service provider, Authorize.Net, that information is encrypted the whole way.

And now that we have a credit card system in place, I can work on setting up a Wacom tablet store. These tablets are perfect for use for Skritter; we use them ourselves and time and again users have let us know how good they are for practicing. This should be fairly quick to build, so you won't have to wait much longer!



After that I'll be diving into a very large project indeed: the rebuilding of the vocab system from the ground up. I'll be starting by creating a practice navigation page, which you will reach by clicking the practice tab, rather than immediately going to a practice page. On this new page you will be able to:

• Study all your vocab (currently how it works)
• Study a single list by itself.
• Study a single section of a list by itself.
• Study a set of words entered in a textbox.
• Browse all lists and sections studied, ordered by activity.
• Remove a list from study, without removing words that have been added from other lists that you are still studying.

We get a lot of emails about the vocabulary list system. It's confusing how checking lists for study only changes whether words are added or not, and keeps words that have been added in study. By having users choose whether they want to study all the words they've added or a list or a section, it should be much clearer what they have chosen to study. It will also be simpler to remove words from study.

With these changes, cram mode will be phased out. Having two different kinds of lists, normal and cram, is confusing. So we're switching to having just one kind of list, and making it easy to study that list or a section in that list by itself, and being able to drop in a set of words on the fly to study. This should cover the same needs the current cram system covers, and will be much clearer and easier to use.

There are two more parts to the vocab overhaul: remaking the list editor and vastly upgrading the queue. With all these come new features and significant improvements in usability, so we hope you like these upcoming changes!