One small step for a Mandarin learner

Last week, I did something I've never done before, despite having studied a modern language for five years at secondary school (and if raw results are to be believed, proved to be better at it than physics at Higher level). I wrote to a native speaker in her own language.

It was fairly low level stuff - I avoided anything that I thought might be open to misinterpretation. My wife is a music teacher. My daughter is 24 years old. My son is called Andrew. My mum and I went to the mountains. Hopefully, nothing there is a euphemism for something awful when said in Chinese.

I wrote some time ago that the idea of learning a new language had seemed like acquiring a superpower when I went to secondary school (though the frostiness of many of my teachers turned it into a trial). I still feel that way. Perhaps I should offer this as a slogan to my opposite numbers in SCILT, Scotland's Centre for Languages - "Learning a new language: the superpower EVERYONE can acquire!"

All this has been done by independent, "teacher not present" "choose your own learning pathway" methods, though had I the time to go to classes, I'd much prefer to have done so. I feel that I've learned a lot about learning in the process, though I'm not sure how much that I think I've learned hasn't merely been the result of reinforcement of uninformed prejudices. So, before we go on, here are my uninformed prejudices, mostly around the topic of e-learning:

• ·         You can't learn physics by playing Angry Birds (though you can learn physics by analysing Angry Birds as rigorously as you'd analyse a golf ball's motion);
• ·         Using Guitar Hero in music lessons teaches you only that your music teacher likes to get down wid da kids.
• ·         The internet is a marvellous library, but along with all the literary classics and well-crafted potboilers, it contains every piece of vanity-published mince that ever there was (e.g. blog posts that nobody other than the other has had made any editorial judgement upon prior to publication).

So here's how I went about learning a couple of hundred words of Mandarin.

Apps! I downloaded three. One was games-based. It taught me lots of phrases, which doesn't quite work for me as I'll explain later, but was useful. The downside was that I became expert at progressing through the games at the expense of rigorous learning. What do you think children would do? Also, one of the games was very difficult, so I avoided it, despite it being the one that would address my weakest area, tones. The second app was essentially just an electronic phrase book and was useful only to learn a few stock pleasantries, though this particular one had a few stock unpleasantaries available too. App 3 was designed to help with the official HSK language test. It epitomised bad software that could actually serve a useful purpose if you used it along with some other stuff. This programme would show you a Chinese word in characters, pinyin and English, where all the meanings were listed. If you were online, you could hear the word being pronounced, then hear a sentence containing an example of its use. The sentence was also written in Chinese characters. After a few words, you were given an instant multi-choice test. Very easy to wheech through for anyone with a better-than-goldfish memory. Unfortunately, whilst HSK Level 1 has 150 words, the examples seemed to draw from a bank of a thousand or so.

Enter Google Chinese input. I became determined to understand as many of these example sentences as I could. I installed Mandarin input onto my Nexus tablet. This lets you type in pinyin, and displays a selection of Chinese characters that might correspond to the Romanised version of the word you've entered. Alternatively, you can draw the character, which is BLOODY HARD. This app turned out to be quite effective in building my vocabulary and inspiring me to get into character recognition, but as a tool for learning words, I needed to run through it several times.

Books and CDs! I include in this a webpage that, but for audio links, was more like an online text book. My most significant progression came as a result of buying something called Dorling Kindersley's Easy-Peasy Chinese. Why? because it (as, later on did the aforementioned online text book) gave me the basic rules of grammar. Yes, it taught me phrases, but unlike the apps, each component of a phrase was explained. This word means "not". This is the verb "to be". Yes! Now it's like physics. I have the formulae and the principles. I can apply them to new situations, armed with the vocabulary I've picked up. Not only that, but when I go back to the apps, I can see why the phrase "where is the toilet?" is written the way it is, and I can use that knowledge to write "where is the restaurant?" or "where is my dinosaur?" Not only that, but in the privacy of my own car, I can take up the accompanying CD's offer to repeat the phrases it's saying, or to translate English phrases into Chinese or vice versa.

What's missing is quality control. I've learned other things under my own direction, such as new computer languages, and there you get feedback by seeing whether your script actually works. There are levels of feedback beyond that, such as efficiency and elegance of code that you don't get, but you get something.

With language learning, it's much harder. Google Translate can let you know if your written Chinese means what you intended, or so you'd think. I ran everything in my email to my Chinese friend through Google Translate and some of the bits I knew were correct didn't look so after translation. From initial feedback from my Shanghai pal, I know that some of the bits that looked right weren't. Speech recognition is even harder. You know when you're wrong, but you don't know how to make it right. Computers don't seem to be smart enough. Perhaps I should add "yet". For now, I need a real person.

Meantime, as a substitute, I asked Mandarin Siri where I could find a restaurant. I was pretty chuffed when she found six local ones, including Alfie's Chip Shop.