听中文歌学中文

I've been listening to a lot of Chinese songs lately. And I've discovered that it's actually really rewarding to go look up the lyrics and learn the words because a lot of songs use the same vocabulary. Most of the songs out there are about love so... there's a lot of "buzz" words, especially among songs that are about the same things like the sad kinds about lost love, the motivational songs, etc. I've started a notebook (a while back) with all the Chinese words that I care about and want to learn. It's really exciting to see a word that you've written down, looked up the pinyin and English for, made into sentences, etc. used somewhere else and you can understand perfectly because you've put in all this effort. Let me assure you it's a lot of effort.

I've also discovered that since I've been putting an enormous amount of time into this that I've began to be able to decipher words that are similar to words that I know. People who have no background in Chinese are always like, "well, it can only be easy if you can remember all the characters!" But they fail to realize that a lot of these characters are very similar and you can guess their sound and meaning from words that you already know. It's not so different from languages like English that depend on an alphabet.

Okay, so I've always known this as a fact but it has never helped me until a couple of days ago. I was able to look at characters, guess at their pronunciation, and look up the pinyin instead of going through this guessing radicals and counting strokes business (it takes forever!). I've also been able to make use of the sentences given by my dictionary. I have Collins and I don't think it's very good. Some of the English translation is just bad. I've always had problems with their example sentences because they use some fairly sophisticated words in them. I think a good dictionary would try to give you a sentence that uses simple words but still show the meaning of the word that you looked up clearly. Anyway, it's not such a big problem now since I can usually read the sentences. Do you understand how annoying it is to look up other words in an example sentence? Especially Chinese words?

I also realized that my memory is really awful compared to... before college. I remember I had this Chinese-Chinese dictionary back in first grade. You know how you have to look up the radical, then it gives you a page number or some other number, and then you have to count the strokes of the rest of the character? Well, back then, I could remember which number corresponded to which radical. So I was able to skip the whole looking up the radical part. Which saves a lot of time. But now that I actually care about saving time, I can't do this at all. I even have to count the strokes of the radical because I'm lame like that! Um... all that was to show how much time knowing the pinyin helps.

Anyways, wish me luck on my Chinese exams on Wednesday!