supplementary materials for Mandarin course

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supplementary materials for Mandarin course

Postby normunds on March 8th, 2010, 4:49 am

I notice somebody's been adding wordlists including hanzi.

What I have is transcripts in hanzi for "Reference lists" and wordlists (including hanzi) up to module 7 included. The last units might not be double-checked/proofread as I quit with my work on FSI at that point.

I think that might be of some interest for other users - is site author interested to add them or let me access to add these pages? For me just creating these transcripts was a very good exercise in itself :-), but people might find having them readily available useful as well.
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Re: supplementary materials for Mandarin course

Postby normunds on December 26th, 2011, 10:10 am

I've posted my content here: http://www.geo168.com/lang/zh/mandarin/fsi/index.php

Please let me know of any problems. Pinyin text is mostly produced automatically from the character text; I've corrected some, but it still should contain some incorrect pronuncation.

Also modules Transportation, Meetings, and Society have no target/reference lists. I hope to add them soon... now when the rest is up :-)

There might also be a confusion between target and reference lists. Why they have two - I guess it has not been clear for FSI as well - as the last modules have only reference lists.

The last part - I hope I will eventually have time to do it as well. There is no textbook - hence it is a bit more complex task. And lately I've been working with other material.
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Re: supplementary materials for Mandarin course

Postby Oberon on December 28th, 2011, 6:04 pm

I took a quick look through the first two units and found a few tiny errors:

General comment - Pinyin proper names for people and county names as well as the first letter of sentences should be capitalized. A two-syllable given name should be written as one word. This is throughout all the units.

Examples: In unit 1 sentence 1:
"nǐ shì shéi? wǒ shì wáng dānníěr. wǒ shì hú měi líng" should be "Nǐ shì shéi? Wǒ shì Wáng Dānníěr. Wǒ shì Hú Měilíng"

Other comments:
Orientation:
Unit 1:
xiānshēng -> xiānsheng
tàitài -> tàitai (maybe this is OK and falls under tone sandhi as a duplicated 4th tone word losing tone)
Unit 2:
bú shì -> búshì (vocab section says bùshi)


Biographical:
Unit 1:
měi guó -> Měiguó
Unit 3:
méi yǒu -> méiyǒu
jīge -> jǐge (几 jī is a small table)
sentence #7 - missing comma after bù, or maybe it should be a period.
Unit 5:
shàngde -> shēngde, also the 4th and 5th sentences says 上的 instead of 生的.
hòunaín -> hòunían

I'll look though the other units as time permits. I didn't look at the text, so some of my comments may not be correct.
Last edited by Oberon on December 31st, 2011, 8:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: supplementary materials for Mandarin course

Postby normunds on December 29th, 2011, 5:42 am

thanks for your comments. Will correct that. The problem with pinyin is that I have it generated using DimSum from the character text (lost capitalisation is one of the consequences). Afterwards I have tried to sort it out, but there must be many problems left.

For me in order to correct pinyin, it would not be enough just to read it carefully, but rather I will need to compare mechanically against the text. For large part I did it already (still some problems left evidently); I think Travel must be the least verified part.

Maybe I will OCR the books, and get pinyin from there. It will also involve editing, but it's relatively easy to do it in FineReader. Frankly do not know it's still a lot of work :-/

Or maybe even hide the pinyin. The real thing is the character text itself. To add the pinyin and English text was an afterthought when I used the sentences in mnemosyne cards.

Also, maybe you know - I got two things I was struggling to find and probably failed to treat correctly:

* Orientation, Unit one - I've used the "normal" transcription for Daniel - 王丹
尼尔 (Wáng Dānníěr) while in the text it is "Wáng Dànián" (with English version
=Daniel) - I could not manage to find the correct characters for "Dànián".

* Prof Hollins from "Arranging a Meeting, unit 4". In pinyin he is simply referred to
as "Hé Jiàoshòu" - I wrote it as 和教授, but I'm not sure at all which character would Chinese normally use in this situation.
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Re: supplementary materials for Mandarin course

Postby Oberon on December 29th, 2011, 5:27 pm

OCR with Finereader would probably work quite well for pinyin. One would need to create a new recognition language that includes the usual Latin characters and punctuation as well as the extra pinyin characters. The pinyin entries in CEDICT would work for a dictionary.

Every transliteration of Daniel I've seen has been the one you've used. Probably the person decided to take a Chinese given name such as "大年". I'm not sure how common it is, but a web search for 大年 has it coming up several times as a male given name.

For "Hollins" the only thing I've seen is a phonetic transliteration: 霍林斯. I'd probably use 何 for the surname. It is the 18th most common Chinese surname character (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Chinese_surnames).

BTW - Take my pinyin tone comments with a grain of salt. I'm first reading the Chinese characters - sounding the sentence in my head - and then sounding out the pinyin to see if it sounds the same. This is not a very definitive way of verifying the sentences.
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Re: supplementary materials for Mandarin course

Postby normunds on December 30th, 2011, 3:39 am

In fact in my experience FineReader (FR) works quite poorly with pinyin. I've had quite a fight some time ago when I was OCRing a Chinese testbook.

I did create a custom language, but it seems that for some reason FR is not able to use some characters with 3rd tone marks (carron) such as ǎ, ǐ, ǔ. However I noticed that I can make it kind of work by substituting letters with carron by letters with breve (ǎ with ă) :-/
ǎ U01D4 with U0103
ǐ U01D0 with U012D
ǔ U01D4 with U016D
it never recognizes ǚ U01DA as well. FR also does not accept some more rare combinations that I've never seen - ǖ U016D, ǘ 01D8, ǜ U01D6 (I could not find any instances of ǖ in CEDICT, while there are a few characters using ǘ and ǜ)

So OCR, then manually go through many omissions, then find-replace stop-gap letters using breve with the correct ones... lots of fun.

However the idea about using CEDICT as a dictionary could be useful - I had not thought about it. FR will just be able to use the text file if I point to it as a dictionary for my custom language? Hm, or maybe not. In any case - in CEDICT pinyin tones are indicated by numbers. Maybe it can be used a a dictionary for the scan of a normal text. Maybe.

As for Hollins - you mean that sometimes Chinese refer to Westerners using a Chinese surname similar to their Western one? Or at least starting with the same sound? Then will have to use 何I guess.

Daniel - as the recording uses it, I could use your best guess. Though it will be a bad luck if anybody then uses this info to transcribe Daniel... So might rather leave it as is. and/or add a footnote about this.

And probably do not waste time reading the pinyin - I'll go the OCR road - luckily there is not too much to edit. The reference lists grow quite long only in the last 2 modules (and I'm done with Society already :-)
EDITED: well the scaned books are from different quality copies. Here is what I got for Travel module :-)
Code: Select all
1.   A: WSman zSnme chěnghu nín

hlo ne?

B: Lái zhèli cǎngaān f&ngwènde rén dǒu Jiào wS LXo Wáng.

2.   A: Nín xilng zhèijiàn shì

zlnme ánp&i bí.1 i&o hSo?

B: W3 xiSng zuì hio dSng vS he Shànghii fǎngmian li&nxí yíxià zài shuò.

3.   A: Tīngshuǒ nín duì zhèi yídàìl-

de fSngy&n hen y5u yinjiū.
It's quicker to edit manually the automatic conversion by DimSum. Or even type it from the book.
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