Blogging in Chinese
April 19th, 2006 by MarkI’ve finally made up my mind. I’m going to start blogging in Chinese. I’ve been hesitant for a few reasons. Primarily, my Chinese isn’t that great. This blog already generates three or four pieces of genuine, curse-ridden hate mail a month, primarily from ESL educators offended by my ideas about teaching, but also a few from Chinese and Chinese-Americans offended by my view of Taiwan.
By blogging in Chinese, I’ll give both groups that much more ammunition with which to attack me. Truth be told, I will make plenty of mistakes. I make more grammar and word usage mistakes in Chinese than some of my more advanced students do in English. Unlike, CFL blogger extraordinaire Alaric, I don’t have anybody I can ask to check it for me at the moment, either.
So, why am I doing it? Well, with all the time I spend on work and pleasure reading, I really haven’t put much effort into my Chinese. I honestly don’t think it’s improved at all in the last year. My vocabulary is a bit bigger, but my pronunciation and grammar are worse. If I just do, say, 1/5 of my blogging, or even 1/10 of my blogging in Chinese, I’m sure it have a good influence on my Chinese skills. In the end, why give a damn about what all these random strangers think of me? I’d rather actually have good Chinese than just seem like I do. The way I see it, each time someone tells me I got it all wrong is a learning opportunity. If Daniel’s not afraid, then neither am I!
I would like a bit of advice, though. Should I leave posts of both languages in the same blog, like Darin? Or maybe make a completely separate blog for the Chinese?
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April 19th, 2006 at 6:08 pm
I’m pretty sure that blogs only in Chinese get much more traffic. If a return visitor returns to see only English, they may quit coming back. I know, you can have a category/tag for only Chinese posts, but I think in practice visitors rarely use those. I recommend a separate blog.
April 19th, 2006 at 8:07 pm
Another option could be a bilingual blog entry. Write it in Chinese first, then tell us what you want to say in English. I realize that one can’t always translate exactly, but you could note that if they were far enough apart.
April 19th, 2006 at 10:42 pm
John, thanks for the input. That’s a good point about scaring away visitors with an all English page. Daren can write on the blog in both languages because his blog really is about half Japanese. No speakers of either language would ever find his blog completely in the other. I’ll impressed if I can even do 20% of my blogging in Chinese.
I’ve also considered putting a 中文 tab at the top, having that send the reader to the Chinese category, and make a special 中文 category.php to make it display the all the posts as a regular blog instead of just previews of each. What do you think of that?
As I said in my post on it today, I really like your Chinese blog and I’ve been reading it recently. Do you mind if I ask a couple of questions about it? Is it an entirely separate install of Wordpress? Did you have to duplicate all of your PHP templates and CSS files? If you don’t mind sharing the information, maybe you should post about it on Sinosplice. I’ll bet a lot of people would be interested.
April 19th, 2006 at 11:29 pm
Thanks for the mention! I must blog in Chinese more…
April 20th, 2006 at 7:07 am
While your motivation is admirable, you’d do much better to put the same time into studying with books and a teacher. There’s a time when you just have to cut loose and use Chinese in your hobbies, but you’re not there yet.
First get to where you can read and write at least 2000-3000 characters AND the common compounds, then start spending an hour or two a day reading the paper, magazines, and children’s books. After you’re comfortable with that is the time to start doing things like writing blogs in Chinese. It may be unpleasant during the year it takes to get through the basic vocabulary building process, but you’ll thank yourself for it later.
April 20th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Mark,
My Chinese blog is a separate WordPress install. For the theme, I just created a new CSS file which imports all the relevant CSS files from my other blog’s theme, and adds a few Chinese-specific extra classes/modifications (like fonts and font sizes). Plugins had to be duplicated.
Another advantage of keeping the Chinese blog separate is that the comments tend to stay in Chinee as well. In your first Chinese post, for example, all those English comments could possibly scare away Chinese commenters.
I disagree with Jake. As long as you enable comments, blogs are a unique form of communication that can be very beneficial to your language learning in ways that traditional study cannot.
April 20th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Jake, I recognize some truth in what you say. During and immediately after my 9 months as a 2-hour a day student at Shida, I really felt I made rapid progress. Not only did I learn how to read and write more words, but my comprehension of all the Chinese I heard outside increased quite a bit, too. In the two years since I quite studying formally, I’ve made very, very little progress outside of my ability talk about English, and to understand parents talking about their children’s problems. Simply listening to the radio a lot, talking with people on the street and trying to muddle my way through children’s newspapers that are too hard for me isn’t getting me anywhere very quickly.
Once I’m done with working at my current school, I’ll finally be able to become a full-time student. I do wish I’d been able to sooner. As for spending my blogging time on serious study, I just don’t have the energy. I want to and I’ve tried to, but while working 6 days a week and sometimes spending 11 hours in the office in a single day, I just don’t have the energy. I can get myself motivated enough to do half an hour of blogging in between classes or after I get home, though.
April 20th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
John, thanks for the suggestions. Keeping the comments in Chinese does sound worthwhile, and if separating my blog will do it, I guess that’s the way to go. It’ll give me a chance to turn all the standard text such as “Leave a Reply” into Chinese, too.
April 22nd, 2006 at 4:09 am
As soon as John called me “CSL blogger extrodinaire” on his blog, I experienced a two week writer’s block! Now you have just extended it for at least another week!
Just joking, there were other factors involved.
Good luck with your Chinese blogging. I don’t think there is any “right” way to do it. Or… Whichever way you do it, that is the right way.