Notes from the tailgate

I won’t be seeing my beach chair any time soon, so today we’ll have to sit on the tailgate of a pickup truck. That’s because I’m still making the rounds of American ranching country. John Wayne had his six-shooter. Me, I’m packing some Chinese flashcards. Welcome to modern times, pardner.

Before I get to the flashcards, I’ll mention that Asian markets are a much-discussed factor in the U.S. heartland. That’s not entirely a new thing. A few business owners I know here remember taking trips to Japan in the ’80s. These days, China, of course, is the big name, with a concurrently big demand for stuff like wheat, lumber and metals.

Anyway, I haven’t so much as glanced at what the outside world has been up to lately. This is therefore a good time to pass on a few more notes for those of you making your way through Chinese studies. Here are several items:

1) Tuttle Publishing, one of the major names in the Asian language realm, came out with a new series of Chinese flash cards in 2012, and I finally got around to trying them out. The “Chinese Flash Cards Kit” series comes in three volumes.

This is separate and distinct from the “Chinese in a Flash” series of flashcards, which have been on the market for a far longer time and are also a Tuttle production.

As for the “Chinese Flash Cards Kit,” each volume comes with a CD that has audio files of every word in the volume, a booklet that includes the words, and a metal card-holding ring that can hold some cards so you don’t lose them when you’re toting them around.

Volume 1 has 349 cards and lists for $13.97. Volume 2 is 273 cards and is also $13.97. Volume 3 is 448 cards and is $19.57. Prices vary by seller; I pulled these prices from Tuttle’s website.

Each card features one Chinese character and some words derived from the character.

I bellied up for the first two volumes to test them out. Overall, I found these cards very useful; however, for reasons that elude me, the “Chinese Flash Cards Kit” cards are printed in sky blue ink. Since I use flashcards to squeeze in little study sessions whenever I can, and these times often don’t provide ideal lighting, the smaller fields in the cards are a bit hard to read sometimes.

2) At some point in the past I mentioned a series of readers (books) from a series called China Breeze, published by Peking University Press. I was pretty slow on the draw about spending time with the examples I ordered, but I read a few of them lately.

One key notion here is that the books come in several levels of difficulty. You can select the level that’s appropriate for you. Don’t look to me for any scientific way to do this, I just use trial and error.

From my experience, the books were a great way to exercise the vocabulary that I already knew, which is exactly what I wanted to do. So I did best by aiming low here, finding books that were easy to read. Me, I’ve accepted the fact that I’ll never be good at Chinese, but I am determined not to get any worse, especially since I have scant opportunity for practice.

Each book comes with a CD with audio files of the book read aloud (one at a slower pace, one at a faster pace), but I never got around to trying out this feature.

The market for these books seems a bit spotty, and prices and availability have a wide range. I glanced at some listings at Amazon.com, which range from $7.95 to $14.95.

3) Here’s a site worth visiting: YoyoChinese.com.

It’s a series of very short video lessons, and by short I mean on order of a few minutes. This focused approach chops things up into easy-to-digest little slices.

The site features free content (which I’ve tried out) and paid content (which I haven’t). As for the stuff I saw, it was excellent. Albert Wolfe, author of Chinese 24/7 (by far my favorite book on Chinese), is part of the Yoyo Chinese team.

The paid content runs $159 for a year’s worth of access to their streaming lessons; $99 for six months; with lower prices for even shorter spans. I’m not good enough at managing my time to take this route; every time I subscribe to something I’ll forget all about it for the next half-year. But for those who can use their time, and their subscriptions, more wisely than I can, this may be a very good bet.

As for Yoyo Chinese, and the other stuff, too, I’ve merely scratched the surface. There’s not enough space for more details. I just wanted to get this stuff on your radar screen. Now that I’ve done that, I’ll close the tailgate, fire up the truck, and head off into the sunset.