Strategies for learning: Clustering / Breaking (English)

 

This series is prompted by reader Valerio's comment on https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/04/chinese-is-learner-friendly-language-in.html about what a challenge the Chinese script presents to the learner, with no gaps between the characters -- what I call breaking up and clustering.

    I've raised some English-equivalent examples of this in the blog covering German (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/05/strategies-for-learning-clustering.html), so what's here are further instances of how one does need some basic knowledge of how the language works.

    I wish I'd been directed more at school to look at English and Mandarin in this way, which would've made it much more illuminating, not to mention fun.  Knowledge of how a language works, to a certain extent, is very useful, something not every learner is taught, from what I've seen (mainly in students who'd done their Beginner level elsewhere before coming to me, either privately or my evening programme classes when I was teaching them).

    Further to the Jonathan Smith vs Jon Athansmith example in the blog on German, here's something to illustrate how it could be done.

    There was a phone company advert on TV in the 80s featuring a grandma talking to her grandson on the phone, asking about his exam results.  He was not particularly pleased, saying he'd only passed one subject: Sociology.  The grandma said proudly, something like, "He's got a pass in an ology and he's not happy."

    That was clever, I thought as a language teacher, guiding the learner of English to look at the language from the angle of patterns in the language, something I use a lot in my teaching of both Mandarin and English.  Some examples:

* It would help the learner enormously in delineating the reference if s/he knew that words that end in ology denote "the study of", e.g., zoology, biology, psychology, sociology.

* Like -ology words, those ending in -ment, -tion, -ness, e.g., are abstract (development, contentment, entertainment; irritation, agitation, imagination; happiness, weariness, dizziness).

    Once you start applying these principles and learning the vocabulary in groups of related words, the burden will be lightened.  You can even begin playing the game of looking out for the next -ology / -ment / -tion / -ness words, to see if the general rule applies, thus making the learning more fun than sheer memorising without seeing some kind of pattern to help identify future unknowns that crop up.

    Remember:  rules are never 100%, just use them to your advantage, and forget about the irregulars for now.

Cultural sense of humour (Eastern Europe)

In the mainland Chinese drama series that I'm currently watching on YouTube, the woman reads bedtime stories to her six-year-old son.  There's one about a mole, which turns out to be a famous Czech cartoon made in 1957 (I discovered by googling it).

    This reminds me of an Eastern European whacky cartoon I saw on telly in the 1980s (when I had a TV) about a banquet.

    The whole cartoon leading up to the punch-line scene enacts the preparation for the banquet, with the staff setting out the long table in an opulent setting, then the guests (at least 20) arriving in chauffeured limousines, all dressed to the nines, one after another.  After the guests sit down, the waiting staff, who are all in formal gear, serve up the food in cloches. 

    The punch-line scene:  the cloches are removed to reveal what's underneath -- lobsters, suckling pig, whole roast chicken, etc., who then leap up and eat the guests.

    The cartoon then starts all over again with the beginning -- the prepping of the food, the laying of the table, the guests arriving in limousines, leaving us to know what is going to happen...

    Talk about a perverse sense of humour, hahaha.  

    The only one that I can find whose description seems to match it is Zofia Oraczewska's “The Banquet / Bankiet” (1976), but what I've found (as a rubbish researcher) does not tell me what happens at the end.

Diminishing returns (London)

(From googling)  Quote Diminishing returns is an economic principle stating that after a certain point, adding more of a single production input (like labor or capital) while keeping others constant leads to smaller incremental increases in output. Essentially, it is a point where extra effort or investment yields progressively smaller results. Unquote

    Valerio's comment on my "Marking homework" blog (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2017/04/marking-homework-london.html):

Quote

... I must disagree with the main assumption: that if somebody turns in perfect homework, then they are not learning anything new. If someone did not know how to write, then they attend your class, and then turn in perfectly written sentences as homework, I would conclude that they learned something new perfectly well from your class.

Unquote

My response:  This comment of yours is good massage for my ego, as it implies (if not actually says so in so many words) that I'm able to mould students who come in at zero-Chinese level (your "did not know how to write") into students who can "turn in perfectly written sentences as homework".  Yes, looked at from that angle (haha, couldn't resist a maths word play for a maths professor), it does make me look like a miracle worker... 

    However, the only students who joined my evening programme classes at zero-Chinese level were Grade 1 (Beginner) students.  (As the years went by, there were fewer and fewer of such students because more and more of them would've dipped into a bit of Chinese before they came to do the lessons, but yes, those wouldn't have done any written Chinese, it's true, mostly just basic Chinese on the romanisation / pinyin-spelling system.)

    Grade 1 (Beginner) students on the evening programme would've done about 150 characters (I think) by the end of the academic year (approx. 70 tuition hours), if my memory is not wrong -- I was on that programme 1985–2011, so details are starting to fade a bit in colour...

    A total of 150 characters is not a huge burden really at the end of a school year.  For homework, they had time to think / draft (unlike in a timed exam), so perfectly delivered homework (even a test paper) is not that difficult to achieve.

    This in itself turned out to be a problem, though, for higher grades.  As the workload got heavier (more characters, more vocab, more complex grammar), their grades would slide downwards as they climbed higher on the learning ladder.  

    I'd get students saying to me, "I got a distinction for Grade 1 -- a mark of 72 or 75, but for Grade 2, I got a B grade [a mark in the 60–69 range]; and a low B or a C grade for Grade 3.  I'm getting worse and worse."

    I had to tell them that it's the nature of the beast, especially since: 

(i) they were learning the language in a country where it was not used a lot outside the classroom (no internet in those days), unless they specifically joined Chinese-speaking groups (who wouldn't have covered the written script anyway); 

(ii) being evening programme students, they had full-time jobs and probably even full-time family commitments, without too much spare time to devote to the constant revision that the Chinese language demands of them.

(London)

Strategies for learning: Clustering / Breaking (German)

Devising strategies for learning is not new to anyone, so this series is not trying to re-invent the wheel, just adding my own perspective and experience to it.  My perspective as in how I learn a language as a student, and how I teach my students of Mandarin and English.  My experience as in what works for me and them.

    Reader Valerio posted a comment on https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/04/chinese-is-learner-friendly-language-in.html about what a challenge the Chinese script presents to the learner, with no gaps between the characters -- what I call breaking up and clustering.

    An English-equivalent example I use in my teaching for demonstrating to students how breaking up or clustering wrongly in Chinese might confuse the listener, when they read something aloud and pause in the wrong places, is rendering Jonathan Smith as Jon Athansmith.  Of course, one will need to know that there's no such English surname as Athansmith, otherwise Jon Athansmith will work as well, so it comes down to some form of pragmatics -- with other factors that are beyond the literal words playing a role too.

    The most striking impression of German text is how long a word can be:  what is one to make of it, e.g., is there a pause somewhere for breath and, if so, where; where to break / cluster, if at all.

    Take "kindergarten" for example, although it is not that long (by the standards of some German words).  

Is it: 

    (i) "kin der gar ten" (four different single-syllable words with four individual meanings), 

or is it: 

    (ii) "kin-der-gar ten" (a three-syllable word, then a single-syllable word), 

or is it: 

    (iii) "kin der-gar-ten" (a single-syllable word, then a three-syllable word), 

etc?  

    I only knew it as a six-year-old because I went to one but not what it meant.  At that time, in Singapore, we weren't told the provenance; we just learned words by rote -- Chinese or English or Malay (presumably Tamil, too).  Later, when I'd learned more English words, I'd even thought it might've been a mis-spelling and should've been kinter garden, whatever "kinter" was supposed to mean.

    Most Brits would know that it's a German word, and that kinder means "child" and garten means "garden".  That would be the same kind of background knowledge expected of a Chinese person / learner of Chinese when looking at a sentence or paragraph of Chinese characters:  where to break, where to cluster.

    Like the Jonathan Smith vs Jon Athansmith example for a certain level of basic background knowledge of how the language works, the person reading the English word "disappear" would not break it up as "disap" and "pear", because s/he would've been taught the basics (e.g., adding prefix dis- to words like "appear", even though "pear" does exist as a word).

    A lecturer in the Linguistics Department of SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) showed me a trick for decoding German words when I told her they were so dauntingly long.  Of course this doesn't apply right across the board, it's only to illustrate one solution.  She said a lot of long German words are a few concepts glued together (like the kindergarten example, which is actually two words put together), so one way to unravel them is to look for clues like suffixes, e.g., the strasse at the end of a long string of letters is just a generic / category word to mark the name of a street.

    My English-equivalent example would be Oxford Street being presented, German style, as one word "Oxfordstreet", or Tottenham Court Road as one word "Tottenhamcourtroad".

    One would have to know the basics:  

* if it was presented as Oxfordstreet for some reason, that "Oxford" is one word and "street" is the category word; 

* Oxford is one word, not two (Ox and Ford);

* if it was presented as Tottenhamcourtroad for some reason, that "court" and "road" are two standalone words;

* Tottenham is one word, not three (Tot and Ten and Ham);

* Cambridge is one word, not two (Cam and Bridge).

    Once you look at it like that, it isn't so unfathomable after all -- up to a point.

(From googling)

Quote

Pragmatics in linguistics is the study of how context influences the interpretation of meaning, focusing on what speakers imply rather than just the literal words spoken. It bridges the gap between sentence structure (semantics) and situational, social, and intentional context, allowing listeners to understand intended meaning behind indirect language, tone, and shared assumptions.

Unquote

"Huh?!?" conversations: 04 (UK)

 

I met a Vietnamese-born Chinese woman on a Longevitology energy adjustment course in 2023, and found that she had an allotment in Woodford in east London (near Stratford, the site of the 2012 London Summer Olympics), so I started to help out there, just doing the weeding and watering.  I say to people, "I'm only good enough to be the skivvy, not the chef."

    For those who might not know what an allotment or a skivvy is:

(From googling)

Quote

allotment: (British English) a small area of land in a town that a person can rent in order to grow fruit and vegetables on it.

skivvy: (British English, informal) a servant, in the past usually female, who does all the dirty or boring jobs in a house.

Unquote

    It's a huge site, with 176 plots. (Standard size of plots: 5 rods / 125 square metres, or 10 rods / 250 square metres).

    Since then, I've met two more lots of tenants (a Portuguese / Brazilian couple in 2023; and Donald, a Jamaican-born chap last summer) whose plots I help out on, on a regular basis.

    Gardening is one of my Distraction Therapy tools (in addition to teaching and healing). It gets me out of the house and into the fresh air, so it's good exercise. When I'm weeding and watering the plants, I'm totally focused on the tasks to be done, which stops me from thinking about horrible things and horrible people. Perfect distraction for an ostrich.

    Next to Donald's plot is a Bangladeshi couple, with whom I've crossed paths on and off since summer last year.

    With the weather getting warmer and the growing season having started, I've been going more often, arranging with Donald to stagger our presence, so that he won't have to go that often. This means that I'm practically always there on my own.

    The Bangladeshi woman told me last week that she had pain in her hands, making it difficult for her to do much on the plot, so I offered to give her a massage on site. We then arranged for me to go to her house to work on her bad back, legs and knees.

    After the massage yesterday, the husband said to me, referring to Donald, "The man in the plot next to mine: do you know him?"

    I guess it's not that usual for an Oriental woman to team up with a dark-skinned man, especially on a platonic basis -- the Oriental/White combination is more common. Or at least in this particular Bangladeshi man's experience anyway, being from a culture where it doesn't happen (much, if at all), and being Muslim to boot.

    There's also always the possibility of his not expressing his meaning properly in English (even though he's been here for over 30 years, if not longer). He might've meant, "Are you friends?"

    Given my perverse sense of humour, I was very tempted to say, "No, I just have the habit of sneaking into people's plots when they're not there, pulling up their weeds and watering their plants."

(London, 2026)

Learner-friendly language in some ways: 03 (Measure words / Classifiers)

The Chinese terms for "collective nouns" are "measure words (mw) / classifiers".

    The most avid reader / supporter of my blogs, old friend Valerio, has inspired this blog by asking how the Chinese language compares with the English on this front.  He has posted up a clever selection of English examples to show how difficult the English language can be for the learner:

Quote 

...another bewildering aspect of English is the large number and variety of collective names for animals:
a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, a business of ferrets, a pandemonium of parrots, an unkindness of ravens...
How does Chinese compare in this respect?

Unquote

  The first major difference is that Chinese uses a measure word for everything, singular or plural, whilst English doesn't (e.g., can say "a dog" / "a table", but not "a vinegar" / "a milk").

(from googling) 

Quote 

There is no exact, official number of collective nouns in the English language, as they are constantly evolving. While there are roughly 200 commonly used collective nouns, there are hundreds, potentially thousands, of archaic, highly specialized, or whimsical terms, with many stemming from 15th-century "terms of venery" for animals and birds.

There are over 200 measure words (classifiers) in Mandarin Chinese, but only about 30–50 are commonly used in daily conversation. While comprehensive dictionaries may list up to 187 or more, roughly 24 core measure words handle most usage, with the general-purpose classifier 个 (gè) accounting for over 90% of daily interactions. 

Unquote

    With so many measure words, it can feel overwhelming when it comes to using them.    

    I teach a lot of strategies to my Mandarin students, to help them feel less at sea with the language.  One of the strategies is called Onion Rings (my coinage):  to deal with the language on different levels, starting with the outermost ring which is the most generalised-rule one.

    For measure words, the near-universal one is 

个 (simplified script) or 個 (traditional script) 

ge 

"unit/item of"  

    The word order is:  number mw noun

e.g., 一个人 / 一個人 / yī ge rén / "one mw person"

    个 (/ 個 / ge) is used with whatever the number is that is being counted:  one person (一个人 / 一個人 / yī ge rén), or ten persons (十个人 / 十個人 / shí ge rén).

    The detailed breakdown for when to use 个 (/ 個 / ge) is a bit less simplistic.  Generally (just the tip of the iceberg):

YES for humans (一个人 / yī ge rén / a person; 一个孩子 / yī ge háizi / a child); 

YES for geographical words (e.g., country / 一个国家 / yi ge guójiā; place / 一个地方 / yī ge dìfāng);

NO for roads, streets, etc; 

NO for creatures (animals, birds, sea creatures);

NO for most inanimate objects (e.g., vehicles; tables, chairs; clothes [trousers, dresses, skirts, shirts] and shoes); 

but YES for some inanimate objects (e.g., door / 一个门 / yī ge mén; computer / 一个电脑 / yī ge diànnǎo; cooking pot / 一个锅 / yī ge guō)

etc.

    As you can see, it's a bit complicated, because it isn't clear / logical why, given that "个 / 個 / ge" only means "an item of / a unit of", it should not apply to everything if one doesn't know their precise measure word.

    I teach my students that should they be in doubt which measure word to use (either had never learned it, or can't remember although they had been taught), to always use 个 rather than leave that space unfilled, even if it's the wrong measure word for that noun.  The mw 个 (/ 個 / ge) doesn't account for any shape (which a lot of measure words do), so it works well enough, even though it doesn't apply to animals, for example.

    The English sort-of-equivalent I use is: for the time 8.05, the "0" has to be sounded, can't say "eight five" as the listener will have trouble processing "eight five", so even if you were to say "eight nought five" instead of "eight o / zero five", it might get understood more easily than simply "eight five".    

    The other umbrella measure word is 些 xiē / "some / several / a few / a number of", used for referring to the said noun as a cluster unspecified in number, e.g., 一些人 / yī xiē rén / "several mw people".  This works even better (but only for plural reference), as it's applicable to humans, animals, inanimate objects, abstract words (e.g., suggestion, idea, concept, policy).  Any word, any shape or form.

One form of self-therapy: 01 (Rinsing out the poison)

(from googling)

Quote

Self-therapy is the practice of applying psychological techniques—such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) methods—to oneself to manage mental health, emotions, and behaviors without a professional therapist. It is a proactive, self-guided approach to building emotional resilience, increasing self-awareness, and resolving personal challenges, often viewed as an advanced form of self-care.

Self-therapy involves utilizing tools and strategies to address mild to moderate issues independently. Common examples include:

Cognitive Restructuring: Identifying and challenging negative thought patterns or cognitive distortions to change emotional responses.

Journaling/Thought Records: Writing down feelings and behaviors to track triggers and patterns.

Mindfulness and Meditation: Practicing presence and accepting emotions without judgment to reduce stress.

Self-Help Resources: Using structured books, online courses, or apps to learn new coping skills.

Exposure Exercises: Gradually facing fears in a controlled, self-directed manner.

Unquote

Talking to a friend (not for the first time) about our respective fraught relationships with our mothers has made me recall a story told back in the 90s by someone about her and her siblings' relationship with their mother, and one of the ways they diluted the impact over the years.

    I'm writing this blog only as a layperson, of course, just re-telling something I've heard from someone about a technique that had worked for her and her siblings. Nowhere near recommending psychological techniques like CBT, as I'm totally unqualified.

    Let's call the person Lee Meilan.

Start of her story (in my words from what she'd told me):

    There are six of us children.  If the servant came to summon any of us to our mother's room, we'd first go and fetch the cane, without even knowing what she wanted to see us about.  Arriving at her door, we'd go down on our knees and shuffle over to her (seated in her armchair), with the cane raised above our head in both hands.  Such was our relationship with our mother.

    We never found out why she treated us like this.  Perhaps she was frustrated with her position:  being the second wife, she had no power in the household, so she took it out on us.

    My siblings have all had some form of therapy -- that is how deeply affected by our earlier days we had been.

    We'd have an annual get-together, taking turns to go to the country of whichever one of us was living in.  Our mother would come along.  We'd wait until she'd gone to bed, then gather in one room and talk about our treatment at the hands of our mother, crying as we recalled the trauma.

    Each year, we'd go through the same routine, but the feelings evoked would change with the repetitive recollection.  The same stories that had made us cry in the earlier tellings would start to make us laugh in later accounts, e.g., "Do you remember you got caned so hard on one occasion you couldn't sit down for days?" would make us cry for a few years, reducing in the emotional intensity with each year, then switch to making us laugh about it.

    After we'd got round to being able to laugh about those stories, we then invited our mother to those sessions, and were actually able to address her directly, "Do you remember you caned me so hard on one occasion I couldn't sit down for days?" -- and laugh.

End of her story (in my words)

    I can offer an explanation (as a layperson) for Lee Meilan's mother harbouring so much anger towards her children.

    Someone (let's call her Wang Donglian) told me that her mother got married off to her father during the Japanese Occupation because the grandparents were worried about her being raped by the Japanese soldiers.  They thought that the Japanese soldiers might think twice if she had a husband to protect her.  That husband turned out to be an irresponsible husband, as well as an irresponsible father to their children.

    Wang Donglian's mother never forgave her own parents for ruining her life, and took it out on her children because they bore the husband's surname.  The mother, surnamed Zhuang, once said (when they tried to protect her financial interests against one of her predatory brothers), "This is a Zhuang family matter, nothing to do with you Wang family."

    Wang Donglian said, "So, my own mother was drawing a clear line between us and her side of the family, even though half of our genes are from her.  Rejection can't get any stronger."

    Maybe Lee Meilan's mother felt the same way towards her children:  they reminded her of their father / her husband, who had perhaps not treated her well as a second wife, so she took out her frustrations on the children.

PS:  I've just realised that not all readers would know about the traditional Chinese practice of a man taking on more than one wife.  The main reason was usually that the first wife was unable to bear him any male children (for carrying on the family name/line), but it didn't always have to be this reason -- the man could just fancy a change of diet.  The first wife would retain all the power of running the household, and any children produced by the second (or even third) wife would also defer to her as if they were her children.  This would often make the second wife feel helpless, authority-wise.