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We’ve now seen two major deaths in Dream of the Red Chamber, and we’re not even a fourth of the way into the novel.

Qin Keqing’s death was the first, of course. And her demise was memorable, to say the least. In fact, scenes involving her death and funeral take up the better part of two chapters. This is probably the most notable translation post on the subject:

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If you haven’t read it yet, you really need to read my translation post yesterday, where we saw Qin Zhong battle against the bureaucracy of the underworld:

Now, if you’re familiar with the great Chinese classic novels, you know that it wasn’t unusual for the afterlife to be described as a complex government system that mirrored the system of the Chinese empire. In fact, Journey to the West (西遊記) probably exemplifies this fact better than any other Chinese novel.

But this passage in Dream of the Red Chamber is simply impossible to put down. In fact, I was almost late to my day job the other day because I was so wrapped up in translating that passage.

Anyway, here are a few scattered thoughts that have come to my mind as I’ve been reflecting on this:

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Everybody wants to put the blame on emotions. Remember that Jia Baoyu is told by the servant Li Gui to stop crying, and is warned that his friend Qin Zhong would somehow become weaker if Jia Baoyu expressed his emotions.

This is bizarre logic, of course, and was likely as strange to readers back in the late 18th century as it is today. Jia Baoyu’s emotional expression has absolutely nothing to do with Qin Zhong’s physical state. And yet Jia Baoyu forces himself to suppress his sobs and keep a straight face as he constantly tells his dying friend that he is here.

Of course, if we were forced at gunpoint (or by an overzealous literature teacher) to find some cause for Qin Zhong’s terminal illness, we’d probably blame Qin Zhong himself. After all, he’s the one who was shamelessly running around with the young nun Zhineng. But, on the other hand, it’s likely that his sickness is just one of those things that happens.

But putting the blame on Jia Baoyu for expressing any emotion just feels harsh and cruel.

The underworld judge is scared of Jia Baoyu. There really isn’t much of a logical reason given for the judge’s sudden reaction upon hearing the name Jia Baoyu:

那判官聽了，先就唬的慌張起來，忙喝罵那些小鬼道：「我說你們放了他回去走走罷，你們不依我的話；如今鬧的請出個運旺時盛的人來了，怎麼好？」眾鬼見都判如此，也都忙了手腳，一面又抱怨道：「你老人家先是那麼雷霆火炮，原來見不得『寶玉』二字！依我們想來：他是陽間，我們是陰間，怕他亦無益。」那都判越發著急，吆喝起來。

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When the presiding judge heard this, he was struck with a sense of panic. He began to berate the lesser ghosts, saying, “I told you to let him go back for a while, but you wouldn’t listen to me! Now you’ve stirred things up until you’ve summoned a person in the midst of prosperity and fortune. What are we going to do?”

When the ghosts saw the judge in this state, they were also confused. At the same time, however, they complained among themselves. “Sir, you were all thunder and lightning just now,” they said, “and it turns out that you can’t even bear the thought of the name ‘Baoyu!’ As we see it, he belongs to the world of the living, and we belong to the world of the dead. What do we have to fear from him?”

This only made the chief judge more frantic, and he began to shout even louder.

As I noted yesterday, David Hawkes seems to think that this is because of Jia Baoyu’s jade, or because of some talisman that he had or something like this.

However, I side with the person who left a comment on yesterday’s post speculating that the demonic judge was scared of the power of Jia Baoyu’s emotion. In other words, it’s possible that the pure emotional sentiment that Jia Baoyu felt is strong enough to cause the demons of the underworld to shake and tremble.

This feels almost Biblical in a way.

This passage is simply awesome. My final thought for now is to simply geek out over how fantastically written the underworld scene really is.

Cao Xueqin’s writing is incredible deliberate and careful. Jia Baoyu is “暢快” (happy) that his father is too preoccupied to worry about whether he’s studying or not. However, the fact that his best friend is seriously ill means that he can’t actually be “快樂” (happy).

This sort of distinction between two very similar adjectives will drive you nuts if you’re trying to translate this book into another language. However, if you have an appreciation for the beauty of the Chinese language, you’ll slowly realize that the writing is just pure genius.

And the fact that the mere mention of Jia Baoyu is enough to cause even the leaders of hell to turn around and denounce everything they were just saying is even better. I guess it goes to show that anything really is possible in China.

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As usual, the aiuthor’s commentary in chapter 16 of Dream of the Red Chamber is pretty subtle. Cao Xueqin doesn’t usually come out and say what he thinks about the way his characters are acting. Instead, he will hint at or allude to underlying problems that only become apparently when you think carefully.

For example, there’s this business of the leading men in the Jia family paying no attention to their responsibilities as they construct the massive garden.

Jia Zheng is a pretty good example of this:

賈政不慣於俗務，只憑賈赦、賈珍、賈璉、賴大、賴升、林之孝、吳新登、詹光、程日興等幾人安插擺佈。

Jia Zheng wasn’t accustomed to handling worldly affairs. And so he left everything to Jia She, Jia Zhen, Jia Lian, Lai Da, Lai Sheng, Lin Zhixiao, Wu Xindeng, Zhan Guang, Cheng Rixing, and a few others, letting them handle things as they saw fit.

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I’ve written over and over again about how important the Chinese word 情 is in Dream of the Red Chamber.

It’s a difficult word to translate, and the problem is that it comes up all the time. Most English translations render 情 as something like “passion” or “romance.”

While there certainly is passion and romance in the concept of 情, it seems that its meaning in the book is actually a lot more broad than that. And, as a result, it is incorrect to think of Dream of the Red Chamber as simply a book about a playboy who likes to spend his time with beautiful women.

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My latest YouTube creation is a brief overview of the wonderful world of Chinese calligraphy, with an emphasis on the famous “cursive style” (草書) that I’ve always found intimidating.

Chinese calligraphy is really an uniquely formidable art form to dive into, particularly if you are a foreigner. The rules and conventions of artistic rendering of Chinese characters have been laid down over centuries of practice and tradition. What’s worse, as I explain in the video, is that the only real way to get a feel for what is powerful and what is ordinary is to spend time writing it yourself.

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Now, there aren’t really a ton of references to the art of actually composing calligraphy in Dream of the Red Chamber. The closest we’ve seen in the opening chapters is probably this segment from chapter 8:

一面說，一面來至自己臥室，只見筆墨在案。晴雯先接出來，笑道：「好啊，叫我研了墨，早起高興，只寫了三個字，扔下筆就走了，哄我等了這一天。快來給我寫完了這些墨才算呢！」寶玉方想起早起的事來，因笑道：「我寫的那三個字在那裡呢？」晴雯笑道：「這個人可醉了。你頭裡過那府裡去，囑咐我貼在門斗兒上的。我恐怕別人貼壞了，親自爬高上梯，貼了半天，這會子還凍的手僵著呢！」寶玉笑道：「我忘了你手冷，我替你握著。」便伸手拉著晴雯的手，同看門斗上新寫的三個字。

一時，黛玉來了。寶玉笑道：「好妹妹，你別撒謊，你看這三個字，那一個好？」黛玉仰頭看見是「絳芸軒」三字，笑道：「個個都好。怎麼寫的這樣好了！明兒也替我寫個匾。」寶玉笑道：「你又哄我了。」

As Jia Baoyu said this, he went to his bedroom where he saw writing brushes and ink laid out on his desk.

Qingwen greeted him as soon as he walked in. “Okay,” she said with a smile, “you had me prepare the ink this morning, you eagerly wrote three characters, and then you tossed the brush aside and left. I’ve been waiting for you this entire day! You’d better use up every drop of this ink now!”

Only then did Baoyu remember what he had done that morning. “Where are those three chracters I wrote?” he asked with a smile.

“You must be drunk!” replied Qingwen, still smiling. “Before you went to the Ningguo Mansion you ordered me to paste them on the door frame. I was afraid that another person would do it wrong, and so I went up the ladder myself and spent a lot of time sticking it up. My hands are still stiff from the cold!”

“I forgot your hands were cold,” said Baoyu with a smile. “Let me warm them for you.”

He reached out and took Qingwen’s hands in his, and they then looked up together at the three newly written characters on top of the frame of the door.

Daiyu arrived before long. “Dear Daiyu,” said Baoyu to her, “please don’t make fun of me. Please tell me which one of those three characters you like the best.”

Daiyu looked up and saw the characters. They said “Crimson Rue Studio.”

“They’re all excellent!” she said with a smile. “How is your calligraphy so good? You really should write a plaque like that for me one day.”

“You’re flattering me again,” said Baoyu with a smile.

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Now, as you can clearly see in the passage above, there’s not a whole lot of discussion here about what Jia Baoyu’s calligraphy looks like, or why in the world his rendition of “絳芸軒” looked so nice.

But the fascinating thing here is that the calligraphy itself was designed and used to be an integral part of daily life. In other words, Jia Baoyu wasn’t creating a piece of writing in the hopes of sticking it behind glass in a museum one day. Calligraphy seems to have been a basic and fundamental part of everyday life for him, something that he would interact with on an almost casual basis.

I’m not convinced that this is an accurate reflection of the role calligraphy played in even upper class Chinese daily life in the 18th century. However, I do think Cao Xueqin deliberately decided to have calligraphy, poetry, and the arts play such a fundamental role in the lives of his characters.

You really can’t separate those arts from the literature that is Dream of the Red Chamber. They go hand in hand.

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There are two really interesting things going on in yesterday’s translation post.

The first is the language that Jia Lian uses, which is very hard to explain without jumping somewhat deep into the Chinese text. For example, here are his first two sentences:

如今當今體貼萬人之心，世上至大莫如『孝』字，想來父母兒女之性，皆是一理，不在貴賤上分的。當今自為日夜侍奉太上皇、皇太后，尚不能略盡孝意，因見宮裡嬪妃才人等皆是入宮多年，拋離父母，豈有不思想之理？

The current Emperor takes into consideration the desires of every person. He considers that the greatest virtue in the world is filial piety, because the bond between parent and child is the same for all, regardless of rank or status. After attending day and night on the Emperor Emeritus and Empress Dowager, the Emperor feels that he cannot come close to fully expressing his filial devotion. Observing that the imperial concubines and court ladies have spent many years in the palace, and that they are all cut off from their parents, how could he not think that they long for home?

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There’s a lot here that is difficult to translate. The use of formal and archaic phrases such as 當今 and 豈 and so forth give his statement a real formal touch, almost like he memorized this speech beforehand.

It’s actually quite similar to how Jia Yucun spoke way back in chapter 2, including these crazy metaphysical excursions like this one:

Not all male characters in Dream of the Red Chamber speak like they are reciting imperial edicts. However, this sort of thing happens periodically in this book, and it’s interesting to point it out.

But the most interesting thing about Jia Lian’s speech is his focus on the women of the imperial family.

Look at this part, for example:

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因此，二位老聖人又下諭旨說：椒房眷屬入宮，未免有關國體儀制，母女尚未能愜懷。

Therefore, the two elder leaders issued an imperial decree, stating that the relatives of palace concubines entering the palace might be at odds with state protocol, and that the reunion between mother and daughter might not be wholly satisfying.

The unusual and somewhat bizarre part here is the focus on the relationship between mother and daughter (母女). Why would this be so important? Why not emphasize that the fathers of the imperial concubines miss their daughters so much?

And, of course, there is another reference to 情, or emotion:

庶可盡骨肉私情，共享天倫之樂事。

In this way, the private affections of flesh and blood might be fully satisfied, and there might fully be the joy of a family reunion.

In other words, the whole purpose of this imperial edict is to satisfy the emotional longing that mothers and daughters have for each other.

It seems to run contrary to everything one would expect from a political edict in imperial China. And that alone is simply fascinating.

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Yesterday’s brief passage was interesting for a number of reasons. In my opinion, however, the most interesting part is the complex interplay between Wang Xifeng and her trusted maid Ping’er.

Now, to understand the relationship between these two, we really have to go back. In particular, we need to go back to this passage in the middle of chapter 6, which is where Ping’er is first introduced:

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It’s pretty easy to read Dream of the Red Chamber and conclude that Wang Xifeng is actually an awful person. The truth, however, is far more complex.

We’re still in the early chapters of Dream of the Red Chamber, and the truth is that most of the focus of the novel has been on establishing the complex character that is Wang Xifeng. In fact, if you look through the archive of translation posts on this blog, you’ll notice that Wang Xifeng’s name comes up in the titles more frequently than any other character.

If you recall, Wang Xifeng’s somewhat deceptive actions led directly to the death of the licentious minor character Jia Rui:

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Even though I’ve already read Dream of the Red Chamber a few times, there are still things that surprise me.

The fascinating thing about this novel is the way that it references itself. It must have taken Cao Xueqin years to weave this story together. And we saw a great example of its self-referential nature yesterday.

Lin Daiyu was busy handing out gifts to the others in the family after returning from her long journey. And Jia Baoyu felt obliged to do something about it:

寶玉又將北靜王所贈蕶苓香串，珍重取出來，轉送黛玉。黛玉說：「什麼臭男人拿過的，我不要這東西！」遂擲還不取。寶玉只得收回，暫且無話。

Baoyu carefully took out the fragrant prayer bead bracelet that the Prince of Beijing had given to him, and offered it to Daiyu.

“Why would I want something that a stinking man has handled?” asked Daiyu. “I don’t want this!” And she gave it back and refused to take it.

Baoyu had no choice but to take it back. And nothing more was said for the time being.

Now, the interesting thing here isn’t what the “fragrant prayer bead bracelet” (蕶苓香串) means or symbolizes. Rather, the interesting thing here is Lin Daiyu’s somewhat rude refusal, which should strike you as odd.

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Yesterday’s brief translation post was yet another example of how Jia Baoyu acts differently than everybody around him:

賈母等如何謝恩，如何回家，親友如何來慶賀，寧榮兩府近日如何熱鬧，眾人如何得意，獨他一個皆視有如無，毫不介意。因此，眾人嘲他越發呆了。

Baoyu was completely uninterested in the way that Grandmother Jia and the others gave thanks at court, how they returned home, how excited and busy the two mansions had been lately, and how happy everybody was. He saw it as nothing of value, and felt completely indifferent to it. And this only led to the others to make fun of him for seeming mentally checked out all the time.

Now, the thing to notice here is that Jia Baoyu seems to have the uncanny ability to see the way things really are, rather than reacting to the way things appear to be on the surface. And that’s pretty impressive, especially for a character that is still quite young.

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I’ve had the unique opportunity in my life to seriously study a foreign language at the Foreign Service Institute as part of my career.

As much fun as it was to get paid to study a language, the truth is that the process was pretty frustrating.

The biggest problem with the bureaucratic approach to language learning is that it’s extremely bureaucratic. You’re told that you have a certain amount of time to learn the language, and you wind up going through a preconstructed language program designed to get you from zero to an artifically designated level of “fluency” within that time.

There’s not much room for curiosity or tangents or actually diving into something. Instead, it’s all about memorizing this list of words, practicing that grammatical structure, and hoping and praying that your final language test won’t ask you to do anything you can’t actually do yet.

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But the biggest problem with the Foreign Service Institute approach to language training is that it’s really only designed to get you a few miles down the road to fluency. And, well, you’re not going to really get to the place you want to go (or the place you should want to go) without putting in some hard work yourself.

Foreign language fluency is important to diplomacy precisely because language serves as a window to the soul. As former Ambassador Chas Freeman put it in his excellent book The Diplomat’s Dictionary:

The problem, of course, is that you’re not going to know “something of the soul” of your interlocuter because you toughed it out for all 24 weeks of your FSI Spanish course.

The kind of communication that effective diplomacy requires is more than you can possibly get with your 2/2 or 3/3 score in the language you were assigned to learn. No - the kind of communication we’re talking about requires years of sustained effort and practice, and requires a level of intercultural competence that is becoming increasingly rare these days.

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Now, Ambassador Freeman comes from an older school of diplomatic thinking. As nice as these thoughts are, I really do have a hard time fully agreeing with them:

However, I also know that learning and studying things of deep cultural significance and importance will really open your eyes to philosophic and intellectual worlds that you never knew existed.

Perhaps this is why I continue spending time and effort on Dream of the Red Chamber. It’s a great book, sure. But, even more than that, it’s an excellent way to dive deep into the real world of Chinese culture and thought.

I might not be an official diplomat anymore. However, I would argue that projects like this are just as important to true cross-cultural communication and understanding as delivering official démarches and white papers to the host country’s foreign ministry.

And, besides, it’s a lot more fun to read a book than to read stilted diplomatic correspondance.

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I know it’s a little bit rude and blunt, but sometimes I’ve just got to say what I’ve got to say. The famous David Hawkes translation The Story of the Stone really sucks.

It’s not awful, of course. There are parts that are brilliant, and parts that are at least bearable. But sections like the one we’ve been reading in chapter 16 require care and sensitivity to translate correctly. And, frankly, I don’t think David Hawkes did a very good job.

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Poor Qin Zhong.

It’s obvious that fate is going to catch up with him. And there’s simply no way to avoid spoiling his fate. It’s part of the chapter heading, after all:

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I didn’t start using Anki until sometime in summer 2015. At the time, I remember feeling embarrassed that I had never known about that software, and thought a lot about how useful it was and how nice it would have been to know more about it earlier in my language learning journey.

I’ve learned a lot since then.

I’m slowly trying to compile everything I’ve learned about effectively learning Anki together in a series of videos and posts. This is the latest:

Now, there are a few general principles that you should understand if you’re planning on using Anki to learn any language - or, really, anything at all.

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The first one, the one that trips everybody up, is that you need to make your own personal cards.

Almost everybody I’ve seen in the Anki community is obsessed with downloading the perfect deck. The problem, though, is that it just doesn’t work that way.

Anki is not really a learning system. What I mean by that is that the software is not really designed for you to come in with no foreknowledge and somehow magically learn something by looking at a couple of flash cards.

Rather, Anki is software that is meant to complement your learning. Ideally, you want to learn something first, master it to the extent that you understand it, and only then make Anki cards to solidify your learning.

If you try to learn something through flash cards alone, you’ll find yourself frustrated with the learning process. Either your studies will take too long, or you’ll wind up skipping through words and sentences, which, obviously, is even less helpful.

It’s much better to go slowly and thoroughly than to try to impress people by dumping a bunch of stuff in your deck at once.

That leads directly to the second principle, which is that your cards need to be simple.

Basically, you want every single card to ask you to accomplish a single task. In other words, sample sentence cards you create should only have a single word that you are testing yourself on, or a single grammatical principle that you are trying to solidify in your mind.

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If you don’t understand the grammatical principle or the word at all, you really shouldn’t make an Anki card. You should spend time learning it and fully understanding it first before you even think about making an Anki card.

The idea behind Anki is that you take the knowledge that you’ve already gained and solidify it in your mind by reviewing it in a systematic fashion. Repetition through the algorithm allows you to take relatively shallow knowledge and slowly put it into your long term memory. And, of course, if you wind up forgetting the card, the algorithm will put it back in the mix, giving you the chance to learn it again.

Of course, that leads us to the third principle: Anki really has no ending.

I ran into this tweet the other day:

I understand the sentiment, I suppose - but the truth is that there’s no reason that Anki should ever “end.” Instead, your list of cards and interests should naturally expand as you broaden your reading to new topics and new genres.

Anyway, there are a few of my scattered thoughts on how Anki actually works. And, honestly, the program is a lot more fun if you cut out the preconstructed decks, if you make your cards simple, and if you stop dumping random stuff in for no apparent reason.

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One of the most fascinating aspects of Dream of the Red Chamber is how lifelike the characters are.

I should note that they’re not lifelike because they are described as if they were real people. Rather, they are lifelike because they have complex motivations and personalities.

The old adage about this book, repeated by numerous scholars over the centuries, is that there are really no heroes or villains. The protagonist, Jia Baoyu, is so overcome with his emotions and feelings that he’s honestly just as sexually profligate as his older male relatives. Lin Daiyu, the main female love interest of the novel, flies into rages from time to time. Meanwhile, Wang Xifeng, who people tend to think of as the villain, seems more like a victim of the male dominated society she lives in than an evil person.

But the other fascinating thing here is the motivation. And it’s not entirely clear to me whether Wang Xifeng is actually motivated by money, or if what she really cares about is prestige and power.

This is the passage that kind of confuses me:

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Normally I would want to wait to talk about something like this until we’ve finished a basic translation of Dream of the Red Chamber and can start getting into the commentaries. However, yesterday’s translation passage about Qin Zhong and Zhineng is simply too deep to ignore.

It’s deep because it starts to get at the philosophy that motivates Jia Baoyu. And to really understand that, we need to at least take a peek at some of the famous Zhiyanzhai commentary.

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For something a little bit different, I’ve decided to write a few things to expand on my most recent video.

You can watch the video here:

Now, what I didn’t mention here is that I started to learn a second foreign language while I was in Germany.

We met with a lot of people from mainland China, the vast majority of whom were foreign students at local universities. By “a lot,” I’m talking in terms of hundreds.

I actually counted once, and realized that my companion and I got to know at least 200 different Chinese students during the 12 weeks I was in Stuttgart at the end of my mission. I’ll let you figure out how many people I was meeting with a day.

Anyway, for obvious reasons, I decided to start learning Chinese while serving as a missionary in Germany. Of course, I didn’t exactly have the time or money to take actual language lessons. And so I kind of winged it to see where things would take me.

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I spent about 10 Euros on a Chinese textbook that was written in German. It was pretty basic and wasn’t all that useful without audio tracks. However, it at least got me to understand some of the most basic grammatical principles.

A guy I knew in Augsburg gave me a huge Chinese-German dictionary, which also helped quite a bit. We had copies of the Book of Mormon in something like 60 different languages in our apartment, and so I started messing around with a simplified Chinese copy, seeing if I could figure out what a few words meant and trying to piece things together.

There was an older lady from Taiwan I knew in one of the congregations I served in. She had written up a very basic list of Chinese church vocabulary words that she gave to the missionaries, largely because we were meeting with so many Chinese students. I was also able to use that to gather some really basic vocabulary.

And then there were the native speakers that I knew pretty well, some of whom were members of the church. I’d ask them for help from time to time. That’s how I learned basic Chinese pronunciation, the tonal sandhi rules, and a few other basic odds and ends.

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All of this was somewhat helpful, though it wasn’t magic. In fact, I wound up taking Chinese 101 in university after I returned and studied the language the proper way.

While it wasn’t perfect, there were a few things I learned that can help you if you’re trying to learn a language on your own:

• Always find a native speaker to help. This was the most powerful tool I was able to use. If somebody is willing to listen to your feeble attempts to speak their language, you’ve really got it made. And you get bonus points if they actually correct what you say and don’t just try to make you feel good.

• There’s always something you can do. If something doesn’t make sense, there’s usually a way you can at least try to figure it out. It was a lot harder in the days of paper dictionaries, of course. These days, you can always “cheat” and ask an AI chatbot for help when you encounter one of those phrases or sentences that just doesn’t make sense.

• You can be immersed even if you’re not in the country. I was lucky in that there were so many foreign students from China that I could listen to their conversations pretty much anytime we were near the university campus. If you can get yourself into a position like that, your language skills will improve immensely. If you can’t, of course, you can always fake it, usually by watching television shows.

Anyway, there are a few pointers that might help you out. More to come in the future.

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If you’ve been paying attention to the 400 or so posts I’ve created so far, you’ve probably come to the same conclusion that I’ve come to. Dream of the Red Chamber really is a “romantic” novel at heart.

But there’s a problem, of course. This novel was originally drafted sometime in the middle of the 18th century, long before the true explosion of the Romantic literary movement in Europe.

And, when you start really digging in, you’ll realize that Dream of the Red Chamber has a different approach to Romanticism entirely. Rather than a reaction to cold rationality in the post-Enlightenment sense, the emphasis on 情 (emotion) in this book seems to be a reaction to the general state of emotional repression in the society Jia Baoyu grew up in.

In other words, there’s a lot of really interesting philosophic stuff going on here. And we really need to pay attention to it.

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When I was first planning out this publication, I thought to myself that I might create and sell Anki decks made up of passages from Dream of the Red Chamber.

In my defense, I know that other language focused content creators have done similar things in the past. Some offer really good Anki decks that feature native speaker audio. Others offer decks that are a bit less helpful - and I know this because I’ve spent more money than I care to admit on products that don’t help out all that much.

However, the truth is that you really shouldn’t buy somebody else’s deck, no matter how good it seems.

The truth, as uncomfortable as it may be, is that there’s no real shortcut to learning a language. You’ve got to put in the time and effort to learn it yourself, and programs like Anki are really designed to reinforce things you have already learned, not to teach you something new.

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I’ve tried a few tricks here and there over the years, thinking that they would help me get a special edge on learning this language or that language.

For example, as I mentioned in a previous video, I once used the sub2srs program to automatically convert a number of television shows with subtitles into Anki cards.

That plan worked in the sense that the program chose the right audio clips and created presentable cards. I did find myself frustrated at first by all the cards that weren’t actually sentences, but I was able to delete those on my own.

However, what I learned is that I had absolutely no connection to the content, since I didn’t bother to watch the television shows beforehand. All I had were clips taken completely out of context from a show that sounded somewhat interesting, but that was utterly confusing.

You see, effective language learning requires at least some sort of context. And when you try to take the context out of language learning and turn it into a simple memorization problem, the whole thing loses its flavor.

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This is why you should stay away from downloading precreated Anki decks. The problem isn’t just that the decks are likely inaccurate. The real problem, rather, is that you didn’t go through the learning process required to actually create them.

You see, when you take the time to look up something you don’t know, or to focus for long enough to at least attempt to learn a difficult grammatical concept from a textbook, your brain has to work at actually making sense of the language.

When you strain your ears to figure out what somebody just said in your target language, your brain is working to try to understand just what is going on.

However, if everything is completely spoonfed for you, or if you just mine a ton of sentences without context and throw them into your deck, you’ll find the process boring and ultimately not very useful.

I have thousands of notes in my Anki deck that I honestly should clean out. It’s not a great position to be in, to be honest. I keep committing the sunk cost fallacy, convincing myself that the fact that I spent time copying a bunch of sentences from a grammar book a few years ago means that there’s got to be some value there somewhere.

Don’t be like me. Take your time, learn the language the right way, and keep your deck clean.

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It’s time, once again, to ask one of those pesky literary questions that we honestly do not have an answer for.

In yesterday’s translation post, we saw Wang Xifeng intervene to stop Jia Baoyu from riding horseback with the other men:

鳳姐因惦記著寶玉，怕他在郊外縱性，不服家人的話，賈政管不著，惟恐有閃失，因此，命小廝來喚他。

But Wang Xifeng was worried about Jia Baoyu. She was worried that he would do whatever he wanted if he was outside, that he wouldn’t listen to what he was told, and that Jia Zheng would be unable to control him. Since she was worried that something might go wrong, she had a young servant call him over.

But is Wang Xifeng really concerned about Jia Baoyu out of some sort of familial affection? Or is something else going on here?

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