Language tech: Chinese Social Networking Services

Get a Life (in Chinese): Using SNS's to Study Chinese

Ben Caesar examines how social networking service websites can be used for Chinese language study.  Ben works as a web developer for the White Rose East Asia Centre and writes on Chinese study technology for the Association for Speakers of Chinese as a Second Language (ASCSL).

One of the most pleasurable ways of using a language lies in socialising and making friends with native speakers. Learning more and more about people through increasingly effective communication is a strong driver of continued study. Unfortunately, unless you're in a Chinese-speaking environment, and even if you are but are having trouble connecting through shyness, overwork or another of life's maladies, you might not have easy access to such a social group. So let's look at a simple on-line solution to this - the SNS and making language study pleasurable through socialising (not to be confused with socialism).

When I arrived in Taiwan in 2004, I was penniless, lonely and my Chinese was atrocious. One idle evening, while munching on a night-market takeaway and surfing the net, I came across the popular Yahoo! Taiwan Jiaoyou website; a personals site that, with its blogging and network-building features, had a great deal in common with today's Facebook. Every registrant gets a profile, with the obligatory mailbox, blogging areas and various ways of building friendships from personal messages to sending virtual gifts and the like; all standard fare now in the Facebook generation. Figuring out how the system worked, how to apply for an account (I had to register by mobile phone SMS), then writing about myself, reading other peoples' profiles and diaries, and then writing and responding to letters - all of this over time impacted greatly on my Chinese reading and writing. Not only that, but I became more aware of what was important in 20-something Taiwanese peoples' lives. It helped that most of the people who I interacted with had no interest in studying English and would even correct my Chinese.

This month, I'm recommending you have a crack at joining a Chinese SNS. SNS stands for Social Networking Service and is most likely familiar to us all already through Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Live and the like. Just in case you aren't aware of these and what an SNS is - what they all have in common is that you can register for a profile, which you can customise and add your personal info to (for example, basic details about yourself, photos, videos, an update on your life, installable applications showcasing things that you like and so on), and then you can also connect yourself (after mutual agreement) with other peoples' profiles held in the SNS system and through this network of changing profiles, be mutually updated on each other in a kind of pseudo-social ether.

One of the main reasons to join a specific SNS is simply that if most of your friends are already on one rather than the other, you're more likely to join the former. With investment of time and effort into a profile, people are then even more likely to stick with one SNS over another as their main focus. However, as a student of the Chinese language, with a Chinese-based SNS, you will likely not be under the same sway of such forces. Unless you already have a lot of Chinese friends already associated with one site or another, if the site is free and your first intention is to practice language rather than enhance your social life and upload your photo collection, there's less investment of time and effort - a less popular site may be of more language value than the most popular one in terms of the features it provides and how much people use it to communicate. A reasonably popular one with interesting features is likely preferable to the most popular one for this purpose.

Unlike in North America and North Western Europe, SNS's have been slow to grow in the Chinese market, with Instant Messaging being much more highly-favoured in comparison. QQ or TenCent, the second most popular website in China (the search engine Baidu holds the top spot) is rather more of a portal site which grew out of instant messaging and lacks the SNS structure. For the language student seeking a social way of learning language, SNS's provide a great deal of structure and interactivity that supports interesting language-learning. Instant messaging is less useful in this regard, as it lacks much of the context concerning individuals that an SNS would provide. Further, the typical language used in IM is said to be a sub-language unto itself, in the same way that English-based mobile phone messaging is.

Which SNS? Try a few! These days, Jiaoyou is still worth looking at. Although Yahoo, as with many of their services, shifted from an entirely free model to a subscription-based one, registering and basic SNS is free. Of interest on the mainland are 51.com and the increasingly popular XiaoNei - both come highly recommended by friends and have pleasing Facebook-like interfaces. While not coming close to 51.com and XiaoNei's in terms of popularity, Zhanzuo and 5460 are two further social-networking sites with worth considering. Zhanzuo has some unusual anonymous communication concepts allowing you to send a virtual message in a bottle to land on a stranger's beach. 5460 is a site that is looking beyond its borders, allowing the registration of foreign universities and schools. At the end of the day, you should try a few and see. As with Facebook, with most of these you would register as an ex- or current student of a university or institution in China or Taiwan. When you register, I suggest using Firefox with the Chinese Pera-kun add-on (see previous article), or some other definition pop-up tool to help you if some of the terms and forms used are unfamiliar.

After having said all this about Chinese SNS's, what about the still-growing behemoth Facebook? It is fairly popular in Taiwan and is certainly gaining ground across East Asia. However, while potentially useful for language exchange, its popularity in China and Taiwan is mainly with Chinese-speakers doing exactly the same as I'm suggesting you try here and looking to learn English through an English SNS; Facebook is simply not popular enough and isn't targeted enough at a Chinese audience for it to be the SNS norm for native Chinese speakers looking to communicate with friends in Chinese. However, seeing as many of us will be using FB anyway, switch it to Chinese language by scrolling to the footer of any page and looking for the language switcher (it will probably say something like 'English (UK)'). Select Chinese as your interface language and that can help introduce you gently to the kind of terminology you'll be seeing in most SNS's.

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Written by Ben Caesar Wednesday, 10 December 2008 12:14