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Hitchhiker’s guide to the Chinese Galaxy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4750 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 161 of 230 18 March 2015 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Unit Completion Entry 59
Unit 9 Lesson 4 Basic Spoken Chinese 3.16.2015 Edited by outcast on 02 April 2015 at 3:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4750 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 162 of 230 20 March 2015 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
That is great info. I won't listen to adult sources for another 2 months or so, I probably could now (even if I understood next to nothing), but I still want to practice with children's material exclusively, where I am making small but steady progress. Thank you and in a few weeks I will check them out! - - - - Unit Completion Entry 60 Cycle Two (Lessons 7-26) Book 2 Lesson 24 New Practical Chinese Reader 3.20.2015 Edited by outcast on 02 April 2015 at 3:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4750 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 163 of 230 22 March 2015 at 4:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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糟糕！有的時後漢語很難學！我的口語水平很 不好，我不滿意。
可是我喜歡這個非常好玩兒的語言。了不起！ 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4750 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 164 of 230 22 March 2015 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Right now I'm being reminded of some of the emotions I felt while learning German, my first auto-didact language. One week I would feel like I was making progress and that it would be a matter of weeks before I could have conversations, only to feel the very next week that my progress was terrible and that I was never going to make it and should give up.
Last week I felt really good about my Mandarin progress, this week I am not satisfied at all. Back with German I struggled mightily with those emotional extremes, now I am seasoned and know that I need to be cautious during the highs, and pat myself in the back for the progress I have made during the lows. I have been studying VERY hard, and pretty much full time for the last 4 months though, and I do feel some burn-out kicking in. I will probably take a week off, or at least very light study, the first week of May. Before that I would like to have finished up to lesson 30 in NPCR, and into Unit 12 of Intermediate Spoken Chinese. Right now my biggest frustration with spoken output is I struggle mightily in organizing the elements of a sentence I want to say. I know the grammar fine, it is the syntax that stumps me. I am not trying to translate, so many times I have no template at all in my head. I need massive input both oral and written to remedy this, which is why I'm glad I put all that sacrifice in learning characters. It should start paying off shortly (next 2-4 months). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4967 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 165 of 230 23 March 2015 at 9:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I used to feel bad about this variability and also got over it, outcast. Some days your bran is simply more attentive, the others you have trouble having focus, but it doesn't mean your progress is gone.
I only disagree slightly regarding the ways to make progress sticks. I think output practice plays a great role into learning to form phrases naturally. Just input won't help, because when it comes to speaking you have too little time to remember what word order would be the most natural. That's why writing practice comes in handy. You allow your brain to get used to the new word order through slow and detailed sessions. You learn to parse information the way they do in their target language. Chinese, for example, is so intensively left-branching, also the time adverbial terms also comes first, that you need to get used to mentioning the time where things happened first before telling the rest. I have a better grasp of syntax in the languages at which I write more. I did have lots of input in Chinese the past two years, since I started using native materials, but I only started to get used to applying the Chinese word order after doing some practice at italki. So far it was only dormant knowledge that didn't come up the time I attempted to talk or text-chat, for example. Having the repertoire brought up by massive input helps to think of what sounds right or not, but I see real progress through the explicit slow intensive practice of attempting to write texts and dialogues in the target language and sound natural. Besides, correctors tend to pay close attention to word order, because it tends to sound unnatural, so you get a lot of quality corrections at this field. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4750 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 166 of 230 24 March 2015 at 2:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree with your assessment, and so actually there is no real disagreement. Where I slightly differ is that in my particular learning style, I prefer some extra input time before output.
The simple reason is that when I finally do write and speak on a large scale, my mind will be better "pre-conditioned" to corrections, in other words, I will have a decent enough grasp of grammar, vocab, and syntax from actual studying and input, that any corrections made by others are more likely to make sense to me (I hate to be corrected and not understand the structure of the correction, I just can't "accept it" readily). So it really comes down to that, a personal conscious choice to delay this process somewhat to favor my "language feeling" to develop a little, than anything else. All else being equal, I would write from day ONE. But it just would take so much time that at the very beginning I find it counter-productive. I totally agree about writing, my German and French improved drastically when I finally was writing semi-regularly to my new friends through e-mail, or in chats. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4967 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 167 of 230 24 March 2015 at 8:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well if I understood you well, you've already been having this input and now it may be time to have some output, too. I'm not advocating 'Speak from day one' either, that's not what I do. I just realized traning output helps me understand syntax as well as memorize the words I will actually need the most for conversing. The more I keep doing input, the more I am exposed to less and less words, and output may work effectively for remembering the ones I've already seen so often at previous textbooks but still haven't brought up to an active level. And this when I'm already sick of textbook for beginners.
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| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4750 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 168 of 230 26 March 2015 at 5:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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Unit Completion Entry 61
Cycle Two (Lessons 7-26) Book 2 Lesson 25 New Practical Chinese Reader 3.25.2015 Edited by outcast on 02 April 2015 at 3:52am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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