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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 4739 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 33 of 230 20 April 2013 at 5:50pm | IP Logged |
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Unit Completion Entry 7
Unit 2 Lesson 3 Basic Spoken Chinese 4.20.2013 Edited by outcast on 20 April 2013 at 5:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4739 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 34 of 230 22 April 2013 at 8:41pm | IP Logged |
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For fun I decided to scrutinize a Chinese "article" for the first time today. I'm at
270 characters so I figured I'd check and see how this compares to later on knowing 500 or more characters. I chose an entertainment gossip article, since those (no disrespect to E-gossip junkies or writers), tend to use very "simplistic" vocabulary in all languages it seems... draw your own conclusions from that, lol. Funny aside how I found the article: on the yahoo Taiwan site I see a section with the characters 晚 ，間 ， 星 ... "night/late" "between" "star" ... I thought it was some actor award show and I pressed it. Well it was not exactly but it definitely is gossip and seems it roughly would translate into English as "evening entertainment" news (there was another character that I think means "news", I just haven't learned it). But it feels like a small triumph since for the first time I could use my "knowledge" to navigate if very haphazardly a Chinese-language website. As for the article itself well, I understood nothing of the article really. However, I did recognize a couple of words from all of it, example 一點 which was sort of cool. A couple of other things like 時期 I could at least formulate a POSSIBLE meaning (period of time ??), etc. I also learned something grammatically new just by scanning through it to recognize characters, for the first time outside my language course: I saw “從1998年到2000年” ... I recognized the character for "dao4" meaning "to", and just yesterday I learned "cong2" meaning "from". So upon seeing this it was immediately evident that Mandarin Chinese uses the same prepositions in this instance as English or Spanish does (though many categorize prepositions as verbs in Chinese). Small baby steps. Edited by outcast on 23 April 2013 at 3:44am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4739 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 35 of 230 24 April 2013 at 9:49pm | IP Logged |
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Unit Completion Entry 8
Unit 2 Lesson 4 Basic Spoken Chinese 4.24.2013 (Lesson was pretty straightforward but I did some review of the first two Units, and I also wasn't satisfied with my recall memory in some of the longer sentences of the Transformation Drills, so I did extra day of practice. I'm now satisfied so I have concluded the lesson and thus Unit 2... crazy, but I'm 20% through the basic course!!) Edited by outcast on 24 April 2013 at 9:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4739 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 36 of 230 25 April 2013 at 9:41pm | IP Logged |
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Special entry 4
Hanzi learned @ 4.25.2013 = 300 Note: BEAT DEADLINE BY ONE DAY (will use rest of today and tomorrow to review, add 10 new characters between both days to start new cycle... towards 400!) 201-300 地 别 別 (S / T) 甚 运 運 (S / T) 动 動 (S / T) 玉 到 会 會 (S / T) 吧 兴 興 (S / T) 半 分 钟 鐘 (S / T) 因 带 帶 (S / T) 片 来 來 (S / T) 说 說 (S / T) 夕 外 兑 语 語 (S / T) 开 開 (S / T) 刀 法 至 千 如 耳 行 车 車 (S / T) 取 公 司 馆 館 (S / T) 汉 漢 (S / T) 倒 前 目 要 从 從 (S / T) 身 村 出 用 办 辦 (S / T) 工 首 对 對 (S / T) 后 後 (S / T) 打 心 树 樹 (S / T) 床 牀 (S / T) 本 书 書 (S / T) 立 火 回 典 新 江 里 裡 (S / T) 啊 词 詞 (S / T) 止 卜 听 聽 (S / T) 勺 头 頭 (S / T) 尔 爾 (S / T) 自 土 士 Edited by outcast on 25 April 2013 at 10:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4739 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 37 of 230 25 April 2013 at 10:15pm | IP Logged |
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I have decided to make the next deadline to sunday May 5th. I mulled challenging a friday
3rd deadline, but decided against it. While I have the drive to push to 500, and I am riding that wave, I don't want to burn out. This pace has been working and the most important thing is not so much to cram 20-30 characters in one super day, but to not have a day when you learn NONE. The challenge is to learn new characters even in the days when you don't feel like it or you are challenged with time constraints. Those are the days that down the road pay off in getting you where you want to go quicker. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4739 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 38 of 230 26 April 2013 at 5:31pm | IP Logged |
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Weekly Progress Entry 6
4.26.2013 Finish Unit 2 a couple of days after I had thought, mainly because I decided to review the eight lessons over again, and get a little extra practice for Lesson 4 Unit 2's speech exercises. Again, the grammar is understandable and will not give me problems, except at the time of real time speech when inability to accurately use the grammar and vocabulary learned is a matter of recall memory and muscle speech failures. In other words, it is not the content but the infrastructure that fails you! To improve the "infrastructure" of speaking a language, the only recipe is tons of input, output, and time to sink in. The only place where you can somewhat take short-cuts in time is with grammar if you are really good at it, and vocabulary/characters if you are truly dedicated and apply yourself to learning them quicker. But the other stuff just is a matter of practicing. As seen above my 汉字 is rolling along. It is obvious I could go much quicker just by learning the characters and not bothering to write them. That's why I think learning how to write them was a good idea (for me): it "anchors" me down and doesn't let me get way too far ahead in the characters when my speech or vocabulary still isn't developed enough. After the first two units, I am mulling my first "twist" to my learning: I think I will start adding a few vocabulary words every day, that I myself choose. In other words, I'll look up in the dictionary words I feel I want to learn that day, and make a list of 5-7 vocab words, independent from my courses. It is well known that formal courses no matter how good NEVER satisfy anyone in the vocabulary they want to learn. While I like "Basic Spoken Chinese" overall, I feel that in a couple of their lessons they missed a chance to provide more useful basic vocabulary. I don't need to learn how to say "trade company" at this point in time (in fairness, that is the title of a fictitious company for a dialog, so perhaps that's why they just placed it in as vocab, in order for the learner not to wonder what that was if left out). But that just alerted me to the fact I think I can now start learning some of the basic vocab more independently. I know with Chinese this is a tricky proposition, so I will just stick to very basic concepts like colors and "meaning fixed" nouns of things. I will rely on word lists if I can find them to learn more abstract concepts like adjectives for mood or description, which may pose translation challenges since such subjective things like behavior and tastes depend a lot on the culture. I finally have some money coming in so I am planning to make a couple of purchases: the writing workbook for the Basic Written Chinese (some good practice material), and maybe the Living Language old version of Ultimate Mandarin, the one that is similar to the very old All the Way series. The reason for this is that I am very comfortable with the format of this series, since I used it for German, French, and Portuguese. HOWEVER, I would NEVER have started learning Chinese with All the Way/Ultimate courses: they are not good for raw beginners because they go too fast and as a result skimp or skip too many notes that language greenhorns must read and internalize. That is the big downside of that series, you just feel lost after a couple of lessons without additional material. The GOOD thing about the series is that as a "reference" source it is VERY good: precisely because it goes so fast through the grammar, it can cover many more points. So once you are somewhat comfortable with the language you are learning, the book that comes with the series becomes a very good source for grammar in the beginner and intermediate levels. I plan to use this series when I am done with Pimsleur Chinese, which I have not begun yet (plan to do so after Unit 5 of my current course). So, for next week it will be Unit 3. Next week begins a new month and my goals are to be into Unit 5 by the end of May, and to have reached 650 characters (both simplified and traditional). Right now I'm learning characters from two sources: Basic Written Chinese and the very famous Learning Chinese Characters by Matthews. When I'm done wit them I plan to fill-in with the HSK character lists levels 1-4, and then purchase the "Remembering the Hanzi" (I thinking of getting both traditional and simplified), Book 1 and 2, which Proudft uses. They will keep me busy for years to come. Also hats off to Flarioca for his link http://animation.archchinese.com/ That is one heck of a find and he deserves 10 votes for it. Till the next WPR on 3.5.2013! Edited by outcast on 26 April 2013 at 5:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4739 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 39 of 230 01 May 2013 at 4:52pm | IP Logged |
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Unit Completion Entry 9
Unit 3 Lesson 1 Basic Spoken Chinese 5.1.2013 (This took me a couple of days more than normal, specifically the spoken drills and exercises. I had a hectic week with more hours on my work schedule finally, which should now settle down into a predictable pattern I can work around, plus I have been doing tons of networking for German and French speaking partners, groups, etc. I am now putting a couple of extra hours in speaking Chinese. Thankfully the first lessons of this unit are fairly simple dealing with numbers, and I did study the vocabulary and grammar of the lessons, which one can do anywhere, so the spoken exercises where the ones I could not do since I need some peace and quiet at home. Have some today) Edited by outcast on 01 May 2013 at 4:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4739 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 40 of 230 04 May 2013 at 4:00pm | IP Logged |
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Weekly Progress Entry 7
3.5.2013 Hectic week... Had double the work hours PLUS was asked to go in on a day off. Not only that, I had to spend quite a bit of time networking in order to get some speaking opportunities for my French and German, and then actually attend them, some were a drive's away (I partially succeeded, and attended 2 speaking chances for each! Went well for both). So my time was really really stretched. Somehow though, I made time and expect for one day, kept my Chinese time allotment relatively intact. I focused quite a bit on vocabulary, reading the grammar lessons, and characters at first, since I did not have time to "sit down" and do the oral exercises (certainly not at work in any case). Towards the end of the week I had a bit more time and focused on that. The result is I am still pretty much on track, maybe a day "behind", but that's ok. Should finish lesson 2 Unit 3 today. Grammar: still do not find anything that I just don't understand upon reading it. Still straightforward. Word order: generally sensible, there are a couple of constructions however that are a bit strange for my head: a. possessive "-de" suffix constructions when you want to express what someone's job or employer is. The book literally tells me one must say: "Acme International Airlines Advertising Division's Jane doe". With short names of institutions that's no problem, but with longer ones I still have the urge to state the person first then WHERE they work or go to school. Does not appear to be anything insurmountable and with some practice it will no longer be an issue. b. the "-haole" sentence ender. Again once I get used to it it will be no problem, just have to remember how to use it and to say it at the end of the sentence! Vocabulary: doing well, just a matter of memorizing, no way around it in the beginning stages of a language. Characters: I'm am at 390 Hanzi, and will reach 400 later today. They are becoming a little more challenging now. A couple of reasons: 1. Obviously, I have more characters in my head, and they are still relatively "fresh". Thus, the more characters the more challenging to be able to review them all. 2. With more characters, one starts encountering many more look-alikes. I generally do a good job of understanding what makes two characters different, but sometimes they get me as could be expected. 夫 天 ， 实 买 , 末 禾 ， 士 土 ... just to give the most notorious examples on my list so far. I'm sure there are more to come, but hopefully increasing familiarity with the radicals, phonetics, and other things will eventually actually reverse the trend and make it easier. 3. The meaning themselves start getting more challenging, as the more you get into low frequency characters the more you get into very abstract concepts and near-synonyms which are difficult to remember from other characters that may mean almost the same thing. It's like trying to remember a different image for "impolite" and "rude". How do you do that with such similar words in meaning?? :) Pronunciation: I think I'm decent, I practice a lot and have some understanding of phonetics, know IPA, and how to produce sounds with the tongue. This is where I think a tutor would help the most, but I just don't have the money saved yet. I have to pay all course packages in advanced, how ridiculous, and I won't use my credit card for that. My tones are doing well, yesterday I re-read a lot of the oral exercises and the production was almost flawless! I was very proud, but I know I may have been particularly up for it yesterday and there will be ups and downs. This week my goal is to finish Unit 3. Characters I should be 9/10th of the way to 500!! But I will need to improve my review scheme because now the sheer number of characters start to become a challenge. I may take a brief respite at 500 to consolidate. Till the next WPR on 5.10.2013! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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