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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5326 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 1345 of 1511 29 January 2015 at 4:57pm | IP Logged |
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Have a fantastic trip! I know that you'll do amazing. Big hug from Cristina! And keep up posted. Perhaps you
will be the one to give me the final push to start learning Mandarin :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 1346 of 1511 30 January 2015 at 6:36pm | IP Logged |
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This message brought to you by Tarvos Inc.
Startus update: alive but a bit groggy. Chinese skills terrible. But I can manage the basics. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6134 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 1347 of 1511 30 January 2015 at 8:13pm | IP Logged |
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你的航班過得怎麼樣？我還沒去過亞洲，可是 我想像那麼長的航班可以讓人發瘋。你現在住 在哪一個城市？
而且，你看得懂繁體字嗎？因為你在中國，你 大概學了簡體字。如果你繁體字看不懂的話， 我可以用簡體字寫字。 (Edit: Ugh, I can't stand how the forum automatically inserts spaces between some characters.) Edited by ellasevia on 31 January 2015 at 12:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 1348 of 1511 31 January 2015 at 6:25am | IP Logged |
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I can't read any kind of Hanzi for crap - my Hanzi skills are limited to about the
simplest 100 characters or so. When people send me personal messages I can figure stuff out with a bit of help. The flight was looong (with a layover at Istanbul) but that's pretty much okay. I am in Beijing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 1349 of 1511 02 February 2015 at 12:04pm | IP Logged |
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Even on my first day at Mandarin school, I found out that there was a group of CCTV
people (Chinese television) tracking one of our students and filming at the school. So what happened is that they ended up coming into classrooms and asking other students questions - they even filmed us doing Chinese Whispers in Chinese. So now I have spoken Chinese on camera (yes, on camera) and they apparently didn't think it was half bad because they said "ni shuo de bu cuo!" (the rest of you can figure out the meaning of that sentence). My Mandarin is progressing after a couple days already - I understand more Mandarin than before. If someone speaks to me slowly, commands something, or if there's enough context I get what people say and can formulate some sort of response - sometimes my tones are a little off, or I use the wrong construction - but it's possible for everyone to understand me (and given they adapt) for me them. Shops is still a nuisance because my Hanzi are so terrible, but that's what my stay in China is for. To everyone learning Mandarin here I have to say the following: Mandarin itself isn't the beast people make it out to be. Concentrate on the tones first, and then on the hanzi, because you'll pick up the grammar fast (no morphology to speak of and the word order is quite similar to IE languages, but with some hitches). The biggest problem is the cultural differences between your culture and the Chinese. Overcome that barrier, and you'll be fluent in no time. Please go and study Mandarin (or Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Pashto...) they're not demons. They're languages spoken by human beings. If I can manage with my shitty improper Mandarin, so can the rest of you. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 1350 of 1511 03 February 2015 at 12:43am | IP Logged |
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A Logical Approach to Language Learning: How to tackle Grammar
How the engineering mentality helps you to build a language framework through which to attack foreign language learning This post is about how you can logically approach grammar learning. I know that many people dislike grammar because they see it as dusty rules in a book and tables that have to be memorized. Now some things do have to simply be committed to memory and you will not get around that, but by and large grammar is a logical exercise with some limits (namely where common usage trumps grammar logic, and in the case of idioms). Note that this post does not show you how to learn French grammar - it's an approach, and it's an approach that needs to be MODIFIED ON DETAILS every time you learn a new or different language, and it's also very dependent on your mother tongue and other given languages you are good at. The way I see grammar is as a framework that holds together correct utterances a certain language. In principle, the defining factor is not grammar itself but actual common usage (sorry prescriptivists, I will not hold with grammar perfection when it's not what anybody says. I don't find that suitable for language learning at all). However grammar provides a sort of code with which you can to a very large degree internalize patterns of usage, and they are mostly consistent across a language (or a certain variant of it should a language have a lot of dialects). The problem is not that you do not have any grammar - you always have grammar because you've learned the grammar of your native tongue. The problem when learning a foreign language is that the framework of reference of a native speaker of foreign language X does not coincide with yours. To speak foreign language you have to mentally be 100% A-OK with the fact that your system is inferior to theirs when you are speaking their language. Your system does not count. Theirs counts, and theirs is the one you want to re-create and build from your own framework. The question is how explicitly you know this. I find knowing grammar explicitly is very good theoretically for understanding how a language works, but in practice a lot of it should be implicity or else your framework machinery is way too slow (this is what happens when you translate). Instead, you should copy the relevant bits of any original frameworks you may have and assess whether they need to be modified to suit the environment (usually a related language) or whether you need to completely reassess how to build something (a language strucuturally divergent from your own). Sometimes languages randomly have very similar builds even though they're genetically unrelated - Hebrew is fairly analytic and doesn't have cases, and the adjustments you have to make coming from IE languages reside mostly in the fact that you have to learn the system of roots (most other things work in a familiar way, although you put adjectives after the noun). Some bits of your framework may be redundant. If your native tongue has loads of weird morphology but you're learning Mandarin, you can simply ditch any plural stuff. You don't need it so don't keep it intact. Accept that Mandarin conveys this information through context unless you're talking about people and you'll live with that knowledge just fine. How to build a grammar framework First, you need to check what you already know and how far your target language is from what you already have. If you're building two variants on the same theme (say Dutch/German) then if you come from Dutch there's not much framework building you have to do. You have to intensify the complexity of some of your machinery morphologically speaking (you make the three gender system explicit, expand your plurals, change the verb system a tiny bit and of course add cases) but those are all relatively minor tweaks to your initial system. The only really big thing coming from Dutch is adding those cases, and if you're a bit well versed in Dutch history you will know how the system works anyways (there are remnants in the language). You don't have to change much else. There's some vocabulary switching going on and you have to pronounce German differently, but that's all minor and something that takes a bit of effort to learn but nothing you couldn't do in a couple weeks with your mind focused on the task. Nothing horrid going on. Ok, that's a very simple example. Framework B (German) is simply a modified variant of Framework A (Dutch). Yeah, you have to build in some extra features and then patchfix vocab/pronunciation but you should get it to function easily. Let's take two very different languages: French and Korean. Let's say you're a practically monolingual French speaker (you may have studied English or German at school, but you weren't top of the class). Here the game suddenly changes. Korean's got a very different system and this means that French speakers have to re-do a lot of their system. Example: Verbs do conjugate, but they don't conjugate for person or number. As a French person you thus have to get rid of that from the very start. They do conjugate for tense (a-ha!). But do French tenses correspond to Korean ones? No, so you have to entirely rebuild the tense system in order to get it to work. This is going to take a longer time and practice and you have to keep fixing it to get it right. (That's why it takes longer - not just the vocab is different, but the structural things going on have to be modified and as a French person you have to be willing to see this difference). Another example: pronouns. French cannot drop pronouns, but Korean can and does so when the actor is clear from context. Whaaaaaat? A French person scratches their head in confusion. This is a mental barrier that you need to overcome. Accept that Korean lets this be driven by context and modify your thought pattern accordingly - "do I need to say this or is it clear to the interlocutor that it was Kim Hwang-Soo doing it?". Practice this contextual aspect and fix it. And you can do this for more examples. In Koreans the boundaries between word categories are way more fluid - accept that Korean morphology does not always accept the same distinctions as French does, or that they may choose a very different way of ordering a phrase, and let go of the idea that the French system is the correct one. The French system works only if you're speaking French, not Korean. And so on and so forth. There are way more structural modifications to make here, but if you want to make a Hyundai out of a Peugeot, that's what you have to do. Where does this approach fail? Idiomatics. Some things are grammatically wrong but it's how people say them. Okay, when you encounter this build in an exception that says "if XYZ then I just have to say this phrase because that's what people do." If there's logic behind it, build that in, but often there isn't so don't bother. Just do what you have to. Furthermore grammar can change between registers. For these registers you need to build in the required shortcuts in your system. If you're speaking French orally on a daily basis, you don't need the "ne" part of a negation. Drop it! It's not good in formal speech or writing but in common colloquial usage everyone does it, and so should you! You are one of them now. In spoken Russian, the genitive чего often replaces the accusative (identical to the nominative) of the interrogative pronoun что. You may even hear чё. So adapt to that. Learn the contextual rules and build this in! It's not wrong if you use it in the proper context. Conclusion There's a lot of logic to grammar. Learning declension tables by heart is useless, but knowing how to use declension tables in context is the key to improving your grammar (if a language has them). Or word order. Or other really funny stuff. Just accept that language A is not language B, and mentally put yourself over the barrier that what language B does is funny and sounds really weird or off. It's their language and they are right and not you. Then modify your brain mentality to incorporate the new rule when you're speaking language B. You'll find grammar easier to internalize that way and you won't have to remember all those pesky tables - you'll understand why they say the things the way they do and you'll accept that theirs is just a different machine. After all languages are just vehicles for communication, just like cars are vehicles for transport. A BMW doesn't quite drive like a Volvo, but they're both cars and they both get you from A to B. The same way when talking about Hindi and Russian. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 1351 of 1511 07 February 2015 at 3:03am | IP Logged |
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So I have now survived shitfaced taxi rides at ungodly hours in Mandarin, and kept up my
end of a conversation entirely in Swedish while completely plastered. My Swedish is getting somewhere. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Straya Diglot Groupie Australia Joined 3609 days ago 57 posts - 73 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchA2 Studies: Polish | Message 1352 of 1511 09 February 2015 at 5:16am | IP Logged |
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Sounds like you're living a good life mate.
Im interested to know how exactly you go about learning while immersed in the local language? I know a lot comes from the constant interaction but do you do a lot of work in textbooks at home too? Keep enjoying your time in China :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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