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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 97 of 124 30 August 2013 at 7:54am | IP Logged |
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CANTONESE
After nearly a month of traveling, I’m finally back in Hong Kong! The last two weeks in the US were great practice for my Cantonese, since I was using it everyday with my partner’s family. My vocabulary hasn’t really grown much in the past month, but I’ve seen a lot of improvement in my active ability to use the language. In particular, I’ve improved a lot in my ability to tell detailed stories, to give instructions, to summarize things, to provide reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with people, and other more challenging language tasks. I’m feeling a lot more confident about my Chinese, which is great for seizing opportunities to speak the language. It’s a little embarassing that it’s taken 5 months of dedicated studying to get to this point, but I FINALLY feel that I’m at a level where I can take full advantage of living in Hong Kong to learn and practice the language. JAPANESE I haven’t made any new progress in Japanese, but I think I’ve really started to solidify my understanding of the Assimil lessons I’ve studied to date. Last week, I was feeling pretty frustrated because I felt that I wasn’t retaining much. So instead of forging ahead with new Assimil lessons, I went back and reviewed all of the previous lessons in depth. This consisted of listening to the recordings and reading the texts, but most importantly, doing an active wave, where I read the English texts and translated them back into Japanese. I’m still on Lesson 31, so this active wave comes a bit early. However, I think it is really helping me develop a stronger base in the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 98 of 124 03 September 2013 at 5:15am | IP Logged |
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JAPANESE
I am now up to Lesson 35 of Assimil Japanese. Spending more time on each of the lessons and doing early back-translations have been immensely helpful. I still have trouble with a lot of the grammar, especially the word order and the use of different particles, but some things are beginning to sink in and make sense. I’ve also started Japanese for Busy People, and have made it through the first three chapters. The primary value of this book for me is practicing the kana readings, since the vocabulary and grammar points are so simple compared to Assimil. I have noticed that my kana recognition has been getting better since I started using the textbook. However, I still need a lot of work with katakana. Approximately two months into my studies, I am starting to feel that Japanese might be a language that I want to stick with even after my trip in November. A lot of people study Japanese because there is an aspect of the country or culture that appeals to them. For instance, people who love Japanese manga, martial arts, sushi, etc. None of these things really appeal that much to me. So I do think at some point in the future, I might run into challenges finding native content that is interesting to me. But in the meanwhile, I am just having fun learning the language for its own sake. I think it also helps my motivation that we may be making Tokyo a regular travel destination. Even if I am not in love with any particular aspect of the culture or country, it would be a useful language for getting around, both in November and maybe in the future. CANTONESE I am still learning 15 new Cantonese words/sentences per day with Anki, but I am otherwise not doing much studying. Being here in Hong Kong, it’s such a luxury to be able to put aside the formal studying and just live in the language for a while. My biggest challenge at the moment is still a lack of vocabulary, but that’s something I am planning to slowly build up over time. A few of the interesting words I’ve learned this week: “syut gū” (Snow White), “tiu jáu” (to mix drinks), “sīn” (a fairy or angel), and “pāau bō” (to juggle balls). SPANISH I have recently become addicted to Caso Cerrado, which I watch on Telemundo’s website. I am a big fan of courtroom-style (mostly) reality shows, and the cases are generally very entertaining. The show is taped in Florida, so most of the parties are Mexican American, which makes the Spanish very easy to understand. It’s great review for me, and so much more fun than watching telenovelas. I’m also still chugging through La guerra de los cielos. I’ve gotten approximately 25% through the book (which is around 500 pages total), so I still have a long way to go. Compared to the colloquial Spanish I see on television or use with people, where my comprehension is usually 99-100%, I am having much more difficulty with the vocabulary in this novel. I probably come across 1-3 new words per page. It’s very good practice and looking up new words isn’t bad at all on the Kindle, but this does make reading a bit painful and tedious compared to watching television. I can watch a show like Caso Cerrado entirely for enjoyment, but reading a look like La guerra de los cielos still requires a lot of mental effort. Because of this, I don’t spent much time on the book, but I usually read a few pages here and there if I finish with my Anki flashcards for the day and still have free time on the metro or at the gym. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 99 of 124 10 September 2013 at 11:36am | IP Logged |
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There has been a lot of discussion over the years about what point you can claim to “speak” a language. But at what point do you admit to “studying” a language?
Aside from posting on HTLAL and talking with my partner, I haven’t mentioned my Japanese studying to friends or family. It’s not that I’m embarassed or ashamed, but I hate having to deal with the expectations of people who assume that just because you’ve started studying a language, you are or should be able to speak it. Of course, I don’t wait until I am at a super high level before I come clean, but I do like to know at least basic grammar and a minimally decent vocabulary (1,000-1,500 words) before I start telling people that I am studying a language and can speak “a little.” Relatedly, I’ve noticed that I don’t feel comfortable talking with native speakers until I’ve reached at least that basic, if not much higher, level. I don’t mind stumbling through a sentence here and there, or occasionally having to ask the other person to repeat something, but I can’t imagine jumping into a conversation knowing just a few hundred words and some basic grammar. I know that there are some fearless language learners like Benny Lewis and Moses McCormick who love this approach, but I just don’t think that I could bring myself to do that. JAPANESE I am now up to Assimil Lesson 36 and JapanesePod101 Newbie Season 3 Lesson 17. I have not made a lot of progress. This is largely because I’ve been busy with other things, but also partly because I’ve been spending time revising past lessons. I am still trying to get the hang of Japanese sentence construction, which still remains very foreign to me. I am okay back-translating from the Assimil literal word-for-word translations, but when I can’t imagine doing so if I had to use just the “natural English” translations. CANTONESE I am now up to Chapter 8 of Living Cantonese. I’ve been using this mostly as a source of vocabulary and sentence patterns, and not doing much with the MP3s, since I get enough listening practice otherwise. Almost all of the sample sentences cover topics that seem to reflect common themes in Hong Kong culture – talking about food, complaining about prices and people being late, worrying about getting married, dealing with gossipy coworkers and nosy parents, etc. It’s very stereotypical, but I have to admit that these topics DO indeed come up a lot in my conversations with Chinese people here. So a lot of times, I can use these example sentences with little or no modification. So convenient! Now that I’m back in Hong Kong, I’ve also started up again with the language exchanges. Today’s exchange was completely in Cantonese, which was great practice. We talked about everything from cell phone contracts and dieting to inclement weather and photo paper. I learned a few new words like “tornado,” “glossy,” “matte,” “twist,” and “coverage.” These language exchanges are very useful in pushing my comfort zone; otherwise, I tend to get stuck on the same topics and don’t expand my vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 100 of 124 15 September 2013 at 10:50am | IP Logged |
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INTERESTING CANTONESE 3
I finally had the occasion to take a closer look at this book, and it’s really amazing. It’s the third volume of Susanna Ng’s Interesting Cantonese series, published in March 2013. Earlier in my log, I posted a review of the previous two books, which I found very useful for building up my vocabulary in Cantonese. This huge book, however, seems like just what I need to get my vocabulary up to a truly advanced level. The back cover claims that the book contains approximately 1400 terms, but the actual number is much higher, since each “term” comes with up to 15-20 subsidiary terms and sample sentences that show proper usage. For instance, the word “gold” comes with subsidiary words like “Olympic gold medal,” whereas a term like “up” comes with sentences like “the yacht bobbed up and down” or “tear up that sheet of paper.” I would not be surprised if the book contains at least 4,000 words and at least 4,000 sample sentences. This ranges from slang and proverbs to all sorts of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and other interesting terms. Aside from the example sentences, the great value of this book is that it comes with Chinese characters as well as an audio CD with Chinese-only recordings of all of the words. Speaking from experience with the first two volumes of Interesting Cantonese, I like to listen to the recordings to test my vocabulary after I’ve learned all of the words in a particular section. It’s going to take a LONG time for me to work through this book – probably at least a year, if not longer. However, I think by the time I’m done with this book and Comprehensive Cantonese Grammar, I should be at a pretty high level. Or at least, I'll have a decent enough vocabulary not to have to ask people the meaning of words all the time! ANKI I like tracking my Anki word count, since it gives me a metric for progress. I am plodding along in Cantonese, and I should hopefully hit 5,000 cards by the end of the year. I am hoping to reach the 1,000 word mark for Japanese by the time I embark on my trip in November, but that might be pretty ambitious, since I have only two months left to go. I am getting pretty close to going through my backlog of new Anki words for French and German. This is long overdue – most of the French words are from my trip to Paris back in April 2013, and all of the German words are culled from Langenscheidt’s Basic German Vocabulary, which I studied much earlier this year. For these two decks, I have been studying new words very slowly – usually 5 new words per day, but sometimes none if my review deck for the language gets too large (i.e., more than 35 words or so). I am not in any particular rush, but it would be nice to finally finish up all of the new words, since they have been hanging over my head for more months now. The Spanish deck’s backlog is almost completely cleared, but I still have another 200-300 new words to add to it, mostly taken from Guerra de los Cielos. ANKI WORD COUNTS: Cantonese: 4405 total words (153 words not yet learned) French: 1456 total words (125 words not yet learned) German: 1417 total words (100 words not yet learned) Japanese: 652 total words (63 words not yet learned) Spanish: 1352 total words (53 words not yet learned) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 101 of 124 18 September 2013 at 2:23pm | IP Logged |
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I’ve temporarily put my Japanese on hold to focus on Cantonese and Spanish. There is a chance that I need to use Cantonese for some upcoming interviews and that I may be taking an assessment test in Spanish, so those two languages are taking priority for the moment. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get back to Japanese soon!
CANTONESE I had another meeting with my language partner today, which was pretty challenging. My Cantonese is still very situational and topic specific. For small talk, the words just roll off my tongue and I can at times sound almost indistinguishable from a native/heritage speaker. But once the subjects start to get a little more specialized or precise, I simply lack the words. Some of the words I added to my vocabulary from today’s session included the Cantonese words for: walrus, ethnicity, multiple choice questions, mortgage, applicant, incense, hot air balloon, wheezing, flock (of animals), tread water and the spaces between teeth. These kinds of words are yet ANOTHER reminder of how much more there is still to learn, even with a vocabulary in the 5,000 word range. I know that to some extent, I’ll be learning new vocabulary all my life, especially if I do end up stay here in Hong Kong for a long stretch of time. But it will be an awesome feeling once I finally reach a level where I feel like I can talk for 5 or 10 minutes without having to constantly circumlocute or ask what words mean. SPANISH There is a chance I may need to take an assessment test next week in Spanish. It’s not a high probability, but I have started to review some stuff. I am glad that I started back up with the Skype tutoring sessions a few months ago, that I’ve been intermittently reading and watching television in Spanish, and that I’ve been reviewing vocabulary words using Anki. It’s impossible to guess what precisely will be on the test, but my skills now are definitely better than they were a few months ago. My speaking has mostly recovered, although there are still weak areas. My biggest problems are with the same areas that most learners struggle with: when to use ser/estar, imperfect vs. preterite, and some of the more nuanced uses of the subjunctive. I also occasionally make gender mistakes, usually with concordance. For the most part, I don’t struggle *too* much with these things, but I make enough mistakes for it to bother me. I think I really need to go through a comprehensive grammar review and memorize a few hundred sample sentences before I can work out these kinks. However, I don’t have that much time before the test, so I have been contenting myself with reviewing basic grammar rules and practicing active speaking. I’ll know by the end of the week whether the test is going to take place or not¸ so I’ll have the weekend and early next week to make a bigger push if I do go through with it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 102 of 124 23 September 2013 at 8:00am | IP Logged |
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The Spanish assessment test isn’t happening after all, so I am getting back to Japanese. I am actually pretty relieved. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to take a test in Spanish, and I don’t know how I would fare. In particular, I haven’t had to write anything in Spanish in a long time, so the idea of writing an essay was getting me a little nervous.
CANTONESE I am now on Chapter 9 of Living Cantonese and Chapter 19 of Routledge’s Intermediate Cantonese. At my current rate of 5 new words/sentences per day, I should probably finish Living Cantonese by the end of October, and Intermediate Cantonese by the end of the year. Some of the most recent sentence patterns are just fancier or less common ways to express the same ideas, so I have been focusing mostly on comprehension for these. I assume they will pop up if I watch the news and read books/newspapers, but I doubt I would need to actively produce some of these patterns for everyday speech. JAPANESE I am now on Assimil Japanese Lesson 39 and JapanesePod101 Newbie Season 3 Lesson 22. I have been having a lot of problems *still* with Japanese word order, the use of the particles “wa” and “ga,” and various other little words like “koto,” “na,” "to" and “nado.” I had been hoping that enough repetition would just allow me to absorb these grammar points, but I think I am going to need thorough explanations to really understand them. They are just too different from any language that I’ve studied previously, that I don’t have any sort of basis to help me out. I have working JapanesePod101 in two waves: (1) first listening to the dialogue and learning the vocabulary, and (2) then going back and reviewing the PDF to learn and practice the grammar points. For the “passive” wave, I’m up to Lesson 22, but I’m only at Lesson 17 of the “active” wave. For JapanesePod101, I have been finding the review tracks very useful, especially when I’m on the go. Each track is about 3-5 minutes long, and consists of the speaker first giving an English phrase, then after a pause, the Japanese equivalent, followed by a syllabic breakdown, and then repeating the word/phrase at full speed. It’s very similar to a “learn in your car” or “vocabulearn” format, but keyed to the vocabulary used in the JapanesePod101 lessons. It’s a great way to study on the go, since it includes the English, and allows me to practice my active recall. Moreover, because Japanese is pitch-based, audio tracks are helpful, since using Anki alone doesn’t provide any practice with the correct pitches. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 103 of 124 27 September 2013 at 11:00am | IP Logged |
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If you have a speech-to-text enabled device, like an iPhone 5 or a late-generation iPad, a fun and easy way to test your pronunciation is to talk to the device in Chinese and see if it transcribes the correct word. The iOS software is smart enough that it can distinguish tones and it can usually guess the correct homonym based on context and compound word/phrase. I have been using this feature on my third generation iPad to transcribe some of my romanized Cantonese flashcards into traditional characters, and it has for the most part been pretty accurate. And it’s so much easier than trying to type the words using strokes.
CANTONESE With more of my partner’s family back in Hong Kong for the next six months, my opportunities to speak Cantonese have increased exponentially. For the past month, I have really only been using Cantonese with my language partner and a few shopkeepers here and there. But now, I’ll need to speak it every day, which will be great practice. I’ve noticed that my speaking has become more grammatically complex and accurate since I last spoke Cantonese “full-time” back in mid-August, but I’m still getting my speed back. After using minimal Cantonese for a few weeks, I’ve noticed that my speaking has gotten a little slower and that there are some pauses where I have to think of a word or phrase. I’ve also come to realize that my grasp of tones is still a bit murky. It’s a bit strange, because I almost always use the correct tone without thinking, I can hear tones and generally can repeat an unknown word back in the correct tone, and I can read out romanized words with the correct tone – but if I have to stop and think from memory about the tone of any particular character or word, I am usually stumped. A lot of times, I will get confused with the following combinations: second/fifth, third/sixth, and fourth/sixth. And if I end up repeating a word a few times trying to figure out its tone, I tend to start doubting myself and mispronouncing the word. I wonder if my problem has to do with the fact that I have terrible pitch and absolutely no musical training or ability, so I am not used to identifying intonation or notes by name. It’s not a huge problem because when I speak, I’ll automatically use the correct tone, but this is usually because I know what the word should sound like, and not what particular tone it is in. However, when I hear someone say a new word and I have to try to transcribe it (with the correct tone marker) in my flashcards, I tend to make mistakes. I guess that’s why I feel so much more comfortable first studying a word from a word list, rather than trying to learn just from context and real life use. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 104 of 124 30 September 2013 at 8:45am | IP Logged |
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MANDARIN
Does it count as wanderlust if learning a new language may be important for your job? Living here in Hong Kong, it was inevitable that I would need to learn Mandarin at some point. There are so many Chinese people coming through from the mainland that there is a big market for people who know Putonghua. And there are plenty of resources for learning –lots of television programming from China and Taiwan, lots of books written in Standard Chinese, and lots of course offerings and self-study books. Recently, I was told that it would be very helpful for my job prospects to have conversational Mandarin skills in the future. I don’t think that I’ll need to be “fluent” and I luckily don't have a pressing timeframe to learn it. But I would eventually like to get my Mandarin skills to where my Cantonese skills are right now, that is, roughly a high intermediate level. This is especially important as I might need to do some work in China in the future. My Mandarin was never very good, and the little that I did learn a long time ago has gotten seriously rusty over the years, especially since I started studying Cantonese intensively. My passive skills are sort of still there, but whenever I try to think of how to say things in Mandarin, it comes out in Cantonese instead. Coming back to Mandarin now actually makes some sense. My Cantonese is reaching the point where I am not struggling with basics anymore – it’s more an issue of learning more vocabulary and getting better at extended conversation and television comprehension. And since a lot of formal Cantonese is Standard Chinese, which is basically written-form Mandarin, this is as good a time as any to start studying Mandarin. Besides, I think I can benefit from the huge similarities between Cantonese and Mandarin in a way that I couldn’t the last time that I tried studying Mandarin. And so, even though I’ve been plodding along with Japanese, I think I’ll have to shift my focus over the next several months. So far, I have been enjoying my Japanese studies, but it’s really more of a hobby than a need (notwithstanding my upcoming travels). I think I’ll at least finish up Assimil Japanese, but at that point, I will probably assess whether it makes sense to continue to study more of the language or shift almost entirely to just Cantonese/Mandarin. I haven’t yet figured out how I am going to approach Mandarin, or even when I’ll start studying it. However, I am incredibly inspired by both irrationale’s log and Ari’s ChinesePod method, so I’ll look to those sources for guidance. Unfortunately, I left a lot of my Mandarin study materials in the US, but I do have my Chinese in a Flash cards, FSI Chinese, and a few hundred ChinesePod lessons saved from the last time I studied Mandarin back in 2005-2007. I am thinking that I might start studying Mandarin in early December, right after my Japan trip, so this gives me some time to formulate a plan of attack. JAPANESE I am now on Assimil Japanese Lesson 43 and JapanesePod Newbie Season 3 Lessons 19 (active)/24 (passive). I think I can make a push to finish Newbie Season 3 within the next 2-3 days. Assimil is starting to get to the point where it’s really fun. A lot of the earlier lessons had some humor, but the pacing was pretty tough and there just wasn’t enough vocabulary and grammatical complexity to tell good stories. But now, it feels like each chapter is an engaging little vignette full of Assimil’s ironic humor. This is what I loved so much about New French with Ease, so I’m glad that it’s present in the Japanese book too. It’s been a very slow process, but I think Japanese is finally starting to make a little bit of sense. I’ve noticed that as I am listening to dialogues, I am getting better at understanding them without having to think about Japanese word order or translating sentences into English in my head. I am still a long way from feeling comfortable with the language, but I think if I can make it all the way through Assimil, I should have a fairly solid beginner-level base. Anki tells me that I know approximately 700 Japanese words at this point. The actual figure is probably slightly higher than that, since I haven’t updated my deck to include all of the latest Assimil words. I still have another 1.5 months before my trip to Tokyo, so I think I can still reach my goal of knowing at least 1,000 words before my trip. Hopefully, that combined with some intense cramming before my trip, will be enough to have survival-level Japanese when I get there! CANTONESE I had lunch today with some older friends of my partner’s family, and we spoke entirely in Cantonese. It was a wonderful confidence boost to be able to chat in Cantonese for almost two hours, especially since I didn't stumble over any words and I was able to express myself pretty well without any significant mistakes. Even though I use Cantonese with my partner’s mother and with my language partners, I always wonder a bit if they’ve adjusted to any bad habits that I might have. So it’s always nice affirmation talking to new people and seeing that my Cantonese is “real.” In addition to my structured vocabulary lists, I’ve added a few new words to my Anki deck based on real life conversations, including the words for “canker sore,” “polyp,” “geyser,” “muscle,” “fraternal twins,” “nursing home,” and “Yellowstone National Park.” I finally finished inputting new vocabulary and sentence patterns from Living Cantonese into Anki – the deck now contains 688 cards, most of which are sentence patterns. I go through roughly 5 cards per day, so that’s 26 more days of new reviews to go. Once I get through all of these reviews, I’ll start on the Greenwood Press Intermediate Themes for Listening and Speaking book. I think it’ll be just what I need to graduate from “intermediate” to a more advanced level. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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