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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 41 of 124 25 March 2013 at 12:12pm | IP Logged |
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CANTONESE
I’m now wrapping up Lesson 16 of Elementary Cantonese. Honestly, it’s been slow because I haven’t been that motivated in the past few days. The rough days come and go, and over the weekend, I felt that I could barely speak at all. Even when I knew the correct tones, the words were just coming out wrong. Luckily, today has gotten a lot better and I was able to have some fairly accurate conversations in Cantonese about everything from hair dye to retirement accounts to the laws against Filipino domestic worker immigration. I think part of it is an issue of confidence. If it’s a topic for which I don’t have the vocabulary, I tend to get frustrated and this results in forgetting more words and stumbling over others, and then I start to make easy grammar mistakes or mispronounce words, and it becomes a downward spiral. Hopefully, this will get better with time. Every day, I feel that there is a mountain of new fairly basic vocabulary that I’m learning or still need to learn. I've been adding words like “to cut,” “alarm clock,” “farmer,” “son-in-law” and “monkey” to my Anki deck. It’s very re-affirming that every time I learn a new word, I feel like I hear it everywhere. It’s a good way to reinforce my knowledge. FRENCH We leave for our Paris trip on Friday morning, so time is getting tight. I am on Lesson 110 of Assimil NFWE, and should finish it by tomorrow. At this point, I’ve refreshed most of my prior French knowledge, and should be able to recover my speaking ability within about a day or two of being in Paris. Because of our Francophone friends, I would have any trouble getting very regular conversation practice while I’m there. Luckily, our friends are patient enough to deal with my halting, and sometimes rambling speech. Out of boredom, I've temporarily set aside the RFI podcasts, and have instead been listening to Assimil French without Toil. It’s a surprisingly challenging program! Even now, after going through all of NFWE and about half of Using French, I am still finding lots of new vocabulary and expressions, even in the first 20 lessons that I've listened to so far. I think it will be good practice to go through the entire program at some point (perhaps during free time during the trip?). Although some of the language is outdated, it is a lot of great additional listening practice. OTHER LANGUAGES I am continuing to plod through German and Spanish Anki flashcard decks, but have otherwise put studying those two languages on hold as I prepare for my trip. I have been continuing to read the Spanish version of “Do You Speak English?” for fun, and have about another 50 pages to go. I still have mixed feelings about the book, but it’s been interesting enough for me to want to finish it. Given the iffy value of the Spanish-language translation, I haven’t used it to mine for any new sentence patterns, but I have been noting new vocabulary words to input into Anki. It’s been a quick read, and enough to motivate me to want to read more books in (real) Spanish in the future. Unfortunately, I left my huge pile of unread Spanish novels back at home in the US, but I might check the Amazon Kindle store. Edited by mike245 on 23 August 2013 at 3:46am 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 42 of 124 27 March 2013 at 7:33am | IP Logged |
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CANTONESE
After a few days without motivation, I felt newly inspired yesterday and zipped through Lessons 17-19 of Elementary Cantonese in the course of a few hours. My partner had lunch plans with an old college buddy and his mother was off playing mahjong, and given the heavy rain, I decided to stay in all afternoon and study Cantonese. It helped that those chapters were very heavy on the food vocabulary, which is one of the areas of Cantonese that I actually feel okay about. As I get deeper into Cantonese grammar, I am really appreciating taking this book-centric studying approach. The problem with my language skills right now is that I can, if I really strain myself, get my point across on most common topics, but: (1) it requires a lot of time and effort, (2) I need to be speaking with a patient and understanding speaker, and (3) I will end up mangling the grammar and sometimes the tones, since I don't usually know the proper way of saying something. Being understood is the easy part, I think, but speaking correctly is a lot harder. And I just know that if I didn’t take the time to study the grammar, I would probably one day end up speaking fluent but very broken Cantonese. The great thing about daily conversation practice though, is that I immediately get to put new sentence constructions into use. For instance, ever since learning how to use time constructions, I have been finding ways to insert them into my daily speech. It still takes me a while to formulate the phrases, but it’s definitely getting easier. I don’t think I am going to be doing much Cantonese studying while I’m in Paris, since I’ll want to take advantage of that time to immerse myself in French. But at this rate, I am definitely on schedule to finish Elementary Cantonese by tomorrow, and then I’ll start with Intermediate Cantonese when I get back from my trip. For those of you who may be interested in studying Cantonese, I cannot recommend the Sidney Lau books highly enough. His grammar explanations are incredibly thorough, easy to understand, and very detailed. My only complaint about the books is that they include some archaic constructions and phrases, and that there is no accompanying audio. Luckily, I have enough conversation practice that I can get around the lack of audio and I always check with my partner and his family to make sure the words in the book are still actively in use. But if someone modernized the language in the books and added audio drills, they would be close to perfect! FRENCH I have just finished my review of Assimil NFWE. This time around, I went through and created flashcards of a few words and expressions that I had trouble learning (probably about 30 words), but otherwise haven’t done much with the book. Based on my French experience, I definitely am a huge fan of Assimil. I can’t think of any other way that I could have learned that many words and sentence patterns in French, with relative ease, in such a short period of time. When I first used the book in 2010, I didn't make a single flashcard or actively set out to memorize anything. But yet, when I came to the active wave, I was surprised to note that I still retained almost all the words in the lessons – at least 95% in the first 100 lessons. If only language learning could always be this easy! OTHER LANGUAGES I’ve downloaded Anki Mobile to my iPhone, so I’ll be able to continue reviewing flashcards without my laptop while in Europe. My daily review is now up to about 250 words between all of my decks, but it’s surprisingly manageable and only takes about 30 minutes per day. I’ll hoping this number will dwindle down once I've gone through a large chunk of my German basic vocabulary deck. Aside from a sporadic number of words added to the French and Spanish decks on an ad hoc basis, I am only actively adding large numbers of new cards to the Cantonese decks. Currently, my deck counts are as follows: Cantonese: 716 cards (two decks) French: 147 cards German: 1432 cards Spanish: 137 cards Edited by mike245 on 23 August 2013 at 3:47am 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 43 of 124 05 April 2013 at 4:47pm | IP Logged |
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FRENCH
I am writing this post from my hotel here in Paris, which so far has been wonderful! There is just something wonderful about strolling the streets here, trying all sorts of wonderful pastries, people-watching, and soaking in the sights. I’m glad that I took a few weeks to review Assimil NFWE before my trip. The first few days here were incredibly difficult language-wise. I felt that my pronunciation and accent were all over the place, and that I was struggling to remember simple words. But now that I've been here almost a week, my French is slowly coming back. I’m still making lots of mistakes and struggling with some conjugations, but I’m able to converse again and I've been getting better at talking around words that I don’t know. Yesterday, I had a pretty good conversation with a Francophone friend about the sex industry in Thailand, avian flu concerns in China, and the merits of Chinese medicine versus Western medicine. I think I've reached the point where short exchanges aren't too problematic, but extended conversation and storytelling are still extremely difficult. For instance, just two days ago, I tried to recount an anecdote that required me to use lots of imperfect and passé composé. It felt nearly impossible. I don’t think that it was an issue of any particular sentence or grammatical construction that I didn’t understand. Rather, the difficulty was in stringing all of those words and conjugations together in a flowing conversation. I think this is where my current challenge lies: to get better at longer narratives, storytelling, and extended speech. I believe in “a-ha” moments, and I think I reached one of those milestones yesterday. I have been turning on the television whenever I’m at my hotel, mostly to use as background noise, but yesterday, I was surprised to discover that I could understand 95% of the television show I was watching without any strain or effort. Granted, it was a news show on the decline of domestic workers in Brazil (so nothing too technical), but it was very much a confidence boost. I have been watching more television since then, and I definitely feel that my listening comprehension has suddenly improved at least 10-15% over what it used to be. Before, it felt like people were speaking extremely fast, but now, it is starting to feel like the pace is comprehensible rather than overwhelming. Now that I have Anki on my iPhone, I’ve also been assiduously checking up the new words I've encountered here in Paris and adding them to my French deck. I’ve added about 150 words in the past week, such as “mouillé,” “chantier,” “trottoir” and “courgette.” Now that I have a good vocabulary base from Assimil, it’s been nice to track additional words in Anki so that I can start to get a sense of how large my vocabulary is. I plan to allow my vocabulary to grow “organically” until I reach approximately 1,000 words in my Anki deck. At that point, I’ll use a frequency word list to beef up my vocabulary, much as I did with German. OTHER LANGUAGES Other than Anki word review, I haven’t done much other work with my other languages. I did, however, visit the Gilbert Jeune Langues & Lettres bookstore at Place St. Michel, which is easily my favorite language-learning bookstore in the world. I was so tempted to buy half the bookstore, but unfortunately, everything was pretty expensive, so I only purchased three books so far: El Ventilador (Spanish B2/C1 level), Réussir le DELF B1, and a Becherel French grammar and style book (in French). I plan to go back again tomorrow or Monday to get a few additional books, including some test prep books for French and Spanish. I would someday love to take the DELF and the DELE, so I think some study guides would be helpful to prepare in the future. Edited by mike245 on 23 August 2013 at 3:49am 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 44 of 124 12 April 2013 at 8:31am | IP Logged |
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I’m finally back in Hong Kong after nearly two weeks in Paris. It’s also nice to be home, rather than living out of a suitcase in a hotel. And Hong Kong is a wonderfully cosmopolitan city, which is in many ways far ahead of Paris in terms of efficiency, comfort, convenience, etc. But I also felt a little sad to leave Europe after having such a wonderful time eating at various patisseries and bistros, visiting different museums, and chatting with people. The time I spent there was just long enough to recover my French and start to improve on it. I think my greatest challenges are still extended speaking and storytelling, but everyday conversation now comes a lot more naturally. I no longer have to think about basic grammar rules, and certain constructions now roll off my tongue. I feel that my pronunciation has also improved a bit, and I don’t have any trouble with the “r” anymore.
One small little milestone: at one of the restaurants we ate at, I spoke to the employees only in French and served as a translator/interpreter for the rest of my group, and when it came time for the dessert menu, the hosts brought me a French menu and gave everyone else an English one! This has been a good six months for me in terms of activating unused languages. During my one-week trip to Germany and Austria in February, my German returned after 10 years of atrophy. It’s funny because even as I prepared for the trip, I felt that my language skills were lagging behind and I couldn't speak fluidly. But then, as soon as I got back to German and started speaking to people, it was almost as if I had never left. Now, I can understand television shows and movies, and understand newspapers and magazines, which is a nice confidence boost. The same thing with my French – after a few days, it’s back to where it used to be. I believe it was Ari who posted something a while back about how taking some time off from a language can help solidify knowledge. I feel that it’s been true for me. Even though in both instances, it took a while to get back up to speed, I think that the period of disuse helped the language solidify and ingrain itself into my brain. I noticed, for example, that some grammar rules that used to pose problems in the past just seem like second nature now. For instance, even during my time in Germany, I didn't particularly like the passive voice, and would try to avoid it at all times because I tended to incorrectly use “sein” rather than “werden.” But I noticed that when I was back in Germany this time around, I correctly and without even thinking used the correct form. I also noticed that this time around, in Paris, my French seems to flow a little better. I don’t have to think about liaisons, for example, in order to use them, and my use of “en” and “y” feels a bit more natural. I don’t necessarily advise ignoring a language for extended periods of time, but maybe some breaks (and time) aren't so bad after all. CANTONESE Now that I’m back in Hong Kong, it’s back to the grinding stone with Cantonese. I didn't clock in much study during our trip, other than Anki review, so there is still a lot to cover. I am wrapping up the drills in Lesson 22 of Elementary Cantonese, and I have made it through approximately 45% of Interesting Cantonese 1. The grammar drills are extremely helpful, since I think my mouth still needs a lot of training to get used to creating fluent sentences with the proper grammatical structures in the correct tones with the appropriate prosody. I repeat every drill three times: once working from the romanization, once looking at the characters to get used to reading them, and then once working from the English and translating back into Cantonese. I hope to get up to Lesson 24 by the end of the weekend. My partner’s mother is on a trip at the moment, so I haven’t had as much conversation practice as usual, although I have been running errands in Cantonese, including dealing with the dry cleaners, shopping at the wet markets, and paying bills. All of that basic everyday stuff I can now handle fairly comfortably in Chinese, which is another confidence boost for me. My Anki decks have really increased dramatically in size, mostly because I’ve been mining the Interesting Cantonese books for lots of useful idiomatic phrases and sentences to memorize. I think actual new vocabulary only makes up about 60-70% of the deck. I understand television and conversations better than before, but am still missing a fair number of words. I think I still need about 500 more words before I can get to a comfortable level of listening comprehension. FRENCH Now that the trip is over, the urge to cram French is gone, but I’d like to keep improving. After finishing NFWE, I whizzed through approximately 120 lessons of French without Toil. This was mostly to mine for vocabulary, although I also reviewed some of the grammar points. The book is much more comprehensive than NFWE, but I’m glad I didn’t do it first, since the learning curve is so steep and there are so many additional words in FWT. I think once I get through all 140 lessons, I’m going to back and do all of the exercises, such as the conjugation drills and noun-gender quizzes. Unfortunately, my Using French book and a lot of my other language materials are still sitting in a shipping container in the US. However, I did have a copy of Ultimate French: Basic-Intermediate. Most of these lessons are too easy for me at this point, but I still plan to quickly review all the chapters to reinforce and learn grammar, and to mine for additional useful vocabulary. On the airplane, I also grabbed free copies of Le Figaro, Le Monde, and Les Echos. My Barry Farber-inspired personal challenge is to do the following: read and understand every article in each of these three newspaper issues, and add all useful vocabulary to my Anki. I think this intensive reading exercise will hopefully beef up my vocabulary and reading comprehension. I am not setting a timeline to get this done, but hopefully it won’t take me too long. I think I can cover 1-2 articles a day, if not more. I’ve also started back up listening to RFI journal en francais facile podcasts. This is mostly at the gym, and I am listening just to maintain comprehension. I am not using the scripts at this time. OTHER LANGUAGES I am itching to start working from El Ventilador, but I think I should hold off until my Cantonese/French get up to a stronger level. I am continuing to listen to RFI podcasts in Spanish. I am also listening to Schlaflos in München podcasts, alternating between Spanish and German resources. My current Anki deck counts: Cantonese: 1006 French: 524 German: 1432 Spanish: 137 Edited by mike245 on 23 August 2013 at 3:51am 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 45 of 124 14 April 2013 at 8:59am | IP Logged |
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CANTONESE
I am midway through the Lesson 23 drills in Intermediate Cantonese. This chapter on diminutives is refreshingly easy after the much more difficult chapter on comparatives. The drills are still pretty boring, but it’s a nice break. I hope to get through Lesson 23 today, and then start on the Lesson 24 dialogues. I took a peek at Interesting Cantonese 2 (the advanced volume), and was a bit surprised to find that there were a lot of pretty basic words that don’t appear in the beginner/intermediate volume – and which I never knew in Chinese – like the words for “plant,” “to take off (clothes or shoes),” “remote control” and “heater.” It’s surprising that despite hearing Cantonese for years, I've either never heard some of these words or they simply didn’t register in my head. Given how important these words are to any basic vocabulary, I skimmed the first 50 pages of Interesting Cantonese 2 and added about 65 more words to my Anki deck for study. My Cantonese Anki decks contain well more than 1,000 words, but I still need a good amount more to be able to understand Chinese. It’s funny because when it comes to daily topics and “kitchen” Cantonese, my understanding is about 95% and virtually automatic. It comes in like English, and I don’t have to think about what things mean. But then I turn on the TV and try to watch the news or a soap opera, and my comprehension is like 50% or sometimes less. In my case, I think it’s largely vocabulary, since I’ve gotten fairly used to the speed of native Cantonese. Learning Romance/Germanic languages has made me somewhat lazy about learning new words. There is so much transparency between English and languages like Spanish/French/German that I don’t have to actually know the words to understand terms like “l’opération,” “das Militär,” etc. On the other hand, HK Cantonese has only a handful of English loan words. So even with a vocabulary of 2,000-3,000, there is still a LOT that I don’t understand. FRENCH I made it through two pages of Les Echos so far. I started out with the business section, and have read about the Apple Store’s ban of AppGratis, Virgin Megastore’s financial woes, the average construction cost of a new home in Paris, and a number of other topics. From those two pages, I added a staggering 68 new vocabulary words to Anki. I think this has been so far an extremely challenging but helpful exercise, and if I make it through all three newspapers, my vocabulary should definitely be at a fairly good intermediate level. Yesterday, I also reviewed Chapters 2-8 of Ultimate French: Beginner-Intermediate. Much of it was extremely easy, but I did note a few vocabulary words. What was most helpful for me was review of basic grammar rules. I haven’t really paid much attention to grammar, but I say certain things because they just sound right. For instance, I know to say “en Chine” but “au Japon,” and I know that it’s “comment va-t-elle” and not “comment va-elle,” but I think it’s largely because I've repeated these kinds of phrases so many times using Assimil. Now that I’m actually learning the rules for these grammatical constructions, I am incredibly glad I saved grammar study for now. Looking at all of these basics makes me wonder how I can keep them in my head and apply them in conversations – even though I already subconsciously know and use a lot of these rules and constructions. I think if I had started with grammar, I never would have had the energy or desire to keep learning French, and would have given up a long time ago. My immediate goals for French: read three more French newspaper articles and review up to Chapter 15 of Ultimate French. SPANISH I finally finished the Spanish version of “Do You Speak English?” yesterday at the gym. I don’t think the book was a waste of time, but overall, I didn't really like it. The book started off fairly interesting, especially the chapter on foreigners learning English in Australia. But it eventually spiraled into narcissistic little vignettes explaining just how wonderful the author is, how fluent he is in his various languages, and how much people like him. Maybe he really is some super charming language-learning god, but it got a little tiresome to hear him boast in multiple chapters about how he learned to speak Brazilian Portuguese just like a native within about a year’s time, quickly learned conversational Chinese in a few months, etc., and how people in every nation seemed to chase after him – from the indecent propositions of an older male Italian shopkeeper to lovelorn Brazilian women dedicating radio songs to him and passing him their numbers in his bread bags, to an Arabic girl asking him to marry him after just a few meetings. He seems like that loud drunk uncle in the family who tells hilarious stories at family reunions, but whom no one ever believes or takes seriously. Poking around the Amazon Kindle store though, I did find some science fiction/fantasy novels in Spanish that I’d love to read. They may not be Don Quijote or Cien años de soledad, but I think they will be interesting enough to hold my attention and maintain my skills without too much effort. This week, I plan to start on one of those ebooks, since I probably won't be back in the States until July. Edited by mike245 on 23 August 2013 at 3:52am 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 46 of 124 18 April 2013 at 10:19am | IP Logged |
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CANTONESE
I am currently up to Chapter 25 of Intermediate Cantonese, which largely seems to be a continuation of Chapter 24’s focus on adjectival phrases. The subject matter is not too difficult nor is it particular interesting, but I am hoping to slog through it so that I can get to the hardest and more useful stuff in the later chapters. Reading the drills aloud and adding sentence patterns to my Anki is definitely paying off. I think my mouth is getting more comfortable pronouncing Cantonese, and I have a lot better control of the tones than even just a week ago. I am also quicker at responding to rapid-fire Cantonese without needing time to think about a response. The frustrating things for me, however, are still vocabulary and TV comprehension. Although I feel my vocabulary is quickly approaching 2,000 words, it is still woefully inadequate. For anything other than cooking or travel shows, I usually only understand about 25-50% of what’s going on. This is going to require a lot more practice and a lot more vocabulary study. Between my three Anki decks, I’m now up to 35 new Cantonese words every day, so hopefully I’ll get through another 1,000 words in the next month. FRENCH I have gone through another three pages of Les Echos, and added another 78 vocabulary words to my deck. I've also gotten up to Lesson 15 of Ultimate French. I think the progression of lessons is a little funky – for instance, you learn the word “baroque” in the first lesson but don’t learn “father” or “mother” until ten lessons later. For a rank beginner, I think the course would move too fast. But as it stands, I find this course to be a great gap-filler after Assimil. Even in the earliest lessons, there are still lots of new vocabulary words that I’m learning as well as clarification of various grammar points. I also finally finished my first pass through French without Toil. I added all the new vocabulary words to Anki, but I think it’s going to take about a month or two to digest all of these new words. By that time, I should be finished with Ultimate French and my newspapers. Hopefully, by that point, my vocabulary will be at a solid high-intermediate level, and I can work on fine-tuning my grammar knowledge and spoken fluidity. SPANISH Back in college, I went on a year-long stretch where I read around 10-15 novels in Spanish in my free time, including authors like Gabriel García Marquez, Isabel Allende, Zoe Valdes, and Jorge Luis Borges. I wrote down every single vocabulary word that I didn't know, first compiling these into word lists, and then transferring them to flashcards. It was an incredibly tedious task, especially since these were in the days of paper flashcards and hard copy dictionaries, but it was an incredible boost to my Spanish vocabulary and my reading comprehension. But then, my plans and study focus shifted. With the collapse of Argentina’s economy in 2002, I put Spanish aside and learned German instead. I stuck those flashcards in a box in my closet and eventually forgot all about them. Then, in 2010, I rediscovered the flashcards and decided to transfer them from hard copy onto Anki. I added approximately 75% of the flash cards (970 words) into Anki before getting tired, and then spent several months reviewing them. Later, I replaced my computer and the Anki files were forgotten on a backup hard drive until just yesterday, when I decided to dig the files out and import them into my current Anki. I was apprehensive that there would be mountains of words to study when I opened the deck back up, but it actually wasn’t so bad. The initial review was 90 words, of which I easily remembered about 45, struggled to remember 25, and had completely forgotten about 20. Given the amount of time that I have at my disposal, it’s nice to review all of these words. My current Anki word courts: Cantonese: 1242 words (115 not yet learned) French: 901 words (472 not yet learned) German: 1432 words (874 not yet learned) Spanish: 1096 words (0 not yet learned) Edited by mike245 on 23 August 2013 at 3:53am 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 47 of 124 22 April 2013 at 9:02am | IP Logged |
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CANTONESE
This has been a good week for conversation practice. The wonderful (and tough) thing about living in a target language country is that sometimes you are forced to use the language just to get by, which really strengthens your active vocabulary and survival skills. Just today, I did the following things in Cantonese: (1) discuss issues with a non-working stove-top and get tips on how to fix it myself, (2) give tips on how to choose colleges, including important factors for someone looking to go to graduate school after college, (3) discuss someone’s ankle injury and whether it was swollen/sprained/broken on the way to the hospital, and (4) explain to a salesperson that I was looking for a voltage converter and not a plug adapter for my appliances. The vocabulary that I’ve been studying with Anki has really come in handy for all this. Just last week, I was drilling words for “electrical plug,” “electric shaver,” “bone fracture,” “take an X-ray,” “twisted ankle,” “gas bill” and “recommendation letter,” without really knowing when I would use them. Today, I had to use all of those words and many more to get my points across. It’s incredibly helpful for forcing those words into my memory and my active knowledge. In terms of formal study, I finally finished Chapter 25 of Intermediate Cantonese, which covers relative clauses. Man, it was brutal. I think the toughest part wasn't so much how to construct relative clauses, but rather, learning all the different ways that one can use them in Cantonese. Word order isn't always important. For instance, in English, “Tonight, I’m going to the store” and “I’m going to the store tonight,” essentially convey the same meaning. On the other hand, something like, “the big red house” is correct but “the red, big house” just isn't. I have certain ways that I've gotten used to constructing relative clauses in Cantonese, but expanding my repertoire and learning which ways are possible and which aren't is tough stuff. But I think with periodic review and use, I’ll get better. I am hoping to get through Intermediate Cantonese by the end of next month, but I think that be a bit ambitious. I do think that finishing it before I start any other study methods would be helpful, but the drills can be long and tedious. I think after Intermediate Cantonese, I’m going to skim through Teach Yourself Cantonese, and then move on to the Basic/Intermediate Cantonese Grammars by Routledge. The Routledge books unfortunately do not have characters or audio, but they provide a wealth of example sentences and lots of additional vocabulary that would be helpful to memorize and internalize. FRENCH I’m now up to Lesson 26 of Ultimate French. I've been adding about 10-15 new words per chapter to my Anki. The toughest thing for me at this point is the nitpicky grammar details, including spellings and conjugations. The thing about French is that so many verb endings sound similar that you can get away with knowing very few written conjugation forms and still sound okay. But then, you try to write, and you can’t remember if it’s “tu veux” or “tu veut,” etc. I haven’t had time to get back to my newspaper readings, but I've gotten through about a third of one issue of Les Echos. Hopefully, I can read another few articles this week. SPANISH I've been reading a fairly fluffy chick lit novel in Spanish that I got for free from the Amazon Kindle store. So far, it’s been fairly light read, but it’s been good to be reminded of words and phrases that I used to know well, but which have now faded into my passive vocabulary. I think my Spanish comprehension skills are still pretty decent (probably in the B2 range), but my active skills have gotten weaker and weaker as the years go by and as I study other languages. I think I’m going to need a thorough grammar and speaking skills refresher soon. I have Ultimate Spanish Advanced and Assimil Perfectionnement Espagnol, which I think will be good courses to follow before I use the El Ventilador book that I purchased in Paris. Edited by mike245 on 23 August 2013 at 3:55am 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 48 of 124 24 April 2013 at 8:19am | IP Logged |
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For anyone looking for a comprehensive beginner/intermediate level book for building Cantonese vocabulary, I would recommend using Interesting Cantonese Volumes 1 & 2 by Susanna Ng. Each volume costs about $200 HKD (approximately $25), and comes with a thick book and 3-4 audio CDs covering the entire contents of the book. Words are arranged thematically, although some of the themes are a bit whimsical, e.g., a section devoted to English loan words, another section for Hong Kong metro stop names, etc. There are a large number of example sentences to show proper usage (probably for more than 50% of the words), and a very small amount of grammar review, as well as
information about forming questions, using classifiers, etc. Most of these sentences are very useful, and some of them are just funny enough to make studying more enjoyable. There is no official word count, but Volume 1 claims to cover more than 3,000 words and expressions. Volume 2 is slimmer, but doesn't appear to have much overlap with the first volume. I would estimate that the two books together contain approximately 4,000 – 5,000 words. The words are all modern usage, and include characters so that you can learn to recognize the words. My only complaints about the books are that the Romanization is a little funky and that it could use tighter editing. Some of the tone marks are wrong, which can be a pretty serious problem in a language like Cantonese. I've only noticed a handful of mistakes so far, but since this is in its 9th edition, I would have expected all of those problems to be corrected by now. Also, not all nouns have their classifiers, and there is no index in the back to quickly look up words. Although they are far from perfect, the books are very helpful for acquiring a fairly broad, useful vocabulary in Cantonese. As far as I know, there are no other similar resources for vocabulary building in Cantonese. So far, I've worked through a little more than half of Volume 1, and I come across these words quite frequently in daily life here in Hong Kong. I do recommend, however, getting both volumes if you are serious about learning Cantonese, since even the “Advanced” volume contains a lot of basic words and expressions. Edited by mike245 on 23 August 2013 at 3:55am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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