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Eric’s Mandarin Log (see post 1 for course list) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6219 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 41 of 141 07 November 2010 at 7:49am | IP Logged |
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I've finished chapter 2 of BC. This chapter had about 30 minutes of audio drills. The drills are all listen and repeat drills so far. There will be a short set of sentences like:
Are you Mrs. Wang? No, I'm Miss Gao. After each line is spoken, there is a pause long enough to repeat it. The text is very careful about tones. They mark the tones as actually said, which is helpful. For example, when talking about Chinese the text has zhōng guo huà instead of zhōng guó huà because the tone of guo isn't pronounced. Most texts don't make this distinction and even in the simple sentences of the first couple of chapters it's obvious that a lot of words when pronounced in certain sentences actually switch to a neutral tone. I didn't know this before. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6219 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 42 of 141 20 November 2010 at 9:05am | IP Logged |
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I'm through the first 4 chapters of BC. It takes about an hour or so to get through a chapter so my progress will be slow since I have little time to study each day.
There is also an accompanying text for BC that is character based: Character Text for Beginning Chinese (CTBC). It's essentially BC with characters instead of pinyin. It was originally intended for use by the teacher who wanted to read characters instead of pinyin. As it lists the new characters used in each chapter with a translation and pinyin, the same format used in BCR, I'm using it to supplement my character study. In all between BCR and CTBC, there are 527 characters and 1316 combinations for the beginning series. The problem I'm running into now is that DeFrancis introduces words and characters that make sense in terms of building up stories and dialogs. He didn't seem to think about introducing the easiest characters first like in Heisig for example. I'm finding it quite hard to remember some of the more complicated characters without knowing the radicals so I plan on spending some time learning them. I've ordered Reading and Writing Chinese Characters by McNaughton to help with that. Edited by newyorkeric on 22 November 2010 at 3:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6424 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 43 of 141 20 November 2010 at 9:23am | IP Logged |
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Reading and writing Chinese by McNaughton is not a bad book, but have you ever tried using the Wenlin software? It's a dictionary with an incredible amount of entries and character explanations. You can brake down the characters according to their elements, learn where they come from, how they are used and so on.
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| newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6219 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 44 of 141 20 November 2010 at 9:38am | IP Logged |
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I've taken a look at the website but stopped at the price tag. I'm not sure if I would get my money's worth at this point.
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| newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6219 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 45 of 141 21 November 2010 at 8:37am | IP Logged |
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I had a couple of hours to study today. I went back to Chinese With Ease Vol. I to review. I'm still not able to catch a lot of the audio without the text in front of me so I plan on spending some more time on it this week. Edited by newyorkeric on 22 November 2010 at 4:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6219 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 46 of 141 08 December 2010 at 7:44am | IP Logged |
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I haven't updated this log for a while. I've finished the first 6 chapters of BC, which is 1/4 of the book. Chapter 6 is a review chapter with nearly an hour of drills. It took me several days to finish it.
I'm thinking of trying to include Pimsleur in my studies again. I looked through the transcripts of the second volume, and the material looks more manageable then a month ago. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hobbema Senior Member United States Joined 5581 days ago 541 posts - 575 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese, French, Dutch | Message 47 of 141 08 December 2010 at 5:21pm | IP Logged |
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I see a lot of criticism of Pimsleur on the forums here. But I find it useful for not only getting started with speaking, but also for daily maintenance. Don't be afraid to use whatever resources you have available. If you can spend 30 nminutes doing Pimsleur, that's not wasted time, even if it means repeating it later on. Good Luck!
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