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Mandarin Journal, after 1 year | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5151 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 73 of 107 23 January 2012 at 7:02am | IP Logged | ||
A word of caution: I understand that travel during the New Year period itself can be very difficult: there was a news clip tonight (on a French-language Canadian channel) on the mass internal migration that occurs at this time. And, less recently, there was also a documentary, Last Train Home, on this phenomenon: http://www.thedocumentaryblog.com/index.php/2010/01/30/sunda nce-review-last-train-home/ . (Please copy and paste, removing any spaces inserted by the forum software.) Best wishes with your Mandarin, and Happy New Year! Edited by songlines on 23 January 2012 at 7:04am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aerozeplyn Senior Member United States Joined 5090 days ago 141 posts - 202 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 74 of 107 24 January 2012 at 7:47am | IP Logged | ||
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Ahh... thanks songlines! I will definitely consider that. And thank you for the link :)
Also, I came on here to mention briefly how I am studying the Zhongwen book series for reading/writing characters. Now that I have improved on my listening/speaking skills, it is good for me to attend this local Chinese school and once again take reading/writing serious. I feel very happy that I chose NOT to spread my learning energy thin by developing reading/writing during listening/speaking; however, this is just my preference. From now on, I can only progress farther by including written words in my study! Once again, I will use the Gold List Method for the Zhongwen series books. My goal isn't to always be able to write the characters completely from memory, but my goal is to have strong recognition skills--and this is accomplished by also having the ability to draw what I recognize. This is a skill that I learned to value from my reading/writing rhythm studies. I also briefly reviewed "Uncle Davey's" videos on his Gold List Method. Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH6FERpM5fQ Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTyJiGVJ0LM Anyhoo, I am creating Gold List entries from the 词语 (Words and expressions) section of each chapter. I have my first list of 25 characters, written in 3 columns: characters, pinyin, then short definition to help me remember which chinese characters I will intend on writing during my distillation processes. In a comfortable amount of time, this process takes me about an hour, so I will only create and distill Gold Lists every week or 2. However, I have to admit...once I started creating the Gold List, I could already "feel" long-term memory kicking in as I drew semi-familiar characters. Awesome! :) I'm really looking forward to the Gold List method, and I haven't forgotten the severe improvements it gave me in the past! There are more details to studying the Zhongwen series: 1) The next day I will put the 词语 and any notable "Read Aloud" words and phrases into ANKI. 2) Some other time I will do the actual homework assigned by the teacher. So far, this homework seems to be, "read the passage 3 times and do all of the book exercises." Good practice, hehe :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aerozeplyn Senior Member United States Joined 5090 days ago 141 posts - 202 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 75 of 107 29 January 2012 at 10:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Progress update:
============= 1.) FSI Module 3 (Money): Finished ALL C1 tapes and created ANKI audio cards for nearly all entries. I especially appreciate FSI's explanations during the C1 tapes...they are so helpful. This completes Phase 2 of my approach to FSI. Moving onto Phase 3 this week... Explanation of my FSI Phases here 2.) Zhongwen series (book 5): finished studying chapters 2 and 3. Almost done with chapter 4. At my current learning stage for reading and writing, I feel like I'm learning so much from these books. This is great practice, and it makes me want to complete book 4 with a tutor over the summer. 3.) Created entries 1-25 of my first Gold List. I am preparing new 2-character phrases in an Evernote, and once that reaches 25 I will create the next Gold List :) 4.) Since about a week ago, every day I've been listening to "Listeners Hotline" for a few hours while I work. This is something irrationale suggested in his log, and listening to this live talk show is already REALLY improving my listening skills. I even pick up new phrases every once in a while. I probably won't write much about my "progress" on this, but from now on I'll continue listening to this podcast along with my favorite AWR Mandarin (WSVX). Btw, I get these podcast from iTunes, but the "Listeners Hotline" website is: http://www.rfa.org Also, yesterday (the 28th) was my birthday :D know what I spent about 4 hours doing? studying Mandarin :) and tomorrow is Chinese class! Edited by aerozeplyn on 30 January 2012 at 5:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aerozeplyn Senior Member United States Joined 5090 days ago 141 posts - 202 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 76 of 107 07 February 2012 at 8:14am | IP Logged | ||
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So here I am listening to Mandarin talk radio. I just finished writing down some more words and small phrases for
my Gold List, which is going along nicely. I've been doing the pangu shengong meditation/qigong exercises every day for the past couple of weeks, and it is really showing in my focus and improvement; it's amazing what this simple exercise can do for balancing a studious mind. I've also come to many realizations for my learning over the past couple of weeks. Organized by study element, here's a quick summary of my recent progress and learning realizations... *** FSI: I think I finally got over the massive number of new audio cards, and today I finished Module 3's Drill Tape Unit 2. I'm also starting to review the difficult drill tapes from the 2nd module. Basically, I am on phase 4 of 8-- halfway done! I must say, I am really happy with my "phase" approach to studying FSI. As far as the material goes, it is starting to quickly feel pretty easy. Since I really want to get more conversational ability, I may just skip to Module 7 (society), and refer to the functional modules later. Or I guess I could also spend more time working on Module 7 as I simultaneously work on the other modules. I hear the Society module is pretty hard, and more time can only help. *** Gold List: +25 new entries today; 125 total entries. For the purpose of improving my reading, writing, and vocabulary, I am really enjoying the Gold List method. By looking over Gold List entries I created 1 year ago, I am also amazed at how many items I remember--and many of these items I rarely experienced, if I experienced at all, for that year. As someone who studies learning systems, the philosophies behind the Gold List method and why it works makes complete sense to me, and now that I also have the experience of working with this method from 1 year back, I am nearly certain that I want to continue the Gold List method. At the moment, I am nearly certain that my long-term goal is to get over 10,000 gold list entries: ~5000 in the first 8 months, and then another ~5000 in the remaining 4 months of the year. I attribute less time for 5000 entries in the last 4 months based on the speculation that my character recognition will improve drastically over the next 6-8 months. Welp, by October 2012 we shall see how I'm doing with the Gold Lists!!! Also, I came up with a new routine for creating Gold Lists, and this is working very well. The fact that creating a Gold List (characters, pinyin, and English) used to take easily over an hour (sometimes 1.5 hours!) for 25 entries, I isolated the actual actions that take me the longest time: gathering the vocabulary for the Gold List. With my new routine, the Gold List is broken down into 2 phases. It probably takes the same amount of time overall, but I enjoy it much more now. Here's the process, with the following phases... Phase 1 *** when I come across a vocabulary list in my studies--Zhongwen book, FSI, older iMandarin Pod .com podcasts, etc.--I first put this list into a "master" spread sheet. If I don't know the characters, I try to figure them out :) or I ask someone at the #mandarin IRC chatroom on freenode.org. As you can see from my screen shot link below, the spreadsheet acts as both a "staging" area, and a central location where i can easily search a chinese character, word, or phrase to see if it already exists in my Gold List. My master spreadsheet, which currently holds almost 175 entries, will never have less entries than the physical gold list. A screen shot of my spreadsheet: master spread sheet for Gold List Phase 2 *** when I have extra time to create a new head list of 25 entries, I find a nice and relaxing atmosphere and then I write the actual head list in my college-ruled spiral notebook. If i happen to need any help with a character's stroke order, i will consult http://www.nciku.com *** ANKI: between 30 minutes and 45 minutes a day. Even though most of my ANKI decks are audio flashcards, i have "officially" decided to ONLY put audio questions and answers into ANKI. ANKI is great for drills and short term memory, it's also great for learning long-term, and I may even change my tactic in the future; however, i don't want to waste time with the extra studying (and creating) of plain text question/answer cards. That action--and time--I have reserved for the Gold List, where I will spend less time studying things that I basically want in my long term (not short term) memory anyways. The audio flash cards be MUCH better use for short-term memory because of 2 very important reasons: 1) the audio flash cards give me more time to actively listen to mandarin audio i am learning, and 2) these are spoken drills for me! as in: my purpose is to actually speak back the answers; constantly re-enforcing the speaking muscle memory and fine-tuning my spoken technique. This is the best benefit of short- term memory studies. *** Zhongwen book: so I realized this book doesn't exactly go by "chapters", but by "lessons". To be more specific: my class is still on lesson 4. For a while I thought studying children's material would have a great benefit. Now, I feel as if my mandarin has grown out of it! The most benefit I get from the class is active listening, and a teacher who always speaks to me at native speed, and always asks me questions and demands responses--great mandarin practice :) This semester will likely be my last in a chinese school. Afterwards, volunteering as a ESL tutor at one of the many local universities sounds like the best thing I can do for my study. Now I am looking into New Practical Chinese Reader (just the textbook). In fact, I'm about to purchase NPCR on Amazon.com along with "1400+ Chinese Conversational Phrases" by Ju Brown. I might not purchase the NPCR audio CDs yet, because I hear the speaking is way too slow. I can always speed it up... Anyhoo, as for the NPCR textbook, I have not worked through book 1 or 2; however, while I was looking at NPCR on Amazon's search inside feature, it appears textbook 3 is more on my level. I don't know if the perfectionist inside of me will be able to stand not working through books 1 and 2. At least I already have book 1, and I can create head lists for my Gold List from just the vocabulary. I can also at least read through the passages of book 1. Besides, from whatever I miss in book 2, I'm sure I will either gain that somewhere else, or end up buying book 2 :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aerozeplyn Senior Member United States Joined 5090 days ago 141 posts - 202 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 77 of 107 09 February 2012 at 6:27am | IP Logged | ||
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I just discovered that FSI's textbooks have lots of extra vocabulary...and vocabulary "booster" sections. SWEET @_@
Of course I'll have to figure out the characters for myself. Still very happy about this... especially for my Gold Lists! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aerozeplyn Senior Member United States Joined 5090 days ago 141 posts - 202 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 78 of 107 21 February 2012 at 8:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Alrighty...so even though I've taken it easy this week, I got a LOT accomplished the previous week. This week has been pretty
relaxed, and I have also spent a lot of time during the weekends and week nights watching the 汉语快乐 sitcom on youtube. Unfortunately, I have a pretty busy month coming up in March, so I will have to make the most of my study time when I get it. I'm sure there are ways to sneak in study time...just waiting to be discovered. Here is my current progress: * FSI: finished all of the money module's drill tapes. my ANKI due cards takes about 25 minutes a day now. I also reviewed a few of the previous module's drill tapes. Onto Phase 5 of my FSI study plan... * Gold List: It appears that I only added +50 items to my Gold List (175 total). However, my master spread sheet (the "staging" area) has a total of 390 items, and I cannot wait to start creating head lists from these! As far as using the Gold List method the past 2 weeks, I actually spent most of my Gold List time distilling Gold Lists from Dec 2010 and January 2011--a little over 1 year ago! I distilled 8 head lists into 1 fully-distilled list (completing the Gold List process), about 2 head lists were distilled to the point where they now await their "final" distillation, and the rest of the head lists were basically distilled once. I have to admit, the Gold List is pretty awesome. The head lists of my Gold List for last year were definitely the last times I actively studied the production of writing chinese characters. While I remembered a very high percentage of the vocabulary--as expected due to the fact that I've focused on my listening and production abilities within the last year--I was even more shocked that I remembered over 30% of the chinese characters. When I say "remembered", I mean that I was able to draw the characters from memory without thinking about how to draw the character. These are characters that I haven't written in over a year!!! For these past head lists, I thought I would need to start over with them. Basically, I felt like it would be better if I started over with these lists and rewrote them, rather than *continued* where I left off from last year. Needless to say, I'm going to continue where I left off with my old Gold List. This adds another 575 items to my Gold List...a total of 750 items now. Ahh...the long-term benefits of the Gold List method. I cannot WAIT to reap those rewards! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aerozeplyn Senior Member United States Joined 5090 days ago 141 posts - 202 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 79 of 107 12 March 2012 at 6:40am | IP Logged | ||
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This month has been quite busy, as I expected. My main focus has been keeping up with the ANKI decks, chinese school on
the weekend, and working with the Gold List. The Gold List method is really paying off, and i'm greatly enjoying it; my reading and writing ability is noticeably (greatly) improving! I'm starting to see many more writing patterns, understanding many more radicals, and even developing my own chinese character handwriting style. I even came up with a chinese name for the Gold List method that I am really happy with :) I find this very fitting: 金簿 (jin1 bu4) which is literally "gold accounting book". When talking with Mandarin speaking friends, I call it the 金簿法. As for FSI, I am still on Phase 5--working on completing the C2 tapes for the money module. I may finish the money module by the end of the month...or maybe later...i am really not sure until this season passes. And incase i have not mentioned this earlier, FSI's money module has surprisingly improved my active listening and spoken skills. Everything has been so rewarding, and i really look forward to the other FSI modules! Here's my current progress with the remainder of my studies... * Gold Lists: for the old gold list book i started last year, i have distilled 525 items into about 350--with only about 50 items remaining in the old book. As for the new book, i've recorded 225 items so far. only 1 distillation has been done in the new book, as i am spending more time focusing on distilling the old book. Also, for anyone that has iOS, i strongly recommend "eStroke". I've been using eStroke for quickly looking up character stroke order (w/ stroke name audio!) and character definitions. This is an AWESOME tool...well worth the money...and it saves me a ton of time waiting for nciku's stroke order widgets to load. In fact, the best part is that with "eStroke", my reliability on the internet has greatly decreased. Definitely, the 2 best chinese educational applications i've used for iOS are eStroke and Pleco. * Listening skills: during the work week, I passively listen to a little over an hour of mandarin audio a day. I COULD beef up my passive listening time during work to 3-4 hours .... temping. I've also realized that i am now at a point where i really need to do MORE active listening. the active listening usually happens when i lay down to sleep. the materials include podcasts from iMandarinPod.com, listener's hotline, 汉语快乐 on youtube, and some of my favorite disney movies in mandarin. I think the disney movies have been a great choice so far because I am very familiar with the disney movies AND it is my guess that disney has hired some of the best translators around the world :) I also created some workflow charts a few weeks ago. These were made not only to organize my thoughts, but also to share with others who are interested in the Gold List method for Mandarin. I am definitely curious of other ways people are using the Gold List for Mandarin.... Anyhoo, here are some diagrams of my Gold List processes. Enjoy! :) Populating Master Spreadsheet--my "staging area" for planning my head lists. My Distillation Process General overview of the Gold List Method 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| JayR9 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4642 days ago 155 posts - 162 votes Speaks: English* | Message 80 of 107 13 March 2012 at 2:07am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi I just want to say, what a great and Interesting log.
I am not familiar at all with the Gold list so will definatly look into it. I also have not put anything new into Anki for a long time now. Reading your log makes me want to kick myself up the arse and get back using it. You are doing a great job. Keep up the good work. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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