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Hitchhiker’s guide to the Chinese Galaxy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4944 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 65 of 230 02 June 2013 at 4:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks Crush and Kevin Hsu.
Now, I guess I forgot to specify we are only talking about raw counting of numbers. I do know and have learned the different ways price numbers are said, as well as how the time of day is said. In both cases there are sometimes differences (and of course years). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4944 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 66 of 230 08 June 2013 at 5:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Weekly Progress Entry 12
6.7.2013 This weekly report won't be too long, since compared to last week this one was pretty quiet in developments. Not because I have not studied, though. I have started Unit 5 Lesson 1, it is a LONG section, both in the material introduced and in the exercises, I think one of the two of the longest in the entire book. I should be done with it tomorrow; the other lessons are not as long. This lesson deals a lot with 在"zai4" and it's many uses. Also talks about style usage in spoken Mandarin when it comes to deleting the second syllable of verbs. It also explains the concept of the verb-object compound verbs in a bit more detail and how to treat them grammatically. Then a primer on 认识 vs 知道。It would seem that at first glance, the difference between the two is analogous to the indo-european pairings "conocer/saber", "cohnecer/saber", "connaître/savoir", "kennen/wissen" ... which English of course has lost. I'm am not sure how parallel this usage is to the Chinese pair, however. I guess I will have to learn over time. Today reading the Pinyin came quite easy for me, probably the easiest ever. I made very few tone mistakes while reading, and quite a few sentences came out right the very first time, even though it was the first time I had read them. I was quite encouraged by how the sounds "flowed" out of my mouth and I wasn't struggling as much to get the whole thing to sound right. Experience with learning languages tells me this will fluctuate and other days I will "regress", but that every improvement will get me to a new watershed. I am 40 characters into the next 100 batch. I will have to do some good time to reach 700 by the "deadline" of Tuesday or Wednesday. 60 Characters in 4/5 days, difficult but not impossible. Not sure why I have slowed down a bit with the characters, not a lot, but slightly. Maybe I am reviewing more the older characters so that eats up time. This week, my goal is get at least through lesson 2 and possibly lesson 3 of Unit 5, and by friday starting on the next 100 characters on the way to 800. I will have to get some work done on this last part, I am mentalizing myself and hope to push the pedal a bit. Till the next WPE on 6.14.13! Edited by outcast on 08 June 2013 at 6:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4944 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 67 of 230 09 June 2013 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Unit Completion Entry 17
Unit 5 Lesson 1 Basic Spoken Chinese 6.09.2013 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4944 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 68 of 230 13 June 2013 at 8:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Special entry 9
Hanzi learned @ 6.12.2013 = 700 601-700 零 需 进 進 (S / T) 气 氣 (S / T) 呀 介 绍 紹 (S / T) 漂 渴 茶 喝 考 试 試 (S / T) 帮 幫 (S / T) 助 便 花 歹 世 堂 鱼 魚 (S / T) 感 危 雨 雪 死 戊 尼 根 银 銀 (S / T) 良 娘 旁 饿 餓 (S / T) 闻 聞 (S / T) 访 訪 (S / T) 注 元 园 園 (S / T) 完 院 幸 平 评 評 (S / T) 倍 将 將 (S / T) 算 劳 勞 (S / T) 驾 駕 (S / T) 非 咖 啡 排 板 青 清 晴 情 睛 精 亮 亭 停 简 簡 (S / T) 合 拿 答 拾 讲 講 (S / T) 改 欠 吹 暖 把 巴 爬 送 联 聯 (S / T) 牛 件 饺 餃 (S / T) Edited by outcast on 13 June 2013 at 8:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4944 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 69 of 230 13 June 2013 at 9:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Major Milestone 3
I have now "officially" learned 700 characters. That is to say, I have spent time learning the character, memorizing it, or making up stories to remember them. I have also most likely written down the character at least 5-10 times as practice (more on that in a moment). So far, it seems that for each batch of 100 characters, 20-25 involve traditional variants of the simplified. Therefore, if we subtract the "doubles", I have only learned thus far about 525 true individual unique Hanzi. In any event, that would still mark the official halfway point of learning to recognize and write the top 1,000 most common characters, according to two book sources and two frequency lists. I am using all those four plus my Basic Written Chinese list. While there is substantial overlap obviously, all 5 sources may not agree on what are the 1,000 most important characters, thus I am sure I will be picking up at least 100 if not more characters that only appear on some lists and not others, some even showing up in one of the sources only. So in the end, I may end up knowing closer to 1,200 characters plus 300 or so traditional versions. So perhaps 1,500 total characters before this challenging phase of Chinese writing ends for me. At the current rate, I would be reaching that endpoint by early to mid September this year (2013). My caveat is that while I review the characters and writing them, I am not being anal about forgetting some of them. I do forget some of them and when I go back and review a list of 100 I realize that. There are two reasons why I am continuing forward without focusing too much on the hard to remember characters (yet): 1. I see no reason why I should slow down the absorption of new characters just because a few stubborn characters slip my mind. There are MANY characters in each new batch that are either easy to remember visually, or for whatever reason are easy to remember period (their meaning, etc). So why not learn those instead of forcing oneself to stay stuck in prior characters until they are "memorized"? I see no point in that. Learning 70 new characters from a new batch of 100 is much better than trying to make sure you don't forget 20 from an old batch. 2. It allows me to test myself on prior lists and I am making a list of characters I forget each round. Sometimes I forget one that I did not forget in another review, or viceversa, forgot one and then remembered. But indeed, there are some characters that recur in eluding me. I am making a list of those and eventually will do some special sessions with them, probably involving some weird stuff using aromatic candles and wine/beer (yes, I am crazy). Finally, While I have written down in practice many of the characters, there probably are about 200 or so I never actually practiced in writing. They are mainly those in two batches (400-500, 300-400), where I got a bit lazy or spent the time doing extra work with German or French (that was the time I started my meetings and all that). I will make a point of returning to those and practicing them. Halfway there... it's not 'hard', it's just a challenge to remember. wow. Edited by outcast on 13 June 2013 at 9:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6967 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 70 of 230 13 June 2013 at 9:35am | IP Logged | ||
Good luck with your studying! I think generally, the analogy to conecer/saber and kennen/wissen is pretty accurate, although I believe there is actually a third verb "会" which should also be included, which can be used in the sense of to know a skill, e.g., I know how to speak Chinese. In English, we usually loosely translate this as "can" but languages like Spanish and Portuguese use "saber" which I think makes it worth noting if you are analogizing to conecer/saber. Edited by mike245 on 13 June 2013 at 4:58pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| js6426 Diglot Senior Member Cambodia Joined 4515 days ago 277 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English*, Khmer Studies: Mandarin | Message 71 of 230 14 June 2013 at 3:43am | IP Logged | ||
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It's encouraging to see your progress with the characters Outcast, you are learning them very fast! Just out of
curiosity, which frequency lists (not the ones in the books) are you using? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4944 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 72 of 230 14 June 2013 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks Mike for the good advice on that crucial verb pairing. Interesting about 会 is that at first I learned it means "meeting", but then in a later lesson also learned it means "can" as in an ability to perform something (usually learned).
js6426, I very much like this list because it integrates three quite popular courses: http://www.chineseliteracy.net/content/charcrossref.htm And then I use this one: But you also have this one (notice how the ranking even in the top 10 characters is not the same And this is an interesting read: http://www.foreverastudent.com/2012/11/chinese-character-fre quency-list.html For the record, I have yet NOT used the frequency lists to learn characters. They are sort of my "back fill" when I am done with "Learning Chinese Characters" (probably the most popular source here at HTLAL for learners), and when I am done with "Basic Written Chinese". Basic Written Chinese introduces only 300 characters, and the overwhelming majority are included in Learning Chinese Characters, but not all. Once I am done with those, I will finish my run to 1,000 characters by learning any characters on both frequency lists that are in the top 1,000 and that were not introduced in the other two books. Like I said before, because not all sources agree on which characters are the top 1000 I will be learning a bit more than 1000 characters but that is OK, since any character whose status as top 1000 is not considered "universal" by all lists/sources, is surely important enough anyway to learn since it is almost guaranteed to be in the top 2000-3000 required to read Chinese languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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