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Wulfgar | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Members profiles |  | |
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4662 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 5 12 February 2012 at 3:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello, I'm Wulfgar of Icewind Dale. My old hobbies (Dragonsbane, Giant slayer, Orc slayer, etc) were fun but dangerous. I'm in my
50s now, and have decided to take up the safer hobby of language learning. I have learned several languages to a comfortable level, but would like to get them to a point where it would take very little to maintain them. I am counting on all of you to give me some good ideas on how to do this. Thank you in advance! Wulfgar 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6573 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 5 12 February 2012 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | ||
What you need is a Ring of Language Maintenance +1, but they're hard to come by, especially if you're no longer questing. You might be able to get a local wizard to craft one for you, but the one I talked to wanted 500 gold pieces to do it. Man, forget you, Raistlin the Greedy! I got a hold of one later, but it took some serious questing and I'm not selling! Welcome to the forums, Wulfgar! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4662 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 3 of 5 12 February 2012 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well met Ari! It just so happens I was searching for some good information on Mandarin pronunciation, and found
some of your posts in a thread called "only listen". Evidently I can't post a link yet, but here is a sample quote
So my question to you is whether you feel there is anything in this ALG method that could potentially help someone who has already reached an upper-intermediate to advanced level in Mandarin, or any of my languages? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6573 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 4 of 5 12 February 2012 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, that was a long time ago. The lesson I took from experimenting with ALG was that you don't need to stress production in the early stages. I don't really think much one way or the other on that topic nowadays, and I don't think the approach has much to offer in the advanced stages. At these levels, I find that reading, watching, listening to native materials is the best way to learn. My current approach is simply to look everything up, use an SRS to memorize all new words and when the deck is getting too big to handle or I need to take a break, delete it and start over. It seems to work pretty well for me. There are other methods in dealing with idioms and expressions, but I find a lot of them can be dealt with through cloze deletion cards.
As for pronunciation, my experience tells me that it's mostly talent. That is, you can only improve your pronunciation to some degree through training, and if it's bad, it's probably never going to be great, but you can train it to be less bad. I think the best way to do that is to read descriptions of the phonology of the language, experiment, maybe get native speaker input if you can and then try to incorporate what you learn in your natural speech. The best description of Mandarin phonology I've found is the one found here, on Sinosplice. Edited by Ari on 12 February 2012 at 6:04pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4662 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 5 of 5 12 February 2012 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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Nice. I used Sinosplice and the FSI pronunciation unit in the very beginning too. Great minds thing alike:) I think
you're right about ALG too. I've been trying really hard to get something useful out of that method, but I think my time is best spent elsewhere. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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