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Learning Mandarin Chinese in 7 Weeks | ||
Tags: Time to learn | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| zilan2367 Newbie United States Joined 3789 days ago 27 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English Studies: Thai* Studies: Spanish | Message 25 of 66 07 July 2014 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Jeffers, the class I'm joining is first level Intermediate Chinese. The two prerequisite classes are first level Beginning Chinese and second level Beginning Chinese. Normally students study each course for 1 semester (which is about 4 months or 16 weeks). The FSI program is really good. This is the first time I used it and it really helps me solidify the information. Thanks! Edited by zilan2367 on 07 July 2014 at 7:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| zilan2367 Newbie United States Joined 3789 days ago 27 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English Studies: Thai* Studies: Spanish | Message 26 of 66 07 July 2014 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks for all the links, I'll watch all of them soon. I just added the "Learning Chinese is fun!" show into my daily study routine. How long should I repeat each episode of a children's show that I watch? Do I need to take notes? Or make Anki cards to review the words? Or should I just watch it passively? I will be learning Simplified Chinese since that is what is taught at the Intermediate Chinese course that I will be taking. Thanks for the link about the character writing. I will look into that too. Are you familiar with the books: 1) Remembering Simplified Hanzi 1 by James W. Heisig 2) Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters: A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters by Alison Matthews and Laurence Matthews Do you know if these are good books that will help me effectively remember the Chinese characters? Also what ratio (a:b:c:d:e) should I be splitting up my time between: 1) Listening 2) Reading 3) Spoken Interaction 4) Spoken Production 5) Writing Currently I'm not thinking about the ratio of which category I'm practicing in. But I have noticed that usually in language learning, my speaking skills will be decent but my listening skills and especially my writing skills are poor. This is probably so because I concentrate mostly on speaking. Edited by zilan2367 on 07 July 2014 at 5:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| zilan2367 Newbie United States Joined 3789 days ago 27 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English Studies: Thai* Studies: Spanish | Message 27 of 66 07 July 2014 at 5:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks for the link. I read his post and it seems very interesting. I think I might look into a Mandarin tutor because unfortunately, there isn't too many Mandarin speakers in my area. The only practice I get with speaking with real Chinese people is going into Chinese restaurants and struggling to order some food. I will quote him: "I'd say that writing by hand helped me learn characters and improve reading speed. I think I "know" those characters I can write from memory more deeply than those I can just recognize. But I don't know if it's really necessary. Knowing character components is important, but I could imagine that it's more efficient to not bother with the mechanical skill of writing. It really takes a huge amount of rote repetition to learn to write by hand. I did it late at night when I was too tired to study more vocab, so I felt that I wasn't taking away time that I could put to more productive study use." The syllabus for my Chinese course is not yet available but I think that I will have to write in Standard Chinese in class. I can't imagine taking a test and the teacher allowing the students to write the answers back in pinyin. Also, I was studying the writing in the morning, rather than at night. I will try to study writing at night now just to see if I can remember some characters better at that time. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4628 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 28 of 66 08 July 2014 at 12:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm a devotee of "Remembering the Kanji" (for Japanese) by the same author. But I strongly recommend against you using it. The order taught is based on groups of characters with similar components, with no regard given to how useful the characters are. If you get though the first 500 characters (out of 3000 total) you'll know a few common ones and lots of uncommon ones. Heisig's view is that eventually you'll have to learn all the characters anyway so you might as well learn them in the most efficient overall order. But this logic breaks down in your situation. You need to know the most common characters for your class and don't have enough time to learn all 3000. Edited by AlexTG on 08 July 2014 at 12:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4434 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 29 of 66 08 July 2014 at 6:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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When it comes to learning and remembering Chinese characters, the teacher in class used to write them
on the board and we would write them into a notebook over and over half-dozen times until they stick in your head. For somebody who is not currently in class, depending on your knowledge of Chinese characters, you may want to watch the video presentation on stroke order. Once you get a hang of writing a few characters, you can get a basic phrase book. With a piece of paper next to it and a pen. You just go through each line and practice copying the characters line by line. Even a character you see a character in a video, you can pause the video and practice writing it on paper. In the beginning you may be more focus on stroke order to learn a few radicals and characters. The next phrase would be less focus on writing but reading books, newspapers, magazines to recognize characters. One must not forget in this day and age, a lot of young people are doing Email, texting with their portable devices. Recognizing characters in Chinese becomes more important than being able to write characters from memory the way you recite passages out of Shakespeare's plays. Just to give a practical example: There was a TV program from Taiwan a few years ago featuring a group of university students discussing various subjects "大學生了沒". In 1 of the episodes several foreign students were tested on their ability to recall Chinese characters. Several Taiwan natives claimed they get characters mixed up. A local singer 陶喆 Táo Zhé (a local singer) on the show claimed he is so used to using phonetics to enter characters in electronic devices that he wouldn't be able to write a character by hand. The show included an ABC (American-born Chinese), a half-Chinese from Haiti, a White American and a few others. The original video: 大 學生了沒 ========= Based on personal experience in 1989 I was in Taiwan for a summer exchange program with an American friend. He learned his Chinese from his parents but over the years have taken Chinese language courses in the US in collaboration with the Confucius Institute 孔子教学 partly funded by 漢辦 (an agency under the Ministry of Education of the Chinese government). We both attended language classes in Taipei at the lower-advanced level. Every day for 3 weeks we had to read a story in Chinese and do character dictation on paper the next morning. We would spend at least 1h each evening before bedtime to drill on unfamiliar characters. In the end all the hard work paid off. After returning to N. America from Taiwan, we wrote letters to each other mostly in English and then he insisted that we write to each other in Chinese. We sent paper copies by "snail mail" for a number of years before I decided to have my letters typed on a computer. A year ago, he finally decided to give up writing by hand and input characters by Pinyin. I learned to use Zhuyin but didn't find it practical on computer. For a while I was typing words and phrases in English and used a Chinese input software like an English-Chinese dictionary 漢英字典 for looking up characters and last year I finally decided to take a few months to become proficient with Pinyin. Edited by shk00design on 08 July 2014 at 6:34am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4434 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 30 of 66 08 July 2014 at 7:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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When you are learning a language, should you repeat words & phrases and how often?
Different people would have different opinions on the subject. Based on my personal experience on a less proficient language French you would find a set of learning videos, books and other audio resources. And then you'd go through them in sequence as many lessons as you feel you can handle in a day. Go through several lessons all the way through at least once before going back to review less familiar words & phrases. The first time you want to get some kind of regular pattern of the language into your head. For example: if you want to say a "person goes to the movies" in French you would go through a list of sentences starting with the pronoun "I" down to "They" as a set: Je vais au cinéma. Tu vas au cinéma... Elles vont au cinéma once before backtracking. The next day you'd pile on another set of lessons. You'd keep moving on until the end of the week. And you would review quickly the lessons you studied from the beginning of the week. You would pay attention to /repeat a few more times only the words & phrases you have trouble remembering. As you start adding words to your list, you'd start seeing common sentence patterns that you'd be able to substitute with other words and phrases such as: I'm going to Paris => Je vais à Paris. The next time instead of Paris, you substitute with à Londres, à New York, etc. And once you learn that in front of a city name you use "à" and in front of a country name you use "au" for masculine and "en" for feminine, you can now say "Je vais en France" and "Je vais au Japon". In Chinese you can take a similar approach. First few sentences you introduce yourself: 你好, (How are you?) 我是 Michael (I'm Michael) 我从美国来的 (I'm from the US). After you learn a few basic sentence patterns pattern you can use other phrases: 早安, (Instead of starting with 你好 for every greeting, you substitute with Good morning) 我叫 Ben (instead of saying I'm Michael, you change the name to Ben and say something like "I'm call Ben") 我是澳洲人, 来自墨尔本。(Instead of saying I'm from the US, you say "I'm Australian from Melbourne"). The 2 sets of phrases are similar: 1. Basic greeting. The first set you say the Chinese equivalent of "How are you?". The second set you use "Good morning" 2. Your name. The first set you say I am [your name]. The second set you say I am called / my name is [your name]. Slightly different word for the same thing. 3. Your location (where you come from). The first case you say you're from the US. The second set you say "you're an Australian", a slightly different variation from saying "you're from Australia". In the beginning the phrases you use in your conversations tend to sound like the standard sentences out of a phrase book. After a while you'd be able to substitute words and phrases to fit the context for different situations. In French you don't need to use "Bonjour" every time you greet someone you know. You can also use "Salut" (Hi) or "Voilà M. Leblanc" (Here is Mr. Leblanc). Edited by shk00design on 08 July 2014 at 5:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3882 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English | Message 31 of 66 08 July 2014 at 11:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
They don't make the students learn harder, they actually do teach less. After of three years of French classes you'll be much more "advanced" than after three years of Chinese class. Getting to intermediate Chinese in 7 weeks is highly unlikely, but covering two semesters of Chinese classes is realistic. Many universities do 4 academic hours per week, that is 3 hours of classes, which in 16 weeks equals around 50 hours of class time, make it 100 per semester, if you include studying at home (homework time is usually much less for most actual students). Squeezing in 200 hours of studies in 7 weeks is entirely possible. Best thing would be to find someone who actually took those classes and find out what book was used and what they covered. Otherwise you might end up feeling bad in class for first few weeks and feel like you know less than other students, even if in fact you have covered more than they have - it's just that textbooks introduce new vocab and grammar so differently, that moving from textbook A to textbook B (same level) might feel like moving to a much, much more advanced book at first. If you can't do that, use HSK as a rough guideline. Two semesters of Chinese equals HSK 2, see grammar points and explanations here: http://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Grammar_ points_by_level for HSK vocabulary see any flashcard site (quizlet, ANKI, memrise) or here: http://www.hskhsk.com/word-lists.html The most important thing for you is to make sure you make your studies effective and that you learn only the essential stuff. For listening practice, I would recommend listening to podcasts from this site: http://sites.la.utexas.edu/chinese/ over kiddie TV shows. This listening practice will be a closer match to what you'll need in your third semester class. For learning to write, I think memrise.com is a good tool - you can learn your vocab by using other peoples mnemonics. Also, for a quick intro see this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0h18Rdhb44 Keep you studies focused, and I think you can do it. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4134 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 32 of 66 08 July 2014 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Great idea! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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