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Snowflake’s Mandarin Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes  Studies: Mandarin | Message 297 of 740 01 October 2010 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the kind words.
The characters are still active in my SRS deck. That said, there has been slippage. My thoughts are all over the place so this may ramble. I don't use a lot of material that was specifically created for language learning use. Part of that is that I tend to find a lot of those materials to be rather dry. When hitting intermediate, many of those materials start introducing terms which are used in writing but are generally not considered part of daily speech. It's annoying that distinction is not noted. Right now I tend to depend very heavily on movies, not set in ancient times, since the dialog will be characteristic of regular speech. As my recognition of characters is rather poor, I'll copy sentences into Nciku, or an adso site, to get the pinyin and any needed definitions. I did that yesterday with something that a chat partner sent. It was something poking fun at work life, 12 pages of photos and captions. The photos contained a woman holding a small white board with written English dialog; the captions were in traditional characters. So I spend time copying the captions and translating. It is a pain in the neck having to translate most things since my character recognition is so weak. This topic also opens up something that for me at the moment is mostly closed. I get things in both traditional and simplified so a fair amount of translation has to be done anyhow. I regularly get emails in Chinese, mostly in simplified. Any Chinese snail mail is almost always in traditional characters. I've even been getting a quarterly magazine in traditional characters (no I didn't subscribe). I don't necessarily read everything though mention this since focusing more on reading puts a different slant on things. Signs in the local Chinatown may be in traditional or simplified. In church it's the same, some things are in traditional with some in simplified. I am not a fan of simultaneously studying both character types. And given the sources I am using, there isn't any distinction as to levels. My animated movies are probably mostly in the intermediate range with some spots which would be considered advanced. TV series and movies with live actors would probably be in upper intermediate to advanced. The blurb mentioned earlier, that pokes fun at work, has a good amount of pretty advanced vocabulary. Recently was thinking that I'd start retackling reading again when I can engage in a conversation reasonably well. Then I was mulling over how to define "reasonably well"....maybe when my mother says that I speak Mandarin, which will not be a high level by the standards of most forum members. Right now she says that I'm learning Mandarin. My mother speaks Toishanese and understands Mandarin. However her comprehension is not good enough that she would watch Mandarin TV programs or the news. I've also had some thoughts, when tackling characters again, about doing it ala AJATT in an attempt to break my overly heavy dependence on pinyin. So many things to think about... Edited by Snowflake on 02 October 2010 at 5:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 298 of 740 02 October 2010 at 5:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, I just purchased a level of ChineseLearnOnline. As a sort of test run, I used the website dialogs with a mainland chat partner. Given previous experience, I was unsure how this person would take to the Taiwanese material. She really liked it! We also went through a lot of dialogs really fast. So now I feel some pressure to quickly work the material so as to keep up with our chat schedule. So now I'm committed to working through material that was actually created for language learning,
An up.... in the past this person very rarely understood Chinese sentences that I formed myself. This time she did. Edited by Snowflake on 02 October 2010 at 5:45am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6321 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin | Message 299 of 740 03 October 2010 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi Snowflake, I read some of your log and just wanted to voice my support for your efforts because I can totally relate to your situation of growing up linguistically confused. My parents are also native Toishanese speakers, but mainly speak standard Cantonese outside the house. And since they are also fluent in English we kids ended up speaking only English in the end, though we can all understand Toishanese and Cantonese to varying degrees.
I don't know if you've heard, but there's a new Cantonese podcast that looks promising, Cantoneseclass101.com. Curiously, they currently only have lessons for beginner and advanced levels, but I think this just may be what we Cantonese learners have been looking for. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 300 of 740 05 October 2010 at 4:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi Sheetz, thanks for the info and the encouragement! Edited by Snowflake on 05 October 2010 at 4:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 301 of 740 05 October 2010 at 4:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Pushing pretty hard right now on my studies... the brain wants a rest.
Was asked this weekend if I was from Taiwan. That was a bit of a surprize as I am pretty sure my Mandarin has an American accent. The majority of my material was done for the Taiwanese market and the bulk of my language exchange chats are with Taiwanese....so I guess that's coming through rather clearly now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 302 of 740 07 October 2010 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Recorded myself....I do have a bit of a Taiwanese accent. I already know that my word usage and patterns tends to be Taiwanese. Last year when taking class, my mainland instructor would correct sentences that I had gotten from Taiwanese movies. She'd basically change the sentence to be more direct.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 303 of 740 14 October 2010 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Lately I've mostly been alternating between heavily hitting the SRS entries (echo'ing any phrases), echo'ing CLO material and echo'ing movie phrases. I started CLO at a level which has very little English. Since my vocabulary is all over the place, I already know a decent amount of the "new" words in the upper levels and so don't feel bound to necessarily use the lessons in their intended sequence. CLO seems to be turning out to be a good compliment to my movie materials. The only thing is that being behind in my SRS entries has become normal.
Think I surprized the people in one of my small groups in that my comprehension is better than they expected. My standard response regarding how much I understand is 一点点. It's not at a level that I'd consider to be good, only decent for limited situations. Edited by Snowflake on 15 October 2010 at 8:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jasoninchina Senior Member China Joined 5175 days ago 221 posts - 306 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Italian | Message 304 of 740 15 October 2010 at 7:56am | IP Logged | ||
This has also been my response for quite some time. At some point, we need to amend that response, but I don't know what to. I am very hesitant to tell people that I can "speak" Mandarin but I surely understand more than 一点点。When you come up with a good answer, let me know :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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