js6426 Diglot Senior Member Cambodia Joined 4510 days ago 277 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English*, Khmer Studies: Mandarin
| Message 25 of 111 13 February 2013 at 9:25am | IP Logged |
Thanks! Also great story reading by the way!
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proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 26 of 111 19 February 2013 at 9:49am | IP Logged |
Hah, thanks. I have an idea for another recording, but I will leave it a mystery for now. A three-day weekend here has done its usual damage to my rate of additions, I am only up about 7 or 8 Chinesepod lessons since my last log.
I did add another Anki deck (this makes seven, ulp), and am about 30 into that. It's a deck of the odder traditional->simplified characters which I picked up on chinese-forums.com here.
There's 532 of them in the deck, which, after going through RTH for so long doesn't really seem like that big a deal at this point. If I do 5 a day, that's a mere couple of months, so off I go on that. If there's one thing learning Chinese does for you, it's teach you to set long-term goals. I did 10 a day twice but that was clearly going to be too much. For about 2/3 of them so far I know the simplified character and/or meaning already, so that's nice.
I started using a fountain pen for character writing about a week ago (just for amusement, really), but it is hilariously awful for the traditional characters with all the little bits and dians here and there. Most of them look like cat footprints at this point.
Anyway, traditional characters are pretty much vital for the aforementioned game I am now playing in my spare time, so into the heap of stuff they go. They would also be useful if we ever go to Taiwan at some point since it would be sorta sad to be able to talk but not read there.
This site on listing the differences is pretty neat and is where I was sort of bumbling around for a couple of days until I got the deck & it's gone into the pile of useful links I keep handy: sayjack.com
In random motivational stuff, I watched about half an hour of a movie tonight that I last watched about six months ago, and my comprehension level is much higher now. I can glance to the English subtitles, get the meaning of the sentence, and then when they say the Chinese I can find most of the words. Perhaps in another six months I won't need the subtitles. :P
Edited by proudft on 19 February 2013 at 9:49am
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proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 27 of 111 28 February 2013 at 1:22am | IP Logged |
Went skiing this weekend, still catching up on reviews after skipping three days of Anki due to exhaustion. I might get caught up today, fingers crossed.
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proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 28 of 111 02 March 2013 at 9:58am | IP Logged |
Chinesepod has some of the typical office talk/getting dinner/introducing yourself dialogs, but there are also some pretty funny and/or weird ones. So, since I am really good at procrastinating: my favorites
OK, now that I've got that out of my system I can get back to Anki-ing.
Edited by proudft on 02 March 2013 at 9:59am
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proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 29 of 111 06 March 2013 at 7:13am | IP Logged |
Current Chinesepod lessons:
Words: 240
Sentences: 214
Shadowing: 99
Remembering the Hanzi: 2204
Total Words: 3430
Total Sentences: 1497
I should figure out averages/day once I get to the 8th or so, that'll be an even 3 months since my first post.
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proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 30 of 111 11 March 2013 at 2:56am | IP Logged |
Average new stuff over 93 days:
- Words: 16.4
- Sentences: 11.4
- Hanzi: 3
OK, characters needs to be added faster, yeesh.
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proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 31 of 111 23 March 2013 at 6:23pm | IP Logged |
I've been super busy with work and travel stuff, and adding new stuff continues to
suffer. I'm making a concerted effort to concentrate on the RTH and try to add new
characters faster - once I get those 3000 characters done it will be a bit of a load
off.
I'm exactly halfway through book 2 - 2250. The last couple days I was able to add 11-
15 new ones each day, and if I can keep up that pace it'll be something like two months
for the remaining ones. So the end is in sight, but, man it takes a while.
I might try adding things in a couple of batches each day. Ten here, ten there, ten
there. It might be a complete disaster the next day, but if it works it would really
speed this process up. It worked for vocabulary words, but those seem to live in a
different part of my brain.
Other stuff: I finally finished that first story in Chinese Reader 3. Trapped for a
few hours with no internet is how I will get through a print book, apparently.
I've also been messing around with FluentU. This is
a website that basically takes Youtube videos and adds subtitles and translations, and
there's a bunch of additional stuff like vocabulary lists and quizzes and whatnot. I
had signed up for the beta some months back, and poked around a bit, and then forgot
about it. Coming back, I am now at my same stage here as everywhere else - 'I know all
these words, but they talk too fast for me to figure it out in time'. Just need more
volume of input, I guess.
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proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 32 of 111 24 March 2013 at 8:48pm | IP Logged |
Whoa, I was looking through my recorded TV stuff to find a show to watch and found these old episodes of Jia You Er Nv. And I can actually read the subtitles. Holy cow, I think all the Chinesepod sentence reading has finally paid off. Looks like a lot of terrible-sitcom watching, pausing, rewinding, and repeating is in my immediate future. :P
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