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Mandarin: Year 3.7 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 33 of 111 29 March 2013 at 8:06pm | IP Logged |
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Up to 2313 in Remembering the Hanzi, and have been watching 1-3 episodes of Jia You Er Nv each day. I can tell what the episode is about, so that's good. Just can't make out each sentence. They don't seem to match the episode guide on Wikipedia, but whatever.
That's about it, nothing too exciting. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 34 of 111 04 April 2013 at 12:05am | IP Logged |
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Hoo boy, I am sick of Anki lately. Clickclickclick. I'm gonna try the Gold List method for some variety (and to get some time off the computer) and see how that goes. I think I might have enough characters/words known now that this short learning style won't all vaporize in my head immediately. We'll see, anyway. Plus it would be a little more portable, though I can almost always web-anki if I have to it would be nice for airplane flights or whatever.
So reviews only on Anki decks for now, except for RTH 2. Then for the Gold List method my lists of 20 (25 won't fit in my notebook) I'll break them down for now into 10 words from the MMORPG, 5 words from a list of measure words, and 5 from the list of 'odd traditional characters'. None of these lists are super vital so if the method is a horrible failure I won't be too upset. :P Links: The Gold List (along with lots of people saying it failed for them, hee hee) List of Measure Words 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 35 of 111 13 April 2013 at 5:26am | IP Logged |
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Back from another week out of town, during which I didn't put anything new into Anki. But all reviews are caught up, and I did listen to about 8-9 hours of Chinesepods on the driving journey. They were all Intermediate lessons that I have 'learned' but I never actually listened to the lesson part. So there was lots of grammar stuff and miscellaneous explanation to learn that was useful, plus I can understand most of the Chinese-language back and forth talking now. More than half of it, at least. And now I have listened to every single Intermediate lesson that I have been reviewing, hooray!
My Bronze List(s) are up to 120 items now, I've been doing that regularly. The notebooks are handy for being away from a computer. I am sort of skeptical that I will remember anything at all, but maybe when I see my handwriting of the English words on that first list in another week or two it will trigger something, who knows. Reading speed continues to increase. I can almost make it through a page of the Chinese Reader 3 in a reasonable amount of time. Slow and steady progress on that front. I think the subtitles to Jia You Er Nv are actually helping this as well - they are on the screen for, like, three seconds so I have to read really fast. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 36 of 111 29 April 2013 at 6:22am | IP Logged |
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Well, I did my first Gold List review. Three weeks after list #1, I remember 1.5 items instead of the goal of 6 of 20. Hmm. Well, maybe it'll get better later. I dumped the extra words over 14 onto the beginning of the 180-200 list.
I've been collecting words like a squirrel collecting nuts, primarily from the MMORPG. The new words list from that is close to 500 now. Whether Gold List will get them in my brain or if it will become a gigantic Anki thing remains to be seen. Also my Chinese version of Game of Thrones book #1 arrived yesterday after a month-long transit from, according to the stamps, Fiji. I had ordered this after hearing so many people say 'I read Harry Potter and it helped me tons!' Well, I didn't really LIKE Harry Potter so that idea didn't seem very appealing to me, but I do like me some Game of Thrones. I made it through two pages so far, just today. The translation is kind of funny - the dialog is frequently reordered. Like, in English, the line is "We should start back. The wildlings are dead." And then in Chinese, it's "The wildlings are dead. We should start back." Keeps me on my toes, I guess. Not sure if this is usual for translated things, this is really my first one. And it's easier to read than the Mandarin Reader so far, which is strange. Either because I know the story already or the structure is less confusion. But, I've got bedtime reading for like, a year, now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 37 of 111 31 May 2013 at 8:40am | IP Logged |
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Been bad about updates, clearly. I haven't added much to Anki, sort of continually procrastinating on that. Will do better in June - new month, new start!
The last weeks: Though little was added to Anki, I have been diligently keeping up on reviews and as the number of reviews has (so, so slowly) dwindled, the review now takes about half an hour, which is much more manageable and further reduces any excuses I might have about adding new stuff. I decided the Game of Thrones books are too hard right now to make progress through at any reasonable rate of speed. I found, doing line-by-line translations for a while, that though I know all the characters, many of the combinations into words are new. And by many, I mean a LOT. So! Deciding that, if that was too hard, and Mandarin Reader wasn't thrilling me, I should give the Chinese Breeze books another shot, and lo, I finished WRONG WRONG WRONG (which is not nearly as salacious as it sounds) in about a week - probably about 3-4 hours total, which is embarrassing but oh well, I have to remember I am basically reading at a kindergartner level. I am currently on CAN I DANCE WITH YOU? which, thus far, isn't as interesting as WRONG WRONG WRONG, but who knows where it will turn.... Though severely limited in vocabulary (allegedly 300 words), these Chinese Breeze books do have the virtue of no pinyin crutch, and my endless reading of Chinesepod sentences means I can read these characters and be quite certain of the tone and sound for each one, since they are all so common and I have seen them umpteen times. Though I still am not entirely sure how WRONG WRONG WRONG wrapped up due to grammar confusion, at least I was able to read it and, more importantly, finish it. I did a couple more Gold List reviews, each as pathetically inept as the first. I still have some time within that 2-month limit for some of that first batch but I better get a move on. The aforementioned books: Wrong Wrong Wrong Can I Dance With You? (I have the print books; I have no idea if the Kindle editions are any good/legible/etc.) Edited by proudft on 31 May 2013 at 8:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4264 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 38 of 111 31 May 2013 at 10:03am | IP Logged |
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Hello proudft,
Nice to see someone else enjoying the Chinese Breeze series. I've read them all (I think), 1st and 2nd level, and I believe they are a wonderful stepping stone. Although the stories and plots IMHO are not always fascinating, at least they are varied. They allowed me to cement my knowledge of basic characters, helped to kill the fear of reading Chinese without pinyin and made for a rather large quantity of interesting comprehensible input. The audio versions are also useful. 加油! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 39 of 111 02 June 2013 at 12:13am | IP Logged |
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And now the plot has thickened in Can I Dance With You?! The police have arrived!
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5143 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 40 of 111 08 June 2013 at 2:29am | IP Logged |
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I tried another couple of Gold List reviews and... they sucked. OK, forget them for now. I think they would actually work for me for something like Spanish which has cognates and an alphabet, but at this stage it's just too much to have a simplified character, a traditional character, pinyin, and meaning. So I immediately activated all the accumulated MMO words into Anki and restarted the new words per day for that, and the traditional characters.
Four days later, and I've been adding 20 a day from the MMO and they have been SUPER easy. So I think something stuck in my brain somewhere, either from writing them out, or seeing them on the screen in passing, or, more likely, I just have more background now which helps out the memorization. Like today, for example, I add a character used in an owl monster in the game, 鴞 (xiāo), meaning, "owl", apparently (though I had learned owl as 猫头鹰). How am I going to remember the pronunciation? Well, the left half looks like hao and the right half looks like niao, and though neither of these are xiao, they both sort of rhyme with it. So it's not trying to remember a pronunciation in a vacuum and it's almost like I can read these squiggles... it's a miracle. I've also been ramping Chinesepod back up. Not back up to three lessons a day yet, more like one or two, but I think the month of nothing-but-reviews may have actually been good to sort of solidify some of this stuff somewhere in the recesses of my brain, which is somewhat of a relief after feeling guilty about not adding anything for so long. The new Chinesepod words have sticking really well just like the MMO words, though there are not nearly as many of them. So, in summary, Gold List not working for me, back to Anki, my memory seems magically better of late. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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