dhaubles Newbie Afghanistan Joined 3945 days ago 16 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 1 of 18 12 February 2014 at 5:06pm | IP Logged |
Welcome all to my language log.
I started Mandarin back in Sept and haven't really got especially far but have recently
felt inspired to continue again with renewed vigour.
My basic method is inspired by what I have learnt lurking about on these forums here
and over at chinese-forums.com (mandarin-specific).
AIM: I aim to get a minimum of 1 hour of study in everyday and to hopefully improve
that baseline with time.
CURRENT METHOD:
pimsleur
anki revision
FSI material
Presently I do a Pimsleur lesson everyday whilst on the subway and I usually spend an
hour doing it: 30m for the previous days lesson and 30m for the new lesson. I only just
started FSI two days ago and am figuring out how best to incorporate it into a study
plan. As for Anki I am in the process of switching over to the 10,000 AJATT method and
am sourcing material from both pimsleur and FSI to achieve that.
CURRENT GOAL: Given my minimum expectations of myself are 1hour a day, I will be happy
to continue Pimsleur at the current pace and hope to have it finished in two months.
Brief bio: I am starting from scratch, I currently live in China (and will likely
continue to be here for some time) and I work fulltime.
Wish me luck!
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Tollpatchig Senior Member United States Joined 4000 days ago 161 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Maltese
| Message 2 of 18 12 February 2014 at 5:40pm | IP Logged |
Good luck! I'm not learning it Chinese myself but I do like to wander around YouTube
channels looking for different language learning channels (it's weird, I know). One good
Chinese channel is Yangyang Cheng
her videos are pretty fun to watch and I found myself trying to learn along with her.
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dhaubles Newbie Afghanistan Joined 3945 days ago 16 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 3 of 18 18 February 2014 at 5:53pm | IP Logged |
Tollpatchig> cheers mate!
Back again for an update:
So far I'm proud to say I have stuck to my goal of a minimum of 1 hour of study every
day. In fact, I surpass that most days.
As for the details:
I have finished Pimsleur 1 (picking up from where I left off) and I am now at Pimsleur
2 lesson 4.
I have still to organise all my anki cards but i have thus far inputted all of pimsleur
I in sentence form.
I haven't yet figured out how I will manage to cover pimsleur/anki and FSI in my
limited study time but I am working on figuring out a study plan to do all of
pimsleur/fsi and anki concurrently.
Goal towards the end of this week:
have anki up to date and be regularly practicing anki everyday. try to make sure a
reasonable number of characters are being learned every week.
figure out a study plan for tackling fsi/anki/pimsleur
Year long goal:
learn 1000 characters
be able to pass the hsk 4 exam
be conversational in mandarin (be able to survive in the language without having to
resort to English to ask: "what does that mean",; "can you explain this?" ; "how do you
say this, etc,..."
POST: I intend to update this only once a week due to time constraints and my trying to
write/research less and practice more! This is turning into more than just something I
have to do! It's becoming a passion/obsession!
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Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5858 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 4 of 18 18 February 2014 at 8:40pm | IP Logged |
I think you'll need more than 1000 characters to pass the HSK4. I studied pretty intensively my first year (3-4 hours a day, plus movies, anki, etc. in addition to living in China) and don't think i could've passed the HSK4. The HSK3, definitely. Anyway, i hope you make all the progress you're looking to make and more.
The FSI course tapes are each about 30 minutes, you could spend a couple days with a tape and move on to the next when you feel comfortable. But if you're only doing an hour a day and splitting that between Pimsleur and Anki, i don't think you'll be able to finish it before the years over. I think it took me about 10-11 months doing 2-3 hours of FSI a day. At the very least, i do recommend doing the pronunciation module.
Good luck! I'll be following along chiming in where i can :)
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Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6078 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin
| Message 5 of 18 19 February 2014 at 9:19am | IP Logged |
dhaubles wrote:
Year long goal:
learn 1000 characters |
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That's my goal for this year as well! I don't know if I'll make it, but it will be fun to try. Good luck with Pimsleur and FSI!
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dhaubles Newbie Afghanistan Joined 3945 days ago 16 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 6 of 18 20 February 2014 at 5:00am | IP Logged |
Crush> cheers for the heads up. I am looking at ways to squeeze in a couple more hours so
that I will able to accomodate the work schedule required to complete FSI. Pleased to
hear you have attempted something similar!
Sunja> awesome! It's good to know there's at least one other who is starting from
scratch. On that subject: are you intent on writing and reading or just reading? For me
its definitely reading first writing much later, in fact I currently make no time for
writing whatsoever.
I'm wondering if this is truly possible: to be able to read a large amount of characters
without ever picking up a pen :s. Well we'll see, so far so good!
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Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6078 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin
| Message 7 of 18 20 February 2014 at 10:10am | IP Logged |
dhaubles wrote:
Sunja> awesome! It's good to know there's at least one other who is starting from scratch. On that subject: are you intent on writing and reading or just reading? For me its definitely reading first writing much later, in fact I currently make no time for writing whatsoever.
I'm wondering if this is truly possible: to be able to read a large amount of characters
without ever picking up a pen :s. Well we'll see, so far so good! |
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I'm doing everything :) Some people can learn just fine without writing, but I find I can memorize things easier if I see it on paper.
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Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5858 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 8 of 18 21 February 2014 at 2:47am | IP Logged |
The one thing that helps about writing is that it forces you to pay attention to the radicals. However, i honestly think it's soooo much easier to learn how to write a character AFTER you're really familiar with it. I started off reading and writing characters, i think my time would've been much better spent focusing strictly on recognition as that's much easier. And when you're already familiar with it, you've got a general idea of it's shape, radicals, etc. and writing it is much easier. You'll also almost never have to actually write in Chinese, everything is typing these days. A lot of Chinese people have trouble remembering characters once they're out of school, too. There were a couple times where a Chinese person would ask whether a certain character was written this way or that way to another Chinese person, and i interrupted to answer. Maybe not very "谦虚", but it was nice to know that i really had learned something :P
Now i try to maintain the characters i've learned how to write, but spend most of my effort on recognition.
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