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Snowflake’s Mandarin Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5957 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes  Studies: Mandarin | Message 353 of 740 05 February 2011 at 5:41am | IP Logged |
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Argh...now AnkiMobile won't sync, am getting an error message. My most current deck is on the iPod.
Update: emailed the programmer who told me to apply a patch. Now it's working again. Edited by Snowflake on 05 February 2011 at 7:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5957 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 354 of 740 06 February 2011 at 9:35pm | IP Logged |
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Planning on cutting back on visiting Mandarin speaking groups a little so as to concentrate on building vocabulary. Having AnkiMobile, I've been able to do much, much better on keeping up on SRS reviews and reviewing in different places (generalization). This has noticeably improved my rate of progress, though it's still not at a pace that I'd like.
Yesterday I attended one of my small Mandarin groups. Since it's Chinese New Year, we went around and everyone talked about the past year and this coming year. Including me there were a total of 26 adults. I was the only American born adult there. There were 2 Taiwanese and the rest of the people came from the mainland. I spoke in English and mentioned working on Mandarin. Afterward, several people came forward to say they'd help me, that they would speak slower for me and that I couldn't use English anymore when talking to them. To which I said, "可是我讲的很慢" (ke3shi4 wo3 jiang3de hen3 man4). They said that didn't matter. This is different than previous offers of help... 1...They came to me as a group, not as individuals. 2...These people included the leaders of this group. 3...Their English skills vary from good to extremely good. 4...These particular people are relatively young with resources. 5...These people all have children who were born here, who are relatively young. So they are struggling to teach their children the Chinese language and cultural heritage. 6...I think Mandarin is the only type of Chinese that these particular people know. I haven't heard them mention any other types. This meeting included a potluck. This may be the first time that I've eaten some Chinese food that was not a variation on something that I grew up with. I usually buy and bring an American dessert to these though am considering next time making some sort of Chinese dessert. This group (the 20+) is comfortable speaking in abstractions. I had not noticed this sustained level of abstraction among native speakers before though now am wondering if that is because of the nature of the discussion. I was describing the plot of one of my movies to someone and said 杀不了 (sha1bu4liao3). The person corrected me with 杀不死 (sha1bu4si3). Now that I'm thinking about it, wondering if 杀不死 really is the correct translation. I guess it's sort of like telling one person 对我的妈妈, 个�� �日不是春节,是农历新年 dui4 wo3 ma1ma, zhe4ge bu2shi chun1jie2, shi4 nong2li4xin1nian2 To my mother, this is not the Spring Festival, it's the lunar New Year. To which he understandably thought there is no difference. So I had to explain that my mother left the mainland before 1949. 她很传统的 (ta1 hen3 chuan2tong3de)...She's very traditional. Update: have been trying to correct the display of characters, but certain ones keep popping up as squares...对我的妈妈,这个假日不是春节,是农历 新年 Edited by Snowflake on 06 February 2011 at 9:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5957 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 355 of 740 08 February 2011 at 3:04am | IP Logged |
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Saturday, someone gave me a sentence that I wrote in pinyin. Afterward I put together the characters but wanted someone to verify those. The person who gave me the sentence is a mainlander. The person I asked to verify the characters is from Taiwan and certified to teach Mandarin there. This is the original sentence;
现在想把时间花在学习听力和讲语言方面 xian4zai4 xiang3 ba shi2jian1 hua1 zai4 xue2xi3 ting1li4 he2 jiang3 yu3yan2 fang1mian4 My friend said that 讲语言 (jiang3 yu3yan2) is not used in Taiwan. They say 会话 (hui4 hua4). So this is the Taiwanese version albeit in simplified; 现在想把时间花在学习听力和会话方面 xian4zai4 xiang3 ba shi2jian1 hua1 zai4 xue2xi3 ting1li4 he2 hui4 hua4 fang1mian4 This brought to mind that the people, on Sat, who volunteered to help me are all mainlanders. So am thinking that I may have to shed my Taiwanese habits earlier than planned. Basically I feel it would be easier to first establish my Mandarin skills and then deliberately tackle variations. Will have to see how this goes. On 杀不了 (sha1bu4liao3) and 杀不死 (sha1bu4si3)....it turns out that given the plot of the movie, 杀不了 is correct. My Taiwanese friend said that 杀不了 has two different meanings. One of those is 杀不死. 杀不死 has only one meaning, basically extremely difficult to kill. Her example was vampires regenerating after being wounded. The other meaning that 杀不了 has is what actually happened in the movie... the hero fully intended the kill the dragon but when faced with actually doing it, he couldn't bring himself to harm the animal. My friend felt that if I were a native speaker, the other person would not have corrected me on 杀不了. Am thinking, for clarity, I will have to describe things several different ways. Edited by Snowflake on 09 February 2011 at 4:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5957 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 356 of 740 09 February 2011 at 4:48am | IP Logged |
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Was thinking today about audio clips with my SRS entries....don't have any since I didn't want to fiddle around with splicing. Well it dawned that I could record native speaker friends reading my entries. Now am trying to figure out how to set up email on my iPod Touch so as to use the voice memo function and then send the clips to myself. The recordings come out a little scratchy but that's OK. Also wondering if I should only ask mainlanders to read the phrases. That may give a better sense of how much my current entries lean toward Taiwanese habits.
Update; Think I have a different way to record separate phrases that will produce better quality audios. Edited by Snowflake on 10 February 2011 at 4:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5957 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 357 of 740 11 February 2011 at 5:33am | IP Logged |
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Trying to get back to echoing (again) and have made my own version of the AJATT site victory calendar....using CLO for echoing. The CLO audios come with a set of slowly spoken, very clearly enunciated dialogs which have the longer sentences already broken down into shorter segments for repeating. I'm also setting a timer to keep myself honest.
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| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5957 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 358 of 740 14 February 2011 at 12:14am | IP Logged |
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I am trying to do a 1/2 hour of echoing each day. Given that I have been unable to sustain this long term, am breaking it into 2 sessions of 15 minutes each. Hope this makes it easier.
Haven't started recording any audio for my SRS entries yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5957 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 359 of 740 15 February 2011 at 5:05am | IP Logged |
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I have the sense that echoing has increased the rate of brain furniture rearranging. Previously I noticed that my English speaking skills were deteriorating a bit. Some of this was expected. I conduct a lot of meetings in my current project, so any verbal slips are personally very noticeable. An example of one slip is using an English word with a p sound but actually saying something in between p and b. There are also dyslexic moments. I sometimes verbally transpose numbers. And when starting Mandarin this time around, I had no problems with 上 or 下. Now I mix these up probably half the time they're used. Today I got 前 and 后 mixed up. These sort of things used to happen when I was younger. But when I “lost” the last substantial remnants of my Toishanese, in my early 20’s, these types of problems went away. So now they've come back...unsure what this means.
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| Matty Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5292 days ago 31 posts - 35 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 360 of 740 15 February 2011 at 5:50am | IP Logged |
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What do you mean by echoing? Is that different from shadowing? (Sorry if you have mentioned this before, I haven't read the whole log).
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