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Mainly Mandarin-(yet another Chinese log) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6382 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 41 of 74 10 January 2012 at 6:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'll also be following Benny. I had a great time the two times I visited Taipei and am of course interested to see how far he gets.
PS Your log is the first one I've been looking for recently! Really interesting. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5311 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 42 of 74 10 January 2012 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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> Since di-di is now considered somewhat vulgar
there is another word that is now used for the relative “little brother”, but of course I forgot that one too... 胞弟 is another word for younger brother. I think the pronunciation is bao1 di4. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6232 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 43 of 74 10 January 2012 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks @ newyorkeric ! I have a lot of fun writing it! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| SueK Groupie United States Joined 4754 days ago 77 posts - 133 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 44 of 74 16 January 2012 at 7:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm wondering if you've tried Memrise.com and, if you had, what you thought of this method vs. 'Remembering the Hanzi....'? If you're not familiar with Memrise, I suggest you check it out, as it does speak to your concern about not getting the pronunciation while it still provides some memory aides, albeit ones built by the community (many of which are excellent). It also adds in spaced repetition that I assume a text would struggle to support. I just caught up on your log. I found lots of tips in to chase down, so thank you for that as well as the entertaining read. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| JayR9 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4703 days ago 155 posts - 162 votes Speaks: English* | Message 45 of 74 17 January 2012 at 8:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hello, Thanks for a good log.
I am wondering though, Where can I watch this Benny programme? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6232 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 46 of 74 17 January 2012 at 10:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
fluentin3months.com An interesting read ! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6232 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 47 of 74 17 January 2012 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The online ployglot community seems to be a fairly small but well connected group. Most of us tend to be
educated professionals with a passion for languages, travel and culture. The are, however a few “rock stars” in this arena who have taken this avocation to whole other level. One such “rock star” is Moses McCormick. Moses (at last check) is “conversational plus” in over 50 languages. This is clearly a pretty amazing feat considering that he is only in his 20’s and most of us can’t even name 20 languages. Moses began his language studies at The Ohio State University where he majored in Chinese and became a highly sought after language tutor. A tutor not just in Chinese, but in several other languages, including some that he never studied. Since then he continues to accumulate more languages. He currently spends three months on each new language but approaches no more than four languages a year. Clearly Moses has found a way to “hack” the system. He has and he calls it the FLR method. FLR stands for “Foreign Language Roadrunning” and is designed to get students up to conversational ability quickly. Through his own studies, he identified several common components and phrases which were necessary to speak at an elementary level. He also noticed these same sentences applied to whichever language he was studying. No, it was not “This is a pencil … This is a blackboard” … My house is big ...This car is new...” He found that learning key interrogatives and memorizing several predictable, stock sentences was much more useful and efficient. For the interrogative “what” , for example, he might learn: Q: What's your reason for learning Chinese? / Nǐ xuéxí zhōngwén de yuányīn shì shénme? A: I want to learn Chinese because I want to go to China one day. / Wǒ xiǎng xué zhōngwén yīnwei wǒ yào dào zhōngguó qù Q: What is your job? /Nǐ de gōngzu. shì shénme? A: I’m a student / Wǒ shì yīge. xuéshēng Q: What do you do? / Nǐ shì zuò shénme de? A: I study at the university. I’m a teacher / Wǒ zài dàxué xuéxí. Wǒ shì yīg. lǎoshī Q: What is your age/How old are you? / Nǐ duōda le A: I’m 30 years old. / Wǒ 30 suì Q: What do you do in your spare time? / Nǐ yǒu kòng de shíhou zuò shénme? etc... Once all the stock questions and answers are familiarized for all the interrogatives, he introduces what he calls “key words”. These are the connector words that give speech the fluidity expressed by advanced speakers. He has about 40 of them. A few for example are : as long as, continue, still, probably, maybe, usually, sometimes, ok, I see, once in a while, always, especially, like this, like that, must, simply, yet, I feel that etc. He memorizes these 40 words and then uses them to recompose the sentences that he has previously learned. The key words can then link several of the sentences together and give a sense of fluidity to them. He makes his own drills by writing and memorizing these recombined sentences. Once he has done this he gets to work speaking with as many native speakers as he can find. For some more obscure languages he has to do it online or in chat rooms. For a language like Mandarin, however, it is usually not too difficult to find speakers in the community. This is supplemented by using a textbook and recombining the textbook’s dialogues with the key words as above. He then does the same process for comprehension difficulties: eg: “I can’t understand you when you speak that fast, if you slow down I might be able to understand better...”. This is followed by creating a stock paragraph introducing oneself that can be automatically reproduced from memory with a native speaker. This method has been incredibly effective for Moses and his students. I met with him over Skype yesterday to discuss the method and how I could apply it to my Mandarin quest. Moses greeted me with a huge smile. He is incredibly friendly and clearly has a passion for languages and linguistics. We went through his own current plan for learning German. I was amazed! 50+ languages and he hadn’t tackled German yet. We shared a laugh over that one. The great thing about his FLR method is that the learner can self-tailor it to his/her own needs. We talked about the textbooks that I was using and he pointed out that I could use a free online course called “Book 2”. Think about it. Countless scores of people are throwing hundreds of dollars away on ineffective courses like “Rosetta Stone” and Moses is using a free online course called Book 2 (& getting much better results!) We came up with a plan for me to efficiently tackle Mandarin Chinese. This week I am going to familiarize myself with the key words and memorize a solid chunk of the key questions and answers. The DLI course is on hold for right now and in its place I will start going through the Assimil Chinese With Ease course. The Assimil course lends itself to this sort of method better than the DLI course does. Oh yeah, and I am definitely going to check out the Book 2 course! 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| JayR9 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4703 days ago 155 posts - 162 votes Speaks: English* | Message 48 of 74 18 January 2012 at 12:45am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for that link about Benny and WOW about 5o languages. That Is amazing. I will keep coming back to your log and see how you get on with It. Interesting to say the least.
Thanks again. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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