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Mandarin: Year 3.7 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 9 of 111 19 December 2012 at 12:43am | IP Logged |
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Still chugging away. Remind me never to skip a day just because I feel a little slow when I have this many decks. Catching up the next day took forrrreeever.... almost 3 hours of nothing but Anki leaves one's brain pretty much mush. Even split into two sessions. Time for a word count!
Chinesepod: 1517 Visual Dictionary: 419 Reader Input: 262 Total: 2198. I try to avoid words appearing in multiple decks but sometimes they sneak through, so let's round down and say 2000. Getting up there, though! Finished chapter 10 of NPCR, nothing too remarkable there. Still on instruments in the visual dictionary. I am all of a sudden much better at reading Arabic numbers out loud in Chinese, and I think this is entirely due to some Chinesepod sentences from lession 1312: Voucher Promotion at the Mall that kept showing up over and over all week. Now I can rattle off 1599 and similar numbers in a jiffy, kinda neat. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 10 of 111 22 December 2012 at 3:19am | IP Logged |
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Almost through my current batch of Chinesepod lessons, guess I'll be prepping more this weekend. Current lessons complete:
Words: 148 Sentences: 116 Shadowing: 55 (none in a week, really? whoops...) The last couple of days' lessons included: I 1955: Carpooling E 2035: Rich and Poor E 2040: Washing Clothes on the Road I 557: She's Easy E 2063: They're Twins! E 2065: Do you have class this afternoon? I 573: The Drug Dealer E 2068: Recognizing a Blind Date The elementary ones had very very little new vocabulary. The intermediates had a lot, though - especially The Drug Dealer with 22 new words which is the most from one lesson in quite some time. In New Practical Chinese Reader, I finished chapters 11 & 12. I re-caught up to that Anki deck, so 13 will probably wait a couple days until I get all the vocab from it memorized. Nothing much from chapter 11, but 12 had a good reminder for me that 还是 acts like a question word when used to present different options, like OPTION 1, 还是 OPTION 2. I will try using that more often - what happens to me a lot with 吗 questions is I will ask the question and then forget the 吗 at the end for a few seconds so I go like blahblahblahlblahblah (long pause, oh right, it was a question) 吗 . Having another option available should be handy in making me mentally remember it was a question from the start (what do people who learn English do about our tone-of-voice-making-things-questions, anyway? That must be weird...) Just out of curiosity I fired up Wikipedia last night for my bedtime reading and went to the Chinese version. After figuring out how to put it in simplified (why is that not the default?), I read over the page for "tiger" for a while, with the handy assistance of Zhongwen Chrome Extension... and, you know, I know virtually all of these characters - by sight/meaning if not sound. Pretty encouraging. And reading about something I already know about is much easier than these fiction stories I am trying to make sense of. I should add some news websites to the idle reading rotation - I had bookmarked some down months ago and figured they would be too hard. Perhaps not! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 11 of 111 27 December 2012 at 7:08am | IP Logged |
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Welp, holiday events did a number on my adding-new-stuff. Kept up on reviews, though, thankfully. Not going to make that mistake again. :P
Chinesepod Sentences are a little more caught up, up to 126 lessons. Still waaaay behind on shadowing. I'm going to concentrate on that (and NPRC) once the holiday stuff is finally over. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 12 of 111 03 January 2013 at 3:57am | IP Logged |
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Vacation(s) are over, time to get back into the thick of it! In addition to trying remembering what I was doing at work in mid-December, Chinese has progressed as follows:
NPCR: finished book 1. On to book 2, Anki-ing the words in the first lesson right now. This is roughly where my community college chinese class had left off, and it reminds me how much of a pain the characters were for me back then, as they pretty much drop the pinyin here in book 2. I really can't emphasize how much knowing the characters has improved my ability to remember stuff and wish I had realized that back then. Of course, the teacher was of the 'write them 1000 times each' school, yuck. Chinesepod: recent lessons include 2073: Hangover, 1957: Formatting a Word Doc, 589: Introducing Oneself to the Family, and 2070: What do you Like to Do on Weekends. I am currently alternating Elementary and Intermediate lessons. According to their FAQ, one is 'ready' to move on to Intermediate after 80 Elementaries and I have done 98, but whenever they put out a new Elementary lesson I can't resist adding it - for now, anyway. I caught up a bit on shadowing. I spent a ton of time on lesson 1797, which had one particularly awful sentence (nà bāng wǒ ānpái zǎoshang jiǔ diǎn kāihuì) said so fast I just kept tangling my tongue in knots trying to follow along. I can do the beginning, and the end, and the middle, but running it all together at full speed just... blam. I eventually gave up and marked the lesson 'too hard' for now (and it's an Elementary, geez). I could slow the thing down and maintain the pitch in Audacity, but I have a million other sentences I can do instead and come back to that lesson later and maybe it will fix itself. Visual Dictionary: I have made it out of musical instruments/styles and the new topic is Terrain, like mountains & deserts & such. Not many words in this section so I will have to decide what is next fairly soon. Maybe country names so I can read news articles a little more easily? Remembering the Hanzi: basically been doing just reviews for a while, the daily reviews are now down to about 35 per deck so at least that got cut down a bit. Time to start adding new ones though, or my daily average is going to look pretty depressing :P Been basically bad and neglecting reading online or print under the vacation excuse. So time to remember to do that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 13 of 111 08 January 2013 at 9:39am | IP Logged |
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Getting back in the swing of things. Mostly finished lesson 15 of NPCR, and have done all the words for 16 so I can move on as soon as I read through 15 a few more times.
Just passed 2000 on Remembering the Hanzi, so 2/3rd done with that, hooray. Current word counts: Chinesepod: 1650 Visual Dictionary: 506 Readings: 332 Total: 2488, so +290 from last count 20 days ago. Not real great, holidays really did do a number on adding new words, harrumph - so much for my pre-holiday dozens of words/day. Oh well. Did I mention I passed 2000 in RTH? :P Readings is out of ready stuff - I need to type in NPCR chapter 17 to as far as I can stand, and Visual Dictionary has like 3 words left from Terrain so I'll need to get on that too with a new topic. And looking at my spreadsheet, I'm also out of ready Chinesepod lessons too, yeesh. I see a lot of typing and cut & pasting in my immediate future. On the listening front I burned a CD of nothing but the Chinesepod dialogs that I have studied, so I can listen to them endlessly in the car. As usual, Elementary-level I can pretty much mostly understand right off, and Intermediate is a big puzzle - even though I can read them on paper, listening is a whole other issue apparently. I need to just sit down relisten to the older ones in particular and really get them burned into my brain I guess. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 14 of 111 12 January 2013 at 3:11am | IP Logged |
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Proceeding right along on Chinesepod now that my schedule is more back in order. It seems that most people get more language work done during vacations/weekends; I am the complete opposite. It's far easier for me to reliably do 45 minutes before work and 45 minutes after work than try and wedge it into a day free of scheduling!
Current Chinesepod lessons: Words: 163 Sentences: 149 Shadowing: 70 I have actually slowed down the sentences somewhat as they are closing in on the words and it occurs to me I don't actually want them completely caught up, since I need the words to percolate/review for a few days before I can easily read the sentences containing new words. Exciting recent lessons: I 1336: Computer Problems and Tech Support E 2087: Drawing Suns I 1341: Western Zodiac E 2090: Leaving a Tip I 2076: Misunderstood Taxi Destination The Zodiac one had all 12 signs between the lesson vocabulary and supplemental words so that adds to my ever-growing font of probably useless words. But you never know, I might need to say, one day, "Excuse me, it appears your sign is Capricorn and that reminds me of a news story that an asteroid is going to hit Mercury and you had better hide your pet flamingo and his crocodile friend." 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 15 of 111 18 January 2013 at 6:17am | IP Logged |
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Chinesepod continues at a rapid clip, everything else is not so good. Since I caught up the words to the sentences to about where I want to be (about 5 days behind seems to work nicely), I have to add enough new lessons each day to have 20 sentences. And it turns out that 'preparing' them at the time I first review them makes things quite a bit faster on the review than the do-them-in-big-batches method I was doing. So it adds another 15-20 minutes each day for that.
The intermediate lessons tend to have about 11-13 sentences, but doing two intermediates a day is too difficult at this time (too many new words at this point). So for the last couple days I have settled on two elementaries and one intermediate per day. Thankfully Chinesepod has a humungous stock of elementaries, and there is no worry of running out of them. The simpler sentences from elementaries is probably good for me as well, considering my grammar difficulties. I decided the next subject in the Visual Dictionary will be Occupations, but haven't started that yet. Same with reading/NPCR, I just have been bad about everything but Chinesepod. But I have been good with that. :P Current # of lessons completed: Words: 175 Sentences: 158 Shadowing: still 70 Recent lessons include: E 2081: A Day in the Life of a Student I 1345: Choosing a New Pair of Glasses (probably the most personally relevant of these) E 2083: No TP I 1351: End of the Year Bonus Surprise I 2085: Getting Warm E 2086: Bounced! I 1353: Leaky Pipes and Faucets I 2082: Sentence Grammar (the supplemental vocabulary for this one was very difficult) E 1514: City Districts in Shanghai E 1268: Light and Dark Colors of Clothing I 1356: A Cell Phone Ad on TV I am over 1200 sentences now in Anki, making good progress towards the mythical 10,000 sentence mark. I am also in the strange situation where I can rapidly read a sentence aloud and often not be sure of what I just said. Byproduct of learning the characters faster than the grammar, I suppose. It's funny though, I can read something aloud to my wife and have her translate it far faster than I can. Between the two of us, we make a complete language. I have no idea if this would ever happen in any other language - it seems very strange to me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 16 of 111 22 January 2013 at 6:57pm | IP Logged |
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I was out of town over the weekend and got back into the Chinese Reader story - and it is
much easier to make sense of now. It still takes forever to read each page and there are many sentences that are somewhat puzzling, but it is actually doable, hooray! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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