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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 57 of 111 06 August 2013 at 3:10am | IP Logged |
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Finished Unit 6 and C1 of Unit 7, and through episode 8 of Step by Step. I really like the explanations in 6 of the different uses of le for time durations, that's something that never really got explained to me anywhere else. Likewise with the differences between nian and xue so far in Unit 7. Still impressed with FSI and still pretty sure if I had started with this from the beginning I would have crashed and burned - it's already pretty hard when I know all the words. But it's good, and since I alternate between exercises that are horribly hard and actually fairly easy, it seems to be covering a lot of gaps for me.
I also did some major reorganizing and regimenting of my schedule last week which seemed to work well for Getting Stuff Done, and in this schedule Anki gets 1 hour and FSI gets 45 minutes. It seems a little short for Anki, actually, I had to catch up a couple times during lunch and haven't been able to add any words, so I might have to add a little more time - though I'm not sure when. Chinese was a major motivation for doing this scheduling because it was tending to eat up a lot of the day due to procrastination of reviews and whatnot. So now my calendar is now a hilarious patchwork of colors, and trying to fit all this stuff into an actual schedule makes me wonder how you crazy multiple-language learners do it. Maybe you don't sleep? :) The TV watching & MMO are off in unscheduled leisure time, but if you figure I have 2-3 hours of those two activities per day (which seems about right to my recollection) I'm looking at about 5 hours of Chinese every day, which is not perfect but not too shabby either. 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 58 of 111 20 August 2013 at 9:50am | IP Logged |
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Finally allllmost done with Module 2 of FSI. I've done the first of the review tapes, and decided to start listening to Unit 1 of Module 3 before the other since it fit into my schedule better - review tape 1 took like 45 minutes with all the pausing I had to do to come up with what to say on the production part, and I know review tape 2 is going to be a lot harder and probably take about an hour.
I've been much much better about adding words to Anki. I've been doing a page of Hanzi 2 every day for at least a week (just passed 2500), and one to three Chinesepod lessons as well (usually during lunch). The new schedule is a bit hectic but gets things done (all sort of things, not just Chinese), so I guess my theory of fully scheduling out each day in 45 min to 1 hour increments to avoid procrastination is sound, despite how OCD it looks. Basically if I have 6 hours to do a half-dozen things none of them end up getting done, but if I have 1 hour to do 1 thing then I am somehow compelled to actually do it. I feel a bit like I'm somehow tricking myself even though I'm the one who made the plan, it's sort of odd that it actually works, but it's been 3-4 weeks now and it's still working, so, good, I guess. But it only works because I stick to the schedule like a slavedriver, and I think I've decided that 45 minutes for FSI is a pretty bad choice. I've been doing only one tape a lot of days since they tend to be 25-30 minutes long, and then don't have enough time for a second. So I'll adjust that up to an hour, I think, but where to grab the extra minutes from... Probably from a break. Who needs breaks? In 'fun' Chinese stuff, we are on episode 23 of Step by Step. This episode was missing on viki (gasp), but fortunately I had recorded the show on ICN about a year ago, and although I never got around to converting it I dug up the one episode on my drive and pshew, evening was saved. I missed the Chinese subtitles, though. 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 59 of 111 28 September 2013 at 3:20am | IP Logged |
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Wow, I've been not updating this. Well, my wife was on vacation for about five weeks, so I was not too good at keeping up with FSI or shadowing, both of which drive her up the wall. We did, however, finish Step by Step. Now I suppose we have to find another show.
Remembering the Hanzi is up to 2582, which is not super good, but I keep plugging away and hoping to add new ones faster. I would add like 20 a day if I thought I would remember any of them the next day, but apparently my brain just doesn't like that. Each character seems to take 3-4 days to really stick, it's sort of annoying. On the flipside, the MMORPG words are getting easier and easier to memorize. I've almost reached where I 'am' in the game... I had been several weeks behind each zone for most of this. I'm up to 637 of those, which is kinda funny. That many words not ever coming up in a Chinesepod lesson... makes me wonder how useful they will really be. But words is words. I love strange English words, so I don't really care if a Chinese word is rare or not, as long as there's still room in my brain for the useful ones. Chinesepod has been sort of neutral. 288 lessons so far, and 87 are Intermediate, and the recommendation is to do 120 of those before moving on to Upper Intermediate, so still a ways to go. I picked up that first story from Chinese Reader 3 I finished a while back and started re-reading it. Much faster the second time and the sentences make a lot more sense. It's weird how there's never a definite moment where you say ok, now I understand this grammar thing. It's really fuzzy and just grows on you over time apparently. I blame the lack of subjects in a lot of these sentences, and you have to be able to read the characters at a decent speed or you'll forget the previous sentences that the current sentence is building on. Or something. Anyway, that was a pleasant surprise, and maybe the second time through it it won't take a month and I will actually figure out how it ends. FSI I got up to Module 3 before the great vacation derail, and need to get that re-started now that things are back to normal. In a funny semi-language-related thing, I was getting my haircut where I normally do and the two women who cut my hair (basically one of the two of them randomly each time) were talking in their own language when I came in because there was nobody there. And though I've been getting my hair cut there for like, a decade, I never really asked what they spoke and had assumed it was Korean. Anyway, since I felt unaccountably chatty, I said 'hey, I have a dumb question, was that Korean or Cantonese?' And she said Chinese, so I said, oh Cantonese? And then I said I was learning Mandarin. And then she busts out the Mandarin, because it turns out she speaks Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, and, of course, English. Jesus Christ. So we chatted in Mandarin for a little bit, by which I mean I said about three sentences and did a lot of nodding and uh-huh-ing to everything she said. And asked my wife later how to ask people to talk slower, for next time. Well, if I get her - the other one only speaks Cantonese and English. :) So the lesson there, I guess, is that I really should just blurt stuff out in Mandarin more often, or at least frickin ask what language(s) people speak. Missed out on who knows how many 15-minute conversations with her over the years. Edited by proudft on 28 September 2013 at 3:23am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 60 of 111 29 September 2013 at 9:12pm | IP Logged |
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I feel like Scrooge McDuck this morning, wanting to count my words and see how it's going and what I can expect in the future....
So Anki tells me I'm at 4356 words known (594 visual dictionary, 2859 chinesepod, 266 reading, 637 MMORPG). And at 2591 in Remembering the Hanzi. I started this log 295 days ago with 1896 words and at 1905 in RTH, so (calculate, calculate) that averages 8.3 words and 2.3 characters a day. I guess 8 words a day isn't too bad. I can do better, though. I'm pretty sure I can do at least 20, just need to finish the Anki reviews earlier in the day. For RTH, at my current rate it's 185 days, or 6 months, to finish RTH 2. Ok, I need to speed that way up. 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 61 of 111 05 October 2013 at 2:36am | IP Logged |
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Up to 2645 in RTH 2. Been good about doing a page a day. I've also changed my learning new characters method a little... after making up & typing in the mnenomics for all of em that day, I then go through them in Anki slowly, intentionally failing them three times. Then the next morning, before any reviews at all, I pick up the book and write them out while trying to remember yesterday's mnemonic. I know Anki operates on a 1-day cycle but for these I think they are a little more difficult to stick.
Anyway, it seems to be working better - at least on the second day I've only been forgetting 2 or 3 instead of all BUT 2 or 3, so that's a little more encouraging. If I can keep this one-page a day streak alive for another week, maybe I'll try two pages a day. Madness! Other stuff is, of course, suffering. I apparently can only really concentrate on one Chinese thing at a time. The reviews always get done, and a few words here and there, and I've been good about adding new Chinesepod lessons but the reading & FSI, not so much. I have to remember that if I can just frickin' finish RTH 2 it will be one thing off the plate, and free up time for everything else. 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 62 of 111 08 October 2013 at 9:06am | IP Logged |
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2675 in RTH. Chug chug.
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| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 63 of 111 09 October 2013 at 8:48am | IP Logged |
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Well, it's been five months since my last crack at Game of Thrones, let's put together an English/Chinese version. Ok, typing in all this English is annoying, let's spring for the $5 ebook on Amazon. Oh neat, the Pleco OCR can actually read these pages of my Chinese book ok. All right, scan scan scan, collate collate. Ok, there's a lot of new words still. Let's grab them with the Zhongwen Chrome extension and put them in Anki.
And the first two (2) pages of Game of Thrones have 142 new words. Lawl. In my various websearches I did come across this repository of Chinese translations of English books: Random Website Legality/accuracy unknown. And oddly the Game of Thrones there doesn't quite match my print copy. A lot of it is the same, but a lot of it is different, too. Maybe it's an independent translation, and a lot of the sentences just happen to be the same because there's only one obvious way to translate it? A mystery. 2682 in Remembering the Hanzi 2. And the big 300 Chinesepod lesson. The landmark lesson of glory goes to a lesson about gossip about dead pigs floating in a river. Edited by proudft on 09 October 2013 at 8:49am 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 64 of 111 14 October 2013 at 8:40pm | IP Logged |
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Had a couple of non-add days, but still basically chugging along:
2707 in Remembering the Hanzi 2. Went over 3000 words from chinesepod, yeesh. Total words somewhere around 4700 from all sources. I've been blazing through the sort of grammar-y book I got a while back called Demystifying Chinese. I don't see it on Amazon anymore, but it's basically supposed to be a companion book to any Chinese course with more examples/questions/etc about various grammatical structures and whatnot. And now that I know basically all the words in the questions/examples/etc it is actually understandable. Right now I kinda feel like I am starting a Roman-alphabet language from scratch, in that I can read pretty much all characters aloud in these sorts of example sentences. It's kinda crazy that it takes so long to get to this point, but it's actually incredibly encouraging that I've finally reached it. Like, instead of battling my way through sentences one character at a time I can read it, figure out what parts are what, and then try to make sense of the whole thing. Learning this language is, without question, the most difficult thing I've ever done with my brain. I'm really glad that things seem to be accelerating a bit. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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