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TAC 2013 Team 鶴 All Chinese All The Time | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4658 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes  Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 9 of 14 24 December 2012 at 10:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi, interesting log you have here. Although I think you exaggerate (a bit) the differences between Taiwan and mainland Mandarin in your comment to Solfrid, what you say about Taiwan people pronouncing all syllables with the inherent tone, rather than making the second syllable neutral, is spot on. I have a pretty good level of Mandarin which was gained mainly by study in Taiwan – I did 6 months of classes at Taipei Language Institute in Taichung when I was starting out, and later I did a month at Shida’s Mandarin Training Center in Taipei. At Shida (Taiwan Normal U.) I had a chance to talk to one of the professors at their institute for teaching Chinese as a second language, and her main comment about my Mandarin was that I never used the fifth (neutral) tone. Actually I don’t particularly want to learn this, as far as I can tell it doesn’t make my spoken language harder to understand. Maybe this has to do with the fact that I really focused on learning the characters early on, and in a sense never really treated two-syllable words as fully independent of their character constituents, I don’t know. What you say about knowing the stroke order, visualizing etc is also totally valid in my view – I also think it’s worth actually writing the characters out by hand multiple times, to give yourself a kind of tactile memory of each one as reinforcement. Anyway, 恭喜 on starting Chinese, or maybe it should be 恭喜發財 – have an auspicious 2013! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LittleBoy Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5302 days ago 84 posts - 100 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 10 of 14 12 January 2013 at 1:21am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello fellow Team 鶴 member!
Struggling through Heisig myself, I'm slightly jealous of your photographic memory! You seem to have a great list of resources too, might have to look at some of them myself. I agree that being faced with a huge pile of two-character compounds on top of the individual hanzi is somewhat disheartening. And I also agree that 1400 characters after 2 years of studying at university level doesn't sound great. Best of luck for 2013! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| BloodyChinese Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 4356 days ago 39 posts - 61 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2 Studies: Mandarin, Korean | Message 11 of 14 12 January 2013 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks!
I apologise for the late update, but I committed several mistakes when I went on Winter vacation. The first mistake was to go on vacation. There is no such thing for a serious language learner, especially when you are learning Chinese, specifically the Hanzi. Never take time off. I mean it. Daily review of the characters is the key to learning them well. Tools such as the Heisig method just facilitate the process. Once you are at a certain point, reading will naturally reinforce the most common characters in use, but then it will still help a lot to keep up your Anki review cycles for the less common Hanzi. Chinese is one of the few languages where even native speakers forget half of their own words(in their written form) due to lack of usage. Certain easy characters will stick in your mind immediately, some others will not. The Heisig method helps with the latter. I don't think it is a wise idea to come up with stories for each and every character. Systematisation of keywords helps though. Since I visited my mother during Christmas, I had the chance to talk more, but I did less and less writing practice, which has resulted in an awful lot of work just getting back to where I was before(=Anki review hell) The second "mistake" was to also ignore my University assignments. The exams are scheduled to start by the end of this month, so I won't be able to progress with my "private study" outlined here until they're over. I will still try to write a proper Chinese introduction though. One thing I have noticed when speaking to my mother is that her Chinese is way different from the stuff I am learning at University. Which isn't surprising of course, as you can't learn conversational Chinese from a textbook, but it was funny to see her replace all the phrases I had learnt at University with more natural sounding ones. Beginning with even something as simple as "nǐ hǎo", which she maybe uses to greet people for the first time, but then quickly replaces with 你吃饭了没有?(nǐ chīfàn le méiyǒu?/lit. have you eaten yet?) The good thing is that she doesn't use any minor slang words and that she knows Standard Chinese(as standard as it gets I suppose). Since I listen to other sources I know that she has crystal clear pronunciation and doesn't use uncommon patterns or words. Still, her conversational Chinese delivered at a speed about 10 times as fast as Eddie Murphy made me realise just how much I need to learn and how ridiculous the cocky statements made by some of my Chinese teachers at University are("Chinese people won't be able to distinguish you from native speakers by the third year!"). One of these Chinese teachers(from Nanjing) speaks German at an amazingly fluent level, but you can still easily hear that he's not a native speaker. He asserts that it is impossible for East Asian guys to lose their accent and use of rather stilted expressions while Western people can reach native level proficiency in spoken Chinese. Well, Dashan and Julien Gaudfroy(look them up on youtube, they're GOOD) come to mind but I don't buy that statement because natural sounding Chinese has a certain melodic flow to it that I've rarely heard reproduced by foreign guys. It doesn't have to do with the five tones. Every language has a certain sing-song quality to it, which you can prove to yourself by entering any phrase into a text-to-speech software. The output will sound very strange. We. just. don't. talk. like. machines. So, in terms of Chinese, we initially get so caught up in learning the proper pronunciation(gotta get those tones right!) that we sound like retards to native speakers. As the years progress, we sound less and less like Microsoft Sam, but there's always those tiny little details in pronunciation and usage of expressions that will irritate native speakers and tell them that you're from some place else. While my mother is really astonished by Dashan and Julien Gaudfroy and needs to look twice to know they're not Chinese, I am sure that they still make mistakes from time to time that "blow their cover", so to speak. But with most mortal guys, like me, the mistakes are so glaringly obvious that they are apparent the moment I open my mouth. Don't take this as a discouragement though!. It just takes a loooong time to become really proficient at anything, including Chinese. But time becomes irrelevant if your motivation is high enough. So, I am currently catching up with school bureaucracy, as the Real CZ calls it, while trying to not forget what I've learnt privately so far. Edited by BloodyChinese on 13 January 2013 at 12:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| billyshears66 Groupie United States Joined 4506 days ago 69 posts - 78 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 12 of 14 22 January 2013 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello fellow teammate. I'm impressed with your progress so far and I'm excited to follow
your progress throughout the year. Good luck on your goals. ... I'm jealous of you having a native speaker, that is related, to talk with. I have a bit of social anxiety and I'm half scared to talk to people... I will fight to get past it though. Keep up the good work! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| iawia Bilingual Pentaglot Newbie Taiwan Joined 4581 days ago 35 posts - 55 votes Speaks: EnglishC2, Mandarin*, Taiwanese*, Cantonese, Spanish Studies: Thai, Japanese | Message 13 of 14 28 January 2013 at 7:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi fellow teammate
I've read and listened to your self-introduction, and given the time that you've studied Chinese, I think you have accomplished much in such a short time. I've read your log, and it's great that you have such an environment to learn Chinese. The written self-introduction was flawless, and you used quite astounding phrases! 風雨同舟 共渡難關! I think that is more to Chinese than what meets the eye, for some reason there are those foreigners that still can't master the tones of Chinese, and there are always new characters you don't know, 成語you have never heard of before, and Chinese historical stories, classical literature and so on. But don't worry! Oh, and I totally agree with what you have said here:
In fact, I listened to your self-introduction, and you pronounced most of the words with correct tones, but when read together in sentences, you do sound like one of those old-fashioned electronic dictionaries. No offence, but spoken language does have "flow". However, since you have set up quite a nice immersion environment and developed good study methods, I think near-native fluency is certainly possible! For now, time and perseverance is all you need. Good luck! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| BloodyChinese Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 4356 days ago 39 posts - 61 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2 Studies: Mandarin, Korean | Message 14 of 14 28 January 2013 at 1:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Haha, thanks iawia! I had hoped you would take a look at my introduction.
I actually went back and listened to it again and it makes me cringe a little bit because it does sound really strange at times. You can literally hear which phrases I practically used for the first time. Throughout the whole "ordeal", I had to slow down and think a lot, which explains why I talked like Microsoft Sam :P. What I spoke about is possible after you get lots of exposure to the spoken and written language and work at reproducing it until you get to the point where you no longer need to think. Edited by BloodyChinese on 28 January 2013 at 1:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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