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Lorinth’s log - 劳伦的博客 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4272 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 233 of 408 11 February 2014 at 4:45pm | IP Logged |
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A week ago, I'd read an article about what a former Swiss president thought about the future relations between his country and the EU. Well, the Swiss have decided by themselves and I've read an interesting summary in the Chinese press.
Link I've also read yet another article about the storm in a teacup caused by a tactless/rude remark about the EU of an amazingly 半吊子 US diplomat. Link I've studied 2 more minutes of the poignant 锵锵三人行 show about homeless people living in holes in Beijing. Two minutes of the show = one hour of intensive study. Way to go. If only I could find one hour/day to sit down and study like that, I'm pretty sure my listening comprehension could finally get a significant boost. Then, I watched Jet Li's beautiful 霍元甲. Again, the DVD had FR subtitles but no ZH subtitles, unfortunately. I wonder if there's some place on the net where I could find an *. srt file. Anyone? Edit: I just typed "霍元甲 srt" in a search engine, and I found it. Edited by lorinth on 11 February 2014 at 4:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4272 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 234 of 408 13 February 2014 at 11:34am | IP Logged |
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I have watched "1911" (the movie). It aims at historical accuracy, which makes for an interesting movie, but unfortunately not a good movie. The triad Sun Yat-sen and his party vs. Yuan Shikai vs. the Qing court is well depicted - I think I understand better the gist of the power struggle at play at that time and the personality of Sun Yat-sen (assuming I can trust the movie on that). However, there are lots of details, disconnected scenes and bombastic moments that people more knowledgeable than me about Chinese history may understand but that I didn't understand, because I lack the background information.
The language was sort of ok as an illustration of the FR subtitles. However, I doubt I'll watch that movie again to try and understand better the audio part. Wikipedia article 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4272 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 235 of 408 14 February 2014 at 11:09am | IP Logged |
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On chinanews.com, I read an article about the EU getting nervous, in the light of the Snowden debacle, about the collaboration between the ICANN and the US government:
"有资料显示，ICANN与美国政府之间有着长期的 合作关系。" The idea of 国际化管理互联网 is gaining ground. Link -- I worked on a 2-minute extract of one episode of 锵锵三人行 about Photoshopping people in and out of pictures, which took one hour. It's a pretty intensive but very useful exercise. -- Then, for a change, I stopped reading 鬼吹灯 and I read two pages of a history book called 中华上下五千年. I started right at the beginning with the war between 皇帝 and 蚩尤 and how the latter used magical powers to 制造一场毒雾and 吧皇帝的兵士团团围住. Chinese history is fun like that. -- In the past week, I've logged about 13 hours of listening, covering all the range between "background listening" to "intensive listening" and everything in between. However, this week has been atypical, I had much more free time than usual, and that situation won't repeat for a long time. So, when I threw that challenge of "10 hours of listening per week", I thought it would be relatively easy. But it won't. I will have to try hard to reach that target. Edited by lorinth on 14 February 2014 at 11:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4272 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 236 of 408 17 February 2014 at 2:43pm | IP Logged |
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Not much these last few days, apart from the routine: I've read a few more pages of 鬼吹灯 and of the history book 中华上下五千年, about how emperor 尧 chose 舜 as an heir, instead of his own good-for-nothing sons. 舜 was a kind of male Cinderella, in that he was ill-treated by his step-mother and step-brother, who even tried to kill him. Which didn't prevent 舜 from treating everybody kindly and respectfully. And that convinced emperor 尧 that he had found a suitable heir.
I've also glanced at the Chinese press and read an article about the upcoming referendum in 苏克兰. I've collected some vocab each day and studied it faithfully with my personal semi-SRS system. I'm logging this for the sake of my personal stats. I'd love to write something more earth-shattering but routine is often the language learner's best friend. Routine is like the undercurrents slowly, incessantly almost invisibly moving the seas. Ah, but, enough two-cent poetry. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4272 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 237 of 408 19 February 2014 at 9:36am | IP Logged |
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As I had a long drive yesterday, I could work on 3 Chinesepod lessons, no less. As explained a while ago, I have reverted back to the "intermediate" level, as my primary objective is to learn to understand stuff that I already know in writing, and not to learn new words. The reason is that, at the intermediate level, there are not many words or expressions I don't know (when I read them) and, still, too often, I do not understand them (when I hear them). So I'd rather go on converting my passive reading vocab into passive listening vocab.
With these three podcasts, my experience has been about the same: on first hearing, I could understand the general meaning, the majority of sentences and many but not all details. I'd rate my comprehension at 75%. With repeated listening, I could increase my comprehension rate to, say, 90%. After listening to the vocab audio file, I could increase that rate up to "just about everything". I also listened to the full lessons (dialogues with comments in ZH and EN), but that was mostly to iron out any outstanding point. At that point, I could listen to the "expansion" sentences with a comprehension rate of virtually 100%. I'd be happy if I could reach 90% comprehension on first listening. At that time, I'll be ready for the upper intermediate level. But maybe I'm being too perfectionist and I'd better stretch myself a bit into "upper intermediate" territory. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ninibo Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 4014 days ago 88 posts - 116 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 238 of 408 19 February 2014 at 4:31pm | IP Logged |
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I've been doing the same with the advanced chinesepod episodes. It's rather depressing to see that i would have no trouble understanding everything in the transcript, but as soon as i listen to the dialogue my comprehension drops. Same with TV shows, without the chinese subtitles i'd understand about half.
加油！ 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4272 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 239 of 408 20 February 2014 at 9:30am | IP Logged |
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Hello Ninibo. At least it's reassuring to know that other people are in the same boat - though, at the advanced level, you are two ships ahead! Frankly, listening comprehension is turning out to be the most challenging and frustrating part in the process of learning Chinese. When you learn to read, you can guesstimate the number of characters you've learnt, the number of words you know, devise progressive plans to improve your reading and literally see your progress. With listening comprehension, at least in my case, progress is so slow, spread over so many months or even years, that it really seems there's no progress at all. For me, it's been mostly an act of faith to go on working week after week. I have to tell myself again and again that, if I keep on working every day on it, it's just not *possible* that I would not be progressing somehow, even if it's not visible.
And above all, in spite of the frustration, I keep telling myself that I have to enjoy the ride without looking too much into the future. There's nothing pessimistic in what I say but, heck, there may even be *no* future. I don't know, for instance, the circumstances of life may *force* me to stop studying Chinese - so I have to see some benefit and some fun right now, even when there's no visible progress. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ninibo Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 4014 days ago 88 posts - 116 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 240 of 408 20 February 2014 at 2:26pm | IP Logged |
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For me the hardest part is to find something that i enjoy listening to. After all, if i only understand half of it and i have to keep listening or watching it over and over i want to be at least entertained. I guess the only thing that helps is stubbornly believing tht one day it pays of, and i understand everything on first try.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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