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Expug’s All at On(c)e Log - TAC14 | ||
Tags: Papiamento | Estonian | Georgian | Native Materials | Norwegian | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Mandarin | Russian | German | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 73 of 415 27 January 2014 at 11:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Thanks tarvos! I've collected a few DONTS regarding Chinese, maybe more so than DOs.
My Chinese learning has been, from the start, COMPREHENSIVE. I attack all aspects of the language at once. I don't allow myself to have a biased viewing of the language. You know the principle of learning several languages at once and thus using one of them as a way for taking some rest from the other? I do this for Chinese, and in fact I treat every aspect of the language as 1 "learning slot" in my routine: conversation, reading, writing system and listening. Some of the lessons I've learned: 1) Do your HSK . Nowadays it's just a set of Memrise courses. You'll get exposed to loads of building blocks that seem to be of less importance, but you'll be on the right track to measure your progress. 2) Cheat, cheat the emk/iguanamon way. Whenever possible, get both pinyin and translation (in the case of Assimil you'll also have a hyperliteral translation). Treat your textbooks as mostly L-R tools. Keep an eye at the written text while you listen to the audio, so that you associate character and audio. Then you'll also associate character and meaning. Sometimes you'll realize you learned the meaning better than the sound, sometimes it's the opposite. In the middle-run, still, you'll keep working and filling in the blanks. Don't be afraid of becoming pinyin-addicted. You'll only become so if you simply ignore the characters. 3. While at textbooks and authentic resources, focus on words. You'll keep studying your characters from the SRS-designed courses or even from a 'mnemonics' book such as Heisig. Don't pay much attention to the mnemonics, after all, memorizing such stories may turn up harder than memorizing the actual characters as they show up. Just keep learning the characters and making good use of the sentences introduced as examples. Chinese has a huge advantage against i.e. Russian, in the sense that you very seldom get bookish sentences just for the sake of presenting a grammar point. Most of what you get is daily useful vocabulary, even if the point is just introducing a new character. 4. Listen a lot till you get used to initials and tones. Then be more selective. Don't waste much time on tourist dialogues if you already know both reading and speaking at the related subjects. It's time to try texts, which will consist of a whole new sentence structure, with longer sentences, and this time you'll need cheating again. 5. Keep it French as much as you can. The best resources for beginners are Assimil and Méthode 90 then Etape par Etape. The podcast classes are also great and I regret not using them earlier. They make the transition between stages very smoothly. Then if you want to really delve into Chinese literature and language, there are outstanding books from L'Asiathèque. Even if you are more of a talking person, at that stage you'll have realized that daily life conversation isn't that hard. At my current level I think I could go shopping at China with no big difficulty. If I had to start from scratch, I'd do the following activities a day: A) Chinese class podcast B) Assimil C) Memrise HSK courses and/or books like Peng's Fun with Chinese Characters D) A teaching series from CNTV Chinese resources are so vast. You can choose resources according to your level. For example, if I finished the Assimil and felt my grammar knowledge was hindering my active skills, I'd practice with Routledge's Basic Chinese. You don't actually need to keep reading grammar explicitly, though. As for talking, I personally had bad experiences when trying to talk with Chinese people whose English wasn't so good yet, while my Chinese was still too rusty and slow. Maybe now it's time to resume trying. I know you'd have a much better time at this. Edited by Expugnator on 27 January 2014 at 11:17pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 74 of 415 28 January 2014 at 11:30am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
What's HSK? The Chinese equivalent of CEFR exams?
I have Assimil, actually. So I think I will get something to work on the characters.
Besides Chinese builds words more simply than Russian anyways.
I think that will be the hardest thing - the tones.
Pas de problème, haha...
J'ai recours à Internet! Ça suffit pour la pratique, haha... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 75 of 415 28 January 2014 at 11:44am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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HSK is just the exam, there is no direct equivalency to CEFR AFAIK, that is, I don't
think HSK 2 corresponds to A2 or so on. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4679 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 76 of 415 28 January 2014 at 12:10pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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HSK is China's equivalent of the TOEFL. It is almost impossible to compare to CEFR, because levels 1-2-3 are so basic the highest of them is probably something like A2 (and A1 something like "A0-"). The progression between levels is not regular nor really exponential. HSK5 is probably B2 and HSK6 "B2+/C1-", I would guess.
Note that they themselves offer a comparison scale to CEFR, but no university in the West actually accepts this equivalence (they claim around a level of CEFR per level of HSK...). Anyway, regardless of CEFR, I've found HSK vocabulary list to be a good support to guide my own vocabulary acquisition. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 77 of 415 28 January 2014 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Today was the first day back at work. I was a bit busier early in the morning,
recovering and reindexing some news from last years, so I played the Georgian series in the background. I was amazed at how up-to-date the series is: while a couple was discussing, one could hear the background of the children playing, ansd that was Angry Birds' sound effects. As if it weren't enough, later on an even more up-to-date mobile game could be hard, it was Subway Surf, which I only began playing by the end of last year. Those guys in Georgian do know how to make their series sound contemporary. I started later and spent a long time at Basic Georgian, but not as much as I thought. The version exercises were shorter and they are actually getting esier. It helps that I'm already familiarized with most of the grammar and am only consolidating it. So, when I have to translate sentences that cover a brand new topic, it's actually one I've had already seen before. At TY Russian, I finally got something on verbs. Sentences actually got easier to translate now that they have a beginning and an end, and don't consist only of nominal, predicative sentences anymore. I've decided to stop worrying about schedule that much. I used to make sure I'd watch the Norwegian video before foing to have lunch. Now I only really care about getting the textbooks done, because they are the hardest to get down on later. The other activities are shorter and I can do one at once whenever I have a break, for example, watching 10 minutes from a film or even reading a short fable. It's ok if I have to scatter them through the end of the afternoon. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| yuhakko Tetraglot Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4633 days ago 414 posts - 582 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, EnglishC2, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Korean, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 78 of 415 29 January 2014 at 12:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I might have found a way for you to continue watching the CNTV videos. I'm going to
move soon so I've been getting a lot of stuff I do streaming on my PC, included the Travel in Chinese (which I started recently after all the praise you said about it). Turns out that when I tried downloading one episode, it only downloaded a part of it. The thing is that each episode (as far as I've seen) is divided in 3 parts and it usually freezes at that time. So a good way to avoid that freezing all the time could be to just download the streaming version part by part. I did it today and in 1 minute or so you can download a part of about 5 minutes and then go on with the next one. Only thing I don't like is that I have to use firefox to use the add-on to get streamings downloaded but you could find sth better maybe ^^ If you want to know more, don't hesitate ;) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 79 of 415 29 January 2014 at 4:34pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Thanks yuhakko! I'll try with either FF or Chrome later at home.
I can only access videos from other sources while at home, so today I studied from the lessons at Youtube, which consist of only the first part. I wonder why the episodes aren't available from CCTV itself at YT, as it was often the case with Happy in Chinese. So, I watched the first part of the program at Youtube, which contains the whole dialogue, then I read the notes at the CCTV site. I'll make the test of watching the rest of the episode at home and seeing if there's really important content missing that isn't on the notes (even though they are shorter indeed). Then if I do manage to download the videos, I'll get the ones for tomorrow. I tried searching for 旅游汉语 at youtube but no results :/ 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 80 of 415 29 January 2014 at 9:10pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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A couple of years ago I posted a link to the online videos and transcripts in several foreign languages at LangMedia.
Since I first stumbled on the site, the colleges involved have added more videos (and their transcripts) including short discussions on cultural facets in Georgian (all of video clips under Culture Talk Georgia that I sampled are in Georgian and accompanied by Georgian transcripts with English translations). Enjoy. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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