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Mandarin journey (FSI, Pimsleur, NPCR) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6048 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 57 of 181 14 January 2009 at 6:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I have JUST pieced together the ULTIMATE method (for me at least). It took at least 4 different programs to do it and about 10 hours of research..but OMG YES! And it is already working like a charm, and will work for any language, but is especially good for Chinese.
haha...hahahahah...HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHHAAHHAHAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAA A!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! God I feel like an idiot before. Character count is meaningless to me now and I laugh at people who brag about how many they know. Assuming constant rate of words, your character known count will taperoff logarithmically anyway. Memorizing characters and words is nothing, "it's the CONTEXT, stupid" Skype = awesome. Had no idea the voice quality was that good. That basically solves the conversation issue, on the whole. Still meeting with my native RL convo partner and already I am developing my conversation ability. Things are moving FORWARD and I can't wait to get to the magic point. I'm on MOD 7 FSI but I need to imput all the past MOD's target sentences into ANKI and run them through my method before I move forward. I don't have the base firm enough yet. I just got NPCR vol 2 today, was kind of dissapointed with the rate of speech being absurdly slow. Still, its more sentences and more contexts that I will rip off the CD for my hungry monstrosity, as well as reading practice. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sossy Bilingual Diglot Newbie France Joined 5790 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 58 of 181 15 January 2009 at 7:48am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hello Irrationale, I must say I am very impressed with your hard work. I have started Pimsleur I this week. I lived in Shanghai for 15 months so I already have basic chinese but I thought it was best to start from the beginning to make sure the pronounciation is correct. I would love to improve my writing but time is a big issue for me. Pimsleur is good for that for i listen to it in the metro and since i already have notions, for the minute it is very easy. In your process, you have worked so far for 3 months, starting with 30 min per day and finishing at 3h30 per day. I would never have enough time to be able to do that. Well done ! !
Question : do you only learn the writing of the words in the Pimsleur lesson or do you also learn new words ? I used to use this website when I was in China and met up with locals to practice my chinese, i'm sure you can find people near where you live (but it is an exchange so requires more time) : http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/ I find it a little depressing that you have put so much time into learning chinese but you say it is still hard to have a real conversation. Do you think it is only due to the lack of conversation ? Anyway, I found your posts very intresting and motivate me. Thanks 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6048 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 59 of 181 16 January 2009 at 12:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks for writing :) I'll try to respond to some of your questions..
Actually, these days I study around 4 to 5 hours a day and 6 to 7 hours a day on my days off. You don't want to know how many ANKI reps a day I do. Does that make you more depressed? Haha.. I am truly obsessed now, and being obsessed requires a lot of time so its not for people with a life!
No, no...you need more than Pimsleur. ESPECIALLY Pimsleur III's vocab is horrible. What I did was this; I started with Pimsleur. I waited (for several reasons) until about 1 month or so into Pimsleur, then I started FSI, and learned all the vocab from there. Around 1.5 months later, I started collecting useful vocab from anywhere I can (I mean anywhere), and I'm currently memorizing all vocab from FSI and all vocab that I find in my chat convos. Every word a learn, I learn to read, write/produce on command.
This is a good question. I think for 3 reasons. First, I think so, yes, it has to do in large part with lack of conversation. I am trying to remedy this by meeting with a native, and skype, but nothing beats real life FREQUENT exposure. Secondly, I have to say that native Chinese speakers have been pretty brutal with me so far. My Spanish speakers helping at the beginning me slowed down their speach, used less complex words, less idioms, etc. The Chinese people I have talked to use full throttle Mandarin with me, and when I say "please talk slower" they switch to English. Maybe I need to speak to one that speaks no English? Hmm.. Maybe other people can verify/deny this. Third, its just a harder language dammit! If you don't really want this you will quit, so get ready. For me, the massive context variable of Mandarin is what is killing me with my convos, because I am a perfectionist, and someone says "oh, in this situation you wouldn't say that, you say this". Also, my FSI lessons haven't really taught basic convo skills until now (MOD 7). For ex, I just learned how to say "like that", and "to make someone.." which is essential for something other than finding a bus stop or asking where the bathroom is. Perhaps NPCR will fair better, but right now it seems really basic. I hope at least their vocab/context will be a good suppliment, and maybe I will get a lot of reading practice. I plan to do all NPCR volumes. The good news is that I have a basic "chat" convo ability, but I don't think this really counts at all, because it doesn't require immediate production and you can use dictionaries, etc. Regardless, I soldier on. Thanks for your kind words and encouragement! Edited by irrationale on 16 January 2009 at 12:23am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6048 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 60 of 181 16 January 2009 at 12:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Serendipitously, just after I posted this the "amazon recommendations" at the bottom recommended "1400+ Chinese Conversational Phrases", and this is exactly what I am looking for so I bought it!
Thanks amazon! You know me too well! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sossy Bilingual Diglot Newbie France Joined 5790 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 61 of 181 16 January 2009 at 2:48am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for your reply.
I totally agree when you say that the chinese people are being hard with you. That's the main reason why I found it so hard to progress when I was over there for when I tried to speak with them, either they didn't understand or they would laugh ! So they continued their way or spoke to me in English. It kind of put me off making any efforts. Also the problem with shanghai is that it's full of 'laowei' and the chinese people just assume you can't speak (mainly cos most 'laowei' don't learn the laguage) so don't make the effort back. The main problem with the chinese language is that if you don't understand a lot of voca, it's very hard to understand the sentance, thus conversation, it's not like English, Spanish or french where you can puzzle up the words for it to make a global sense. This is the concept I explain to people when I explain why chinese is so hard. I am very pleased to start Pimsleur all over again for even if I know the voca, I really feel an improvement in my pronounciation. I think it would be best to practise with a chinese person who doesn't speak English very well, then you both teach each other new words. When I lived in Shanghai, my boyfriend had a language exchange with a guy who spoke neither french nor English (we are french) and so they met up in a cafe with a deck of cards or a book with pictures and exchanged vocabulary, like children : What is this ? What does it eat ? etc... The only inconvenient with this is that you need structure to really continue and make you progress. It's true what you say for with my language exchange, the guy was more intrested in my life than learning french so we ended up speaking English most of the time cos it was easier to chat. A bit annoying. So I think either someone you pay so has an obligation to speak chinese or someone who is very motivated to learn your language. Does this make sense ? Good luck. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6048 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 62 of 181 20 January 2009 at 4:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well, I am into MOD 7 SOCIETY now, and the difficulty and content skyrocketed from the earlier MODs. They might as well be totatlly different. Advanced level (conversation level??) mandarin is waayyy harder than I thought it would be. Way different from English.
Finally I am getting real conversations and not "how do I do I get to Chang An street?" It took awhile. Tons of example sentences in FSI now, so this is good. It will take more than the reference sentences..way more. They all go into ANKI. Started book 2 of New Practical Chinese Reader. Actually, I'm pretty pleased with it. Audio is laughably slow, but perhaps it gets faster later. What I like about it is it is good actual converstions and not silly function questions all the time. Sort of like Pimsleur's content. Also, it has grammar, which I usually ignore, and lots of words, which is great to round out my stale FSI vocab with more modern words. Its great reading practice also. My conversation ability is developing, finally. My main problem is I simply don't know enough words, and haven't heard them enough to distinguish. Also missing a lot of common "filler phrases" that language courses never seem to teach for some reason. I bought a book to hopefully deal with that. But what little I do know, I know very well and can converse pretty quickly. This will improve with time, I suppose. I am trying to have conversations everyday via skype, even if I fail miserably. I need something for my listening ability other than FSI. Maybe an audio book? I won't be able to understand, but I need to improve my listening ability regardless. Any ideas would be appreciated. Edited by irrationale on 20 January 2009 at 5:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6048 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 63 of 181 21 January 2009 at 8:47am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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FSI vs NPCR thoughts.,,
Actually, I am liking NPCR quite a bit. Very nice completement to FSI, which focuses almost purely on spoken proficiency, whereas NPCR focuses mainly on reading and writing and building that ability. I can't imagine using NPCR for conversation/listing...I don't think that is possible, personally. Also, since context is so important to me now, the range of contexts in NPCR is very nicely balanced with convos, pratical situations, etc. Contexts in FSI are very partitioned, whereas in NPCR they are all cohesively together, which is refresing. Also vocab in NPCR is, in my opinion, far superior for more general use. I am already learning basic words that took 50 lessons to learn in FSI. Words like "bring"...umm yeah... Of course I am completely modifying the study plan for NPCR, and putting through my method, ignoring long useless grammar tables, etc. Extracting setences into ANKI for context..etc. Its working out nicely, and pretty easy right now, basically review. I am going to get into a nice rythm and do 1 lesson every two days for now. FSI on the other hand is absolutely crammed with new content each Unit, some of which is quite advanced. Each of these units is about 3 to 4 past units. I am pacing myself on FSI now and also going back and adding setences from earlier units. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6048 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 64 of 181 21 January 2009 at 8:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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哦，这是我的一个中国写的例子。我中国写得 怎么样？虽然我写不太好，可是我还试试。我 跟有的人连天，连天了一个月了左右。那是我 查 中国词的做法。我希望以后我的中国词比现在 更多。如果你会看我写的，请你告诉我我的错 。谢谢：） Edited by irrationale on 21 January 2009 at 9:02am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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