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Muddling through in TAC ’10 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Toffeeliz Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5684 days ago 116 posts - 130 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Russian | Message 33 of 95 15 February 2010 at 5:46pm | IP Logged |
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thats more than the sections in WuJiaoChang in Shanghai and WangFuJing in Beijing!
PS. who is Atamagaii? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 34 of 95 16 February 2010 at 4:53am | IP Logged |
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Yes! I'm so incredibly lucky to have so many random Chinese resources... although to be
honest some of them are not that useful. The book-buyers at the bookstore aren't students of Chinese themselves, so they have really random taste. But students and professors occasionally recommend material so there are some gems in there too. I guess I can't really complain though. ;) I might be spelling the name wrong - again, the user was a little before my time here - but I mean that one poster who basically started the threads about Listening-Reading, got banned for personal conflict, and keeps on sneaking on back under various names. Which is bizarre behavior but I like his sense of humor (minus ad hominem attacks), so I personally don't mind, but he always gets caught by the administrator within a couple of days. :) Here's the poster talking about L-R under the username Siomotteikiru, a name that was much harder for me to spell... http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=6366 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 35 of 95 01 March 2010 at 4:17am | IP Logged |
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And now for something completely different!
Well, a little different anyway. We're still talking about languages here. But instead of beating myself up once again for yet again failing to put any time into Mandarin this week, I thought I'd talk about Arabic instead. I've mentioned Arabic a couple of times in this thread already, but I haven't really chronicled my studies on this site lately. I guess I just didn't feel like I was doing anything especially interesting or worthy of chronicling. But all that is going to change! Because starting this week, I'm going to officially add spoken Arabic to my TAC list. In the coming weeks, I'd really really like to: 1) Work towards eradicating my heavy American accent. (I'm not sure exactly what I'm mangling in terms of pronunciation but I'm guessing that ghayn and the rolled r in particular are tripping me up.) 2) Learn connecting phrases/words to buy me time in conversation: بالذات , الظاهر ... 3) Become more comfortable with making mistakes in spoken Arabic (I find that often I will know the grammar/vocab I want to use but am too nervous to get it out properly). 4) Get a LOT more exposure to Levantine Arabic, which will be my main focus as nobody really speaks MSA anyway. 5) Be able to read things out loud (MSA) fluidly and with appropriate intonation. I do not know yet exactly what I will do to work towards these goals, but I can sense that I have many hours of listening to recordings on my iPod in my future! Obviously Arabic will be my priority for the foreseeable future; I'm sure however that I'll find myself looking wistfully at my Chinese materials a week or two from now... I've only been listening to Arabic for the last ten minutes and I'm already missing the glorious feeling of UNDERSTANDING what I hear... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 36 of 95 17 March 2010 at 8:08am | IP Logged |
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Well, uh, that motivation went fast.
Actually, apart from homework and all other "required" activities, study is going great. I've been doing a lot of composition in Mandarin lately (new study project that I am very excited about - more on that later when I'm further along in the process). The last time I wrote in Chinese, it was December. I'm ashamed to say that I seem to have forgotten EVERY CHARACTER I HAVE EVER LEARNED in the intervening months. I actually had to look up how to write "ge wei!" Oh dear. Well, I'm not too worried - I'm optimistic that the characters will come back eventually with enough exposure. It was either optimism or soul-crushing despair at the thought of the thousands of little scratchy lines that I must now re-memorize. Other than the character situation, I'm actually doing fine. I'm reading, I'm talking, I'm reviewing. I mean... I complain a lot about lack of progress and things like that, but that's just because I only go online when I'm stalling. Facebook? HTLAL? E-mail? I check these places all the time, but I only post when I'm feeling especially frustrated, because when things are going great, well... why post? Things SHOULD go great. That's what needs to be happening. Given the amount of effort I put in (>0), I feel fully entitled to success. It's setbacks that are anomalous and that I feel the need to comment on. My next project is to start making my Mandarin flashcards on smart.fm. I have some horrendous amount of actual, deadline-tied work that I have to do first - hours and hours of it - but I feel confident that I'll have free time again soon! And when I have free time again, Mandarin flashcards, and also some Arabic, I guess. I should do more news in both languages too, seeing as I actually never touch the stuff. Maybe I should block the New York Times etc from my computer and force myself to read news in foreign languages? Edited by annette on 17 March 2010 at 9:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 37 of 95 17 March 2010 at 8:21pm | IP Logged |
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I don't really understand what the difference between Beijinghua and Putonghua is?
Pyx posted this excellent link over on the HTLAL Internet Resources board. It's a Japanese site, but if you don't know Japanese or can't find your way around with just kanji recognition, there's a button labeled EN that may help a little. Anyway, in his post, Pyx stated that on this site "you can get video dialogs of Beijinghua (and apparently also Putonghua)," which made me think that they must be very different to merit that distinction. But honestly, I'm not really sure what differences I should be seeing? I've gone through a few videos now and I'm understanding everything. So far it doesn't look like there is much of a gap between Beijinghua and Putonghua, apart from the minor accent/vocabulary differences that you'll find between region and region anyway. Am I totally missing something? Maybe I've accidentally found my way to the Putonghua videos instead of the Beijinghua? It's a nice site nonetheless. I especially like the transcription in pattern 3. Edited by annette on 17 March 2010 at 8:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5963 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 38 of 95 17 March 2010 at 10:12pm | IP Logged |
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A while back, I asked two people from the mainland about the Beijing dialect and Standard Mandarin. They both agreed that the Beijing dialect had a lot of slang, basically regional phrases. One person said that the Beijing dialect has a lot of words which are pronunicated differently than what is listed in a dictionary. He thought the Beijing dialect was very different than Standard Mandarin. The other person said that the pronunication of Beijing dialect words do match what is in a dictionary. For the second person, the difference of the Beijing dialect was the heavy use of 儿 and the amount of slang. The first person is from Jiangsu. The second person grew up in Beijing with her family being from Shanghai. Go figure.
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| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 39 of 95 17 March 2010 at 11:02pm | IP Logged |
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What the second person said (use of 儿 and slang) seems to match up more with my
experience with those videos. I guess part of the confusion for me is that I had never really given much thought to Beijing having its own dialect. I'm not arguing with the label, just noting that in my mind I had thought of the strain of Chinese I heard in those Beijinghua videos as merely "Putonghua spoken by Beijing people." I think I probably categorized it this way because it seems that I can mostly understand what I hear of Beijinghua, as opposed to something like Shanghainese, which I can't. Of course I don't know any of the slang though. I also find that I can't reproduce the Beijing accent very well. I tried to imitate it to someone the other day and to my surprise, it was very hard! I found myself putting 儿 in the wrong places, and the quality of the tones was actually pretty difficult to reconstruct as well. Maybe that's the first person you talked to was referring to - I do find that the Beijing dialect/accent differs a little from Putonghua in terms of tones, although I can't describe how. I don't think it's that words have different tones, though, just that they sound different in that accent. Edited by annette on 17 March 2010 at 11:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 40 of 95 18 March 2010 at 4:27am | IP Logged |
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So I've said this several times now but I think my main challenge in regards to my TAC
will be consistently putting in study time despite lack of motivation. I personally have never been very interested in doing things that I do not enjoy. I recognize intellectually that it's a valuable and necessary skill to develop, but on a basic emotional level, eating bitter simply feels like irrational behavior. And to be honest, I don't operate on that intellectual level in my daily life; I'm an emotional creature, and I don't always do well with the intangible, and conscious analysis slows my limbs and hinders action. So when I'm sitting at my computer and nothing is pressing and I am distanced from life, sure, I can stand back and say, "If I do this thing that makes me unhappy now, I'll reap this benefit in the future," but when I'm actually faced with the decision of what to do RIGHT NOW, I always, inevitably choose the easiest path. Because that benefit? It's in the future. It's the far off destination, the word on the sign-post. But when you are standing at the crossroads, you can't see that far. All you can see is that you have three roads in front of you, and they are all dark. This is a long way of saying that there are certain aspects to learning a language that maybe taste a little bitter in the mouth. Flashcard review, for instance, or character memorization. For me, there are two bugbears: 1. Listening Comprehension. I'm a little hard of hearing. This generally isn't too problematic in my native English because I'm familiar enough with that language (obviously) that I can catch only part of a sentence but still fill in the gaps. But in foreign language study, it is absolutely a thorn in the side, because I simply cannot hear the sounds that people are making, so if I don't know the word, I can't even look it up or repeat it convincingly, because I simply am not sure what it sounds like. So as a result, I have to listen to things many, many times in order to really drum that sound into my head, so that the next time I hear only half of the word, I might be able to somehow remember the other half and understand the darn thing. This is not fun for me. I get embarrassed, I get nervous, I even get insecure. And if I'm listening to video, I get very very bored and frustrated. Result: I don't do any listening unless I already understand the content. For obvious reasons, that's a problem. 2. The News Journalism is a very different beast from literature. And I've always been more of a literature fan. In Chinese, the differences are especially obvious, right down to the use of grammar. I can read literature relatively easily in Chinese (ease of reading varies from author to author, of course). The news? Not so much. I rarely read fiction with dictionary in hand, unless I want to read very intensively. I generally read newspaper articles with three different online dictionaries open in tabs. And in contrast to my reading speed in fiction, I go very, very slowly. Result: I constantly promise that I'll read newspaper articles every day... when I have the time for it. And I never have the time. Questions of motivation are especially frustrating for me because I never know whether my disinclination to do something is me or my disease. I have only one solution to this problem - to keep on, to do what I can - but if it's just me, then why can't I go farther? And if it's the disease, will I ever be able to succeed? I usually delete posts in which I talk about my personal life and mental health, because it isn't really that relevant to this project, and I understand that these struggles make some people uncomfortable (especially if I whine about it on their facebook walls, but anyway). But today I think I'm going to let this one stand, because it really is the defining conundrum of my life, and it really does affect my approach to study. I took a year off from school to work with my psychiatrist on my treatment plan. Simply put, it's not working, and I now have to accept that I cannot amputate this disease, that there is no magic solution, and that I will have to grapple with the beast for a long time yet. And frankly, that terrifies me. Thank you for your patience. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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