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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 345 of 408 28 November 2014 at 2:13pm | IP Logged |
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To help me clear up my Skritter backlog I started banning "writing" for some characters that
do not appear in the HSK 1-6 vocabulary list. I consider that I should be able to reproduce from memory, in writing, relatively frequent characters, i.e. as a rule of thumb those that appear in words included in the HSK 1-6 list. As far as less frequent characters are concerned, i.e. those that do not appear in words included in the said list, I should be able to know their meaning(s) and their pronunciation(s) - but being able to actively produce them in writing from memory is not a priority. 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 346 of 408 01 December 2014 at 9:58am | IP Logged |
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At the very moment when sub2srs/Anki had introduced a vast amount of fun into language
learning, the Chinese authorities have decided to close down the two main web sites providing subtitle files in Mandarin (shooter.cn and 51srt.com). Ah, well. When I've finished studying 白蛇传说, other such sites may have popped into existence. Nothing earth-shattering to log. My routine now includes reading 《哈利•波 特与密室》(now at page 50), learning characters with Skritter (in the 2000-3000 frequency range, based on Patrick Zein's list), words with Pleco (collected from my daily input), audio dialogues extracted from the movie 白蛇传说 with sub2srs and fed into Anki, plus an Anki deck with massive Cloze deletions (MCDs) (sentences extracted from transcripts of podcasts) and listening to podcasts (Slow Chinese podcast about 面子, and 火龙的传说 a story found on the site 兒童之路). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 347 of 408 01 December 2014 at 7:26pm | IP Logged |
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Too bad that you mention these two sites now that they're closed :/ (I did hear about them before, but the few times I searched for subtitles I forgot about them). I don't do Subs2SRS or any SRS, but my main source of videos are Singaporean series with double subtitles, so maybe it would be fine to make my own subtitles for videos from Mainland China in simplified characters. Anyway, I believe when the need comes there will be other options.
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| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4272 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 348 of 408 03 December 2014 at 11:08am | IP Logged |
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@Expugnator: Up to now, the internet has had a tendency to abhor the vacuum and to fill gaps, so I do hope that other Chinese subtitle sites will appear soon. Maybe there *are* others available right now, but I haven't looked very hard yet.
What are the Singapore series you use for Mandarin? I've watched a few episodes of Lim Pei Lin about food, but I'm a bit tired of cooking shows, they've been all the rage in French just as in Mandarin for a few years now and I've watched quite a lot of them in French with my family. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 349 of 408 04 December 2014 at 8:58pm | IP Logged |
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I started with 'Don't Stop Believing" someone from the Chinese team suggeted. Now I'm watching I'm in Charge. There are others like The Recruit Diaries (English-subs only) and others with only Chinese. It's easy to find more through the related videos to these.
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| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4272 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 350 of 408 08 December 2014 at 1:07pm | IP Logged |
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I'm trying to learn how to post pictures on this forum, so here are two examples of Anki
flashcards I studied this morning. The deck on the left is made of dialogues and snapshots from the movie 白蛇传说, extracted with sub2srs and then exported to Anki. This card offers a nice example of the tricky double 了 construction. Next time I'll create a deck with sub2srs, I'll try not to forget to add the previous and next sentences for context. The deck on the right is my interpretation of the MCD concept. As you can see, I take the word "massive" quite literally, with a lot of text on the front of the card, which allows me to (hopefully) produce and see a word (here 食品) in several different contexts. The back of the card contains the same text in pinyin (as suggested by Google translate, so prudence is needed). My challenge is to produce the word orally, not in writing, and to read and understand the context of use of the said word. The text comes from the "Slow Chinese" website.  
Slow Chinese Edited by lorinth on 09 December 2014 at 9:34am 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 351 of 408 12 December 2014 at 10:26am | IP Logged |
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Yet another interesting iTalki session about the scary subject of 食品安全 in China and
elsewhere. My teacher is very talkative, which is OK as I had made it clear that I wanted to improve my listening comprehension. When it's her turn to talk, I can stop her and ask her to rephrase or explain, or make me repeat some word, expression or sentence. So overall I'm satisfied with the italki experience up to now. Unfortunately I had forgotten to start my Skype session recorder, so I can't listen again. Also, as all learners know, there are days when your fluency level suddenly drops below your expectations, which is what happened to me this time. Fortunately, the other scenario also sometimes happens… You know, those days when you suddenly find that you can talk (relatively) easily about random subjects. -- As a test for when I will be finished with my Anki/sub2srs deck about the movie 白蛇传说, I have started preparing another Anki deck with another movie I like: 浴. Problem is, the two main Chinese sites (that I know of) offering Chinese *.srt subtitle files have vanished (see #346). So I will have to use the "hard burnt" subtitles provided by the DVD. In practice, I ripped the DVD with Handbrake in the *.mkv format, which is a "container" for video, audio and subtitles. After that, in Subtitle Edit, I installed an additional Chinese OCR engine, available here (https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/downloads/list), as explained here (http://www.nikse.dk/SubtitleEdit/Help), opened the *.mkv file and ran Subtitle Edit on the *.vob subtitle file. The OCR engine produced 500 subtitles in plain text. Among these 500 subtitles, not one is entirely correct; so there's some tedious editing work ahead. That's the stage where I'm at now and I feel somewhat unsure about what to do next. Of course, editing those 500 subtitles one by one *is* a form of studying, so I may gather the courage to do just that. Or maybe there's a simpler way? Anyone? -- Apart from that, I've kept on reading 《哈利•波 特与密室》 at a leisurely rate (now at page 99/203) and studying isolated characters (with Skritter), words and sentences (with Pleco), MCDs (with Anki) and dialogues from 白蛇传说 (also with Anki). I've also listened intensively to several podcasts (with WorkAudioBook), most recently Slow Chinese podcasts about 食品安全 , 海峡的两岸, 面子 and 国产动画, plus ChineseLearnOnline podcasts (lessons 236-240). 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 352 of 408 17 December 2014 at 10:21am | IP Logged |
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TESTING MY LISTENING COMPREHENSION
------------------------------------------------------------ (Warning: long and detailed post ahead) What's the problem with my listening comprehension? In my opinion, it's still extremely disappointing, after so many hours, weeks, months and years of studying Chinese. I'm still unable to listen to the news, even concerning a subject about which I've read texts in Chinese; soaps and movies are mostly opaque; even animes for kids are often beyond my grasp. If I tune in to some random radio station, more often than not, I won't be able to fathom what people are talking *about*. Let alone enjoy the show. Olle Linge, of Hacking Chinese, has devised a clever way to analyse the problem. As a summary, the problem can be: Problem analysis - phonology, if Chinese sounds like gibberish and you could not even transcribe some audio in pinyin - vocabulary, if you could transcribe in pinyin, but without understanding the words - speed, if you can understand the audio after repeated hearings, or at a slower speed - motivation, when "you just can’t get around to actually listening to more Chinese" - what Olle calls "a lack of cultural understanding, grammar or different ways of thinking and expressing opinions", which could equally apply to written Chinese. So let's see what *my* problem is. I decided to test my listening comprehension with a Slow Chinese podcast about school geniuses. Link: 学霸和学渣 Note that this is supposed to be artificially simple audio material - not because the vocabulary used in the text is particularly easy (it's not very complicated either) but because it's read slowly… that's the whole point of "slow Chinese", isn't it? So, after so many hours of practicing listening, it should be easy for me, right? Of course, I deliberately refused to peek at the transcript and used only the audio version. I loaded the mp3 file into WorkAudioBook. The file was split into 46 segments of varying length, that do not necessarily correspond to sentences or other syntactically relevant units (I suppose WorkAudioBook relies on pauses in the speech to split audio files). 1. I listened to it once "cold". Here, I should have written down immediately how many segments I could understand on first hearing. Using the tags provided by WorkAudioBook, I could have marked all segments as "easy" (100 % understanding), "hard" (no understanding of the general meaning of the segment) or "medium" (I can understand the gist, but some details are lost, or there's some guesswork going on). I did not do that, but I assess that my understanding level was around 55 % on first hearing, i.e. I knew what the text was about, and I had understood some parts of it very clearly. However many sentences were totally opaque. 2. I started to loop repeatedly through all segments and to use the tag feature of WorkAudioBook. After one hour of looping (there's about 3'30'' of audio in there, so that's a lot of looping), I still had 4 sentences marked as "hard" and another 4 marked as "medium". Hence, for 38 sentences, I had a 100 % comprehension level, i.e. 82.6 %. As the 4 "medium" sentences were not 100 % opaque (in fact I had understood three of them correctly, it's just that I was unsure, see below), I could conceivably raise that proportion to maybe 89 %. It's both very disappointing and somewhat encouraging: at such a slow speed and with so many repetitions, I could hope for 98 %. On the other hand, many sentences that I had not understood on first hearing had become understandable with repetition. So I guess it's a case of half full/half empty glass. 3. I transcribed the 8 "medium" or "hard" sentences in pinyin and looked up unknown words in a dictionary without peeking at the transcript. - Segment 1 (medium) "原来是指在 xue2shu4jie4 很有影响的人物": I had rated it as medium because I was not sure about the meaning of 学术界 or, more specifically, I thought 术 (shù) was in fact 数 (shù), so the sentence did not make sense. If I had known the word 学 术, I'd have understood. My pinyin transcript was correct. - Segment 2 (hard) "有一对 shuang1bao1tai1 学霸 tian2mei2". I looked up "shuang1bao1tai1" and found the correct 双胞胎 (twins). Again a purely lexical problem, as my transcript was correct. On the other hand "tian2mei2" was really " jie3mei4" 姐妹 ( sisters). So my pinyin was horribly wrong. In addition, I know the word 姐妹. - Segment 3 (hard): "tian2mei4li5a5 shen1jing2 jiang3 xue2ting2de5 da3bian4 shi2pin3". In this case, I didn't understand anything. Having just looked up 姐妹, I had the first word. The rest was opaque. Even with my dictionary, I was unable to find the correct words using my pinyin so, even before checking the transcript, I knew that my phonological perception was completely off. In fact the sentence was "姐妹俩申请奖学金的答辩视频", ie. Jiěmèi liǎ shēnqǐng jiǎngxuéjīn de dábiàn shìpín. In addition to the phonological problem, I had to look up 申请, to apply for; 奖学金, scholarship; 答辩, to defend (a thesis). I sort of knew 视频 (video), but as the context was completely opaque, I did not recognize it. In addition, the full sentence was spread over two segments, so it didn't help either: if I understand correctly, "申请奖学金的答辩视频" is a long subject, with the verb "流传开来" being in the next segment, after a place adverbial (在网络上). - Segment 4 (medium): "在网络上 liu2chuan2 开来". In this case, I was pretty sure I'd understood, but I was not sure about liu2chuan2. When I typed it in my dictionary, it suddenly became obvious: 流传. My pinyin was correct. Segment 5 (hard): "使很多网友 ting2hu5 太 niu3 了. Hm. My pinyin must be off because those words don't appear as such in my dictionary. A peek at the transcript, and it's in fact: "使很多网友惊呼“太牛了”. I should have recognized 惊呼 as I know both 惊 and 呼. In fact, I noticed afterwards while doing reviews that I had studied that very word (惊呼) in Pleco the *same morning*, recognized it and passed it as correct. Doing fine with a word in an SRS and not recognizing the very same word in the wild is not an infrequent event. As for the expression 太牛了 (niu2 of course, not niu3), I'm still not sure what it means (very arrogant?). Segment 6 (medium): "在很多其他方面的表现也非常优秀。" I was not sure about this sentence. It turns out it was correct. Its meaning only clicked when I saw it in writing, though. - Segment 7 (hard): "他也是通过 shen1jing2 jiang3 xue2tin4de shi4pin3 而出名". Same unknown words as in segment 3, with completely wrong pinyin: 申请奖学金 (shēnqǐng jiǎngxuéjīn) and 视频 (shìpín). - Segment 8 (medium): "他就在数学和物理方面获得了很高的奖". I was unsure I was remembering correctly the meaning of 物理 (physics). In fact, I was correct. 4. I also checked the rest of the text to make sure I really had understood those part I thought I had understood. No problem here. So what's the diagnosis, what's my problem, using Olle benchmark? - Phonology: I DO have a phonology awareness problem: (1) I tend to mix up the initials ji- and ti- (2) tone recognition is far from perfect. (3) my phonological awareness tends to drop when there are several unknown words grouped together. In fact, knowing the words helps me to hear correctly, it "gives shape" to what I'm hearing, while I should reinforce the other ability: hearing correctly even when I don't understand, if only to make dictionary lookups more efficient. - Vocabulary: I also have a vocabulary problem, but I'd say that for texts of that level, my vocab level is OK, I was able to guess several new items based on the context and the number of unknown words is fairly low. Some of these "unknown" words I had in fact studied before, but I did not recognize them when hearing them (not infrequent). - Speed: if my comprehension level can jump from a 55 % (in slow Chinese…) to 89 %, that must be one important part of the problem, if not the most important. - Motivation: no problem, I believe. - Cultural background: that may explain why I didn't get the expression "太牛了", but I don't think this parameter plays such a big role in this case. - I'd add another problem not mentioned by Olle. Even when listening to mostly comprehensible input (for instance, in my case, ChineseLearnOnline lesson 235-240), listening requires a sustained effort and, after a few short minutes, my attention and hence my listening comprehension tends to worsen, even for audio that I'm perfectly able to understand when I start listening with a fresh mind. Treatment: I should probably concentrate on - transcription exercises to improve my phonological awareness - listen to more texts at that level: listen once cold, loop through sentences, transcribe unknown parts, look up unknown words, check transcript, in that order. It might be useful to repeat such a test in, say, 6 months' time, to assess whether there's any improvement. I should use another "Slow Chinese" text, assuming the difficulty is more or less the same from one text to another. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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