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Chinese Mandarin - Casual beginner log | ||
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| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1 of 22 25 December 2013 at 11:28am | IP Logged |
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Well I am going to be tackling this notoriously difficult language. Funny, yesterday I had no intentions of doing this and yet here I am. Rosetta stone spams me constantly in my email and I know they have good deals on their software this time of year (along with everyone else) and I succumbed and ordered Chinese. I was thinking of getting Japanese but since it only has levels 1-3 there's really no way it would include new material for me having studied the language for over two years now. Rosetta typically goes up to level 5 for their languages but apparently Japanese isn't big enough to warrant it. And neither is Korean, another language I'm curious about and which has lots of fun dramas to watch. So that left Chinese. Well that and boring European languages. I opted for Chinese.
I really don't have a clue what Rosetta is like for Chinese. If it's like Japanese it'll let me choose which writing system I want to use.. traditional / simplified / pinyon. Maybe there's an option to use pinyon along with one of the other two. For now I very much prefer traditional characters since they're pretty much the same as Japanese. I've reached a low intermediate level of Japanese and I would guestimate that I can look at and know at least one meaning for roughly 1500 kanji or Chinese characters. That's totally a guess though, and it's because I worked through James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji a couple years ago. I don't remember all of it.. I'm guessing 3/4 seems reasonable. Currently I'm making an SRS deck using iKnow's Core 500 Chinese vocabulary off their website. I still have a membership there. It's primarily a Japanese learning site but they have some Chinese too and it I assume it's good. It includes native speaker pronunciation of of the word, and two example sentences along with native pronunciation. And a picture. Based on the Japanese sets they offer, the more advanced vocabulary don't have a 2nd sentence or a picture to go with. I'm also listening to the introduction pod casts at ChinesePod101.com. They're pretty much all English so far so it's fun and enjoyable.. but also gets you interested in learning. And is easy to listen to while doing something else (in my case, making these flashcards..) I guess Pinyon actually uses the roman alphabet. That's really easy. If they have actual reading material written in pinyon then I could get to reading really really quickly. But they probably don't. In Japanese, you really can't get much reading material that doesn't use Chinese characters. But comic books for kids have the pronunciation for the Chinese characters above the kanji which I'm just starting to get into. My goals with Chinese right now is just to have fun and learn more about Chinese characters and maybe get good enough to have a simple conversation. I'm going to stick with the core 2000 word flashcards, Rosetta, and the podcasts. I will keep an eye out for other stuff that looks shiny but this seems like it'll keep me busy for a while. I suppose some kind of grammar reference would be good but I'll worry about that when I feel I need it. Oh I forgot to include this. I am totally new to Chinese. The sounds are all new to me. I listen to a few words or anyone talking and it's enough to send my head spinning. It's been a while since I've started a new language so I'd forgotten what that's like. Edited by kraemder on 25 December 2013 at 11:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 2 of 22 25 December 2013 at 2:13pm | IP Logged |
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Still making my deck using the iKnow core 500 media etc.. I need to add the pictures but I think the rest is good.. compared to Japanese which has hiragana/katakana for sounds.. the pinyin looks super easy to read. It's totally based on the roman alphabet and... it has spaces.. WOW. It makes you really sad to look at the sentence in pinyin and then up to the full Chinese character sentence.
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| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 3 of 22 25 December 2013 at 10:33pm | IP Logged |
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I think I'm going to test three ways to start on my flashcards. With Japanese I'm testing two ways... seeing the English and thinking of the Japanese and reading the kanji and knowing it's pronunciation and English meaning. But I'm a total beginner at Chinese and it'll take longer but I'm going to also test just seeing pinyin/listening to the Chinese on side 1. I can't also put the 漢字 on side one or it's really too easy.
I was kind of thinking Chinese characters were called hanzi because I was pretty sure there was a book called remembering the hanzi. And so checking google I see someone's article Hanzi and Kanji: the differencesand it's written exactly the same in both languages they just use different pronunciation. Interesting. So I can write hanzi with my Japanese IME. I will have to work on getting a Chinese IME going later. Looking forward to the Rosetta Stone. Their software has a lot of visuals and is fun I think although they teach zero grammar and probably don't actually teach any 漢字 either so it's not all inclusive. It has a little chat room where learners can talk. Japanese rosetta is kind of dead so you often post stuff and get a message back in an hour or something. I'm hoping there's more Mandarin learners. It being Rosetta they will all be noobs like me. People who are more advanced tend to shun their software I think. I also need to find a good pop up dictionary for reading stuff online.. if only people's comments to this journal saying stuff like 功油. I doubt there's one as awesome as Rikai-sama for Japanese. When you drag the mouse over a sentence it highlights the actual word (great since you can't see the spaces) and pops up with a definition... and you can press a button for native pronunciation. No computer speech. And then SAVE the definition and native pronunciation for you flashcard deck into your SRS. And all this for free. Wow. I finished making my deck of the 1st 100 words to learn last night / this morning about 6 am. Gonna go try to learn some Chinese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 4 of 22 25 December 2013 at 11:10pm | IP Logged |
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我是他的朋友。
I guess this is my 1st sentence and first word. My first flashcard. BTW I typed that myself using Chinese IME. Woot! The flashcard is for 我 so I know this means I. 是他 I'm sort of at a loss for. I think I saw that 他 meant he/him on another card when I was making the deck.. I know 的 means possession because of a conversation I had with a Chinese girl in my Japanese class a while back.. and 朋友 means friend based on the 漢字 (typing that character took some hunting after I typed it in..) This is really going much better than when I looked at my first Japanese word / sentence lol. And I just cheated and used my Japanese dictionary to lookup 是 in my Japanese dictionary and it means これ in Japanese (they never use the hanzi just their alphabet to write it though) which means this. So now I have a pretty good idea of what everything means in this sentence on the 1st flashcard's sentence without any studying. There is an English translation on there to help me so I don't have to totally rely on hanzi but without it I'd be totally lost I think. I think it's weird that the IME doesn't let me pick a tone I just type it and it guesses which one I mean. I grabbed Google IME and it's set to simplified. In terms of setting it up I just clicked next over and over and didn't understand a thing of what was written... (It was Chinese). I can't type in pinyin yet so I'll just cut and paste this card from my spreadsheet. Side 1: [wǒ] + audio Side 2: 我 + picture + audio Side 3: 我 + [wǒ]+ I + picture and audio Side 4: (example sentence 1) " 我是他的朋友。 Wǒ shì tā de péngyou. I'm a friend of his. " Side 5: (example sentence 2 if I have one) " 老師們都喜歡我。 Play Audio Lǎoshīmen dōu xǐhuan wǒ. All my teachers like me. " *edit* I was all congratulating myself on my deduction skills.. and what I thought meant 'this' really was the verb to be. yikes! 是 Edited by kraemder on 25 December 2013 at 11:14pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5306 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 5 of 22 26 December 2013 at 11:59am | IP Logged |
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老師們 - 都 - 喜歡 - 我。
The teachers - all - like/liked - me. Not necessarily MY teachers. - 我是他的朋友。 I am his friend. I'm a friend of his. 我是他的一個朋友. Edited by smallwhite on 26 December 2013 at 12:02pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 6 of 22 28 December 2013 at 5:51am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the grammar tips. I did copy and past that example from a pay site so you would think that they would try to make a literal translation for students to study but they just did a general translation I guess. I'll keep that in mind - I am still going to use the site since well I don't know any other sites that offer vocabulary and example sentences with native audio that I can steal.
I got Rosetta Mandarin in the mail today and set it up and got going. The chat room is kinda dead there just like the Japanese one was. I think I'll have to redo the lessons w/o hanzi though since they seem to give the answer away. Some hanzi however don't really match up with Japanese. Also, I found out that my Chinese pronunciation is god awful. 書.. I couldn't say this one to save my life. The computer just wouldn't let me move on and I had it on a somewhat easy setting. I had to turn off the speech analysis to get by it. I now have it set at way way too easy and I've scraped by since then. I said 書 like 30 times. I figured I knew it by heart but then when I tried to type it above I put SHO. darn. I think it's time for my 1st SRS review of Mandarin vocab. Funny how a few days ago I used to think of Chinese as a language but now I am thinking of it as Mandarin and Cantonese and a bunch of others. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 7 of 22 28 December 2013 at 5:55am | IP Logged |
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Pro tip for Google IME pinyin input. Press CTRL + SHIFT + T to toggle between simplified and traditional input.
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| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 8 of 22 30 December 2013 at 8:45am | IP Logged |
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I haven't made much progress. I did get a tip on Rosetta stone that I can just download their content in a PDF file for all the lessons. So I can use that along with a dictionary to better analyze the words they use etc. I was thinking I really should learn some grammar concurrently while doing Rosetta. I like their practice exercises but the zero grammar and well zero vocab lists is a bit much. As for a dictionary, the best one for Windows PC I found was PeraPera. I didn't spend all evening looking so there may well be better available. It looks a lot like rikai-sama but no audio. No kanji/hanzi dictionary either. I'd like a hanzi dictionary to go with it even more than the audio. I'm on the lookout for a good grammar resource to get started. I might get something off amazon but I'm thinking there may be something free that's just as good.
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