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Mandarin masochism | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Elucidation Newbie United States Joined 3913 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 11 12 March 2014 at 3:23am | IP Logged | ||
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It seems kind of weird for me to say this, but I think I'm going to start learning Mandarin. Just typing that sentence sort of makes me shiver. I'm not really sure why. I guess I've always sort of thought of Mandarin as being this language that was too difficult to learn. But I've been reading some of the articles on the AJATT website and I'm convinced that I can learn Mandarin in a similar way that Khatzumoto learned Japanese. I don't know if I actually can do it in 18 months like Khatz, but wouldn't it be cool if I actually could? I guess we're going to figure that out whether I can learn Mandarin with this language blog/journal/diary..?
So I guess this is sort of an experiment to answer one question: Can I actually learn Mandarin? And I guess if I can do it, probably anyone can do it. I want to be able to do everything in Mandarin. My goal is essentially to magically morph into a Chinese person. I don't really care if it takes me a long time to get to that point, but I'm going to try to learn as fast as possible in the beginning so that I can put myself in an all-Mandarin environment as fast as possible. If I ever get bored for an extended amount of time, I'll reconsider my approach. If I'm still bored after changing my method, I'll just stop. Since this is just for fun, I'm only going to continue doing this if this continues to be fun to me. So I guess I'm just going to make it a goal to always do interesting things in Mandarin. I plan to get through Pimsleur 1, 2, and 3 as quickly as possible so that I can speak reasonably well. I started Pimsleur today and already got through 5 lessons without too much difficulty so think I can continue doing 5 lessons a day. While I'm going through Pimsleur, I'm going to work my way through Remembering the Traditional Hanzi 1. I'll make very complicated stories so that I have the characters burned into my head and I'll use Anki to remember them longer. I'll listen to the Pimsleur lessons pretty much nonstop all day for first 18 days and do 5 lessons a day. I'll also learn 25 Hanzi a day with Remembering Traditional Hanzi. After I'm done with Pimsleur, I'll move on to FSI Mandarin and listen to that nonstop and try to get through it in about 2.5 months months (~70 days). I'll also go through the Practical Audio Visual Chinese series while I'm going through FSI Mandarin. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elucidation Newbie United States Joined 3913 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 11 12 March 2014 at 3:24am | IP Logged | ||
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I've spent a good amount of time reading other people's language blogs and forum posts and I've come up with a pretty good plan. It's not perfect, but I feel like it should work.
PIMSLEUR I'll be going at a rate of 5 lessons a day, which are about 30 minutes long each. That means I'll be learning new material for 2.5 hours each day. The rest of the day, I'll keep the same 5 Pimsleur lessons playing so that I get more exposure. If I leave it playing all day, that's 15 hours of exposure per day. That means that I'll have heard each lesson 6 times, which should be enough time for me to fully absorb the pronunciation. I'll also hopefully be able to answer any Pimsleur prompt at lightning-fast speeds without thinking. REMEMBERING TRADITIONAL HANZI 1/2 (RTH 1/2) I'll be going at a moderate rate of 25 hanzi per day. I'll learn each hanzi in the morning and then I'll quiz myself on old hanzi by looking back in the book. I'll quiz myself in both directions (English meaning to hanzi and hanzi to English meaning). I also want to learn the pronunciations of each hanzi, so I'll come up with mnemonics for remembering the pronunciation as well. By the end of 4 months, I should know all 3036 hanzi from the 2 RTH books. FSI CHINESE There are a total of 9 modules and a total of 63 units in FSI Chinese. Each unit offers about 1.5 hours of listening, with the units in modules 7, 8 and 9 only about about 45 minutes of listening. For the first 6 modules, I'll be listening to each unit for 15 hours per day, which means that I'll listen each unit 10 times. For the last 3 modules, I'll listen to each unit about 20 times per day. If I get bored, I might choose to listen to something else, but I want to make sure I understand each unit before I move on. PRACTICAL AUDIO VISUAL CHINESE 1/2 (PAVC 1/2) There are 12 lessons in PAVC1 and 13 lessons in PAVC2. Each lesson has about 10 minutes of audio, so it shouldn't take up much time. I'll probably spend about an hour listening every day. I should be able to go through about 2 lessons each week for PAVC1 and PAVC2. PRACTICAL AUDIO VISUAL CHINESE 3/4 (PAVC 3/4) For PAVC3 and PAVC4, I'll end up focusing all of my time on listening to the lessons so that I can finish the PAVC series before the 5 month mark. From there, I'll move on to native materials and continue listening to Chinese audio for most of the day. NATIVE MATERIALS When I finish PAVC4, I'll start listening and reading native materials and sentence mining with Anki. I'll get 25 native sentences a day, so I'll have 10,000 sentences by the time I get to day 550 of studying. Here's a general outline of the plan: Day 1-18: 5 Pimsleur lessons/day, 25 RTH Hanzi/day Day 19-90: FSI Chinese, PAVC1, PAVC2, continue with 25 RTH Hanzi/day Day 90-150: PAVC3, PAVC4 Day 150-550: Lots of listening and reading from native Chinese materials, sentence mining with Anki, and conversations in Chinese (there are a lot of Mandarin-speakers at my college, so it won't be hard to get friends who only speak in Mandarin) Day 551-???: I don't really know specifically what I'll do at this point. All I know is that it will be awesome! Since day-1 is today (March 11, 2014), day-550 will be September 12, 2015. By that time, I'll have 1 more year of college left, so I can probably focus more on other things for my last year but I'll still try to use Chinese as much as possible. This plan is just a rough idea and I might change it if it doesn't work very well. Edited by Elucidation on 12 March 2014 at 3:25am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| BaronBill Triglot Senior Member United States HowToLanguages.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4688 days ago 335 posts - 594 votes  Speaks: English*, French, German Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Persian | Message 3 of 11 12 March 2014 at 5:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi and welcome to the forums! Mandarin is a very exciting, very interesting, yet very challenging language. I think you will be in for a great journey!
The only thing I really have to comment on as far as your plan is: MAN, that is a LOT of Pimsleur. I love Pimsleur like the next guy, but the thought of listening to more than a bout an hour a day makes me shudder. But, if you CAN handle it, your accent should be excellent. Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elucidation Newbie United States Joined 3913 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 4 of 11 23 March 2014 at 5:21am | IP Logged | ||
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Day 12:
I've gone through the first 60 lessons of Pimsleur and I feel like it has been a good introduction. I thought that it would be difficult to get good pronunciation in Mandarin, but the constant repetition that Pimsleur offers has been pretty good for helping me with my pronunciation. I'm sure I make a lot of tonal pronunciation mistakes but I've progressed a lot in these last 12 days. I'm going to continue listening to Pimsleur for the next 6 days and then I'll start going through FSI Mandarin and PAVC1 after I finish Pimsleur. I've learned 300 hanzi so far with RTH and I haven't had any problems learning 25 hanzi each day. I haven't been using Anki or any other SRS programs. Instead, I've been just going through the book and reviewing by reading the key words and trying to remember the hanzi and write them in my head. It's been working for me so far and I've also been able to remember the pronunciation of each hanzi pretty well. To remember the pronunciation and the tone of each character, I extend the stories to include the pronunciation of the character. But sometimes, I can make just brute-force memorize the pronunciation if it's close enough to the pronunciation of other characters. For example, the character for "radiance" and the character for "ash" have the pronunciation hui1. Since the character for "radiance" is composed of the primitives for "rays (of light)" and "army", I picture an army marching on ashes with rays of light shining on the army so that I'm able to remember how to write the character for "radiance" is written and remember that it's pronounced hui1 (which is the same as ash). I was able to remember the pronunciation for "ash" by imagining myself looking at a fire that had gone out and yelling "hey!!! it's cold now!". I can remember that "ashes" is pronounced in the first tone (hui1 sounds like "hey!!!") because I usually associate the emotion of excitement with the first tone. I tend to associate other emotions with the other tones, which has helped me remember the tones pretty well. Since the stories become slightly more complicated with the pronunciation mnemonics, this makes the stories easier to remember. I find that if my stories aren't complicated enough, I tend to forget them. I've been really enjoying learning Mandarin so far. Even though it sounds pretty boring listening to Pimsleur nonstop every day, it's pretty interesting because I can actually answer every question automatically. It's also pretty rewarding being able to go through 5 lessons a day instead of only 1 lesson like most people. I should be done with all 90 Pimsleur lessons by Day 18, so I'm pretty excited about starting FSI Mandarin and PAVC1. I haven't had any major problems with anything so far. I really think that listening to Pimsleur so much has helped me a lot. Remembering the hanzi isn't very difficult either because I've been able to remember the stories pretty well. I've been spending about an hour each day on the hanzi, which isn't too long. I really enjoy learning hanzi and it has been easy because it's fun imagining the stories. I haven't written down any hanzi so far and I've been able to remember them all, so I don't think I'll ever really need to sit down and write any. I'll keep learning 25 hanzi per day and listening to 5 lessons per day of Pimsleur nonstop. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elucidation Newbie United States Joined 3913 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 11 22 April 2014 at 7:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Day 43:
I haven't posted in a while. I've gotten pretty far since my last post. I've gone through 1075 hanzi in Remembering the Hanzi. It hasn't been very difficult learning the character meanings or the pronunciations. It's pretty satisfying being able to read signs for Chinese restaurants. With each new day it seems like it's getting easier to learn my daily 25 hanzi. I finished Pimsleur on day 18, as planned. I also went through the whole PAVC1 book in about 2 weeks. I'm now working on PAVC2 and FSI module 4. My pronunciation is getting pretty good. I'm not as intimidated by the tones as I once was - the tones seem pretty natural. I think that listening to Pimsleur nonstop for the first 18 days was the best thing I could have done. It has definitely helped me. I still haven't had any real conversations in Mandarin yet, but I have had a few Chinese friends ask me to say stuff in Chinese and I've only been told that I have good pronunciation, so I think that putting in all that effort with Pimsleur has really paid off. I took Spanish classes in high school all the way up to AP Spanish and I was never told that I had a good accent, so I'm pretty excited about having a good accent in a "more difficult" language. Chinese doesn't seem all that difficult. Maybe it's not difficult because I've been listening to Mandarin almost nonstop for 43 days... I guess everything is easy if you put in a constant effort - but it really doesn't seem like it takes that much effort. I'm not very smart or anything and it's still sort of effortless. Right now, I'm working mainly on PAVC2. I've been listening to the audio nonstop and repeating phrases every now and then. It's not as good as Pimsleur for pronunciation, but it's reasonably good for vocabulary. I also read through the textbook every few hours. I feel like it won't be too difficult for me to get through PAVC2 and FSI at this rate. I should easily be done with both of them before day 90. I can't wait until I get to PAVC3 and PAVC4. It's also going to be fun being able to have conversations in Chinese. For now, I'm just enjoying PAVC2 and FSI. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SomeGuy Groupie Germany Joined 5099 days ago 56 posts - 75 votes Speaks: German* Studies: Arabic (Written), Turkish, Mandarin | Message 6 of 11 22 April 2014 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, i didn't expect any updates.
Learning over 1000 hanzi in 43 days is quite nice.Any examples of material you understand or even better some self written texts (maybe on lang-8) ? (i'm curious what your level is right now) 3x sessions Pimsleur per day doesn't confuse/annoy you ? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elucidation Newbie United States Joined 3913 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 7 of 11 19 June 2014 at 7:00am | IP Logged | ||
I haven't been looking at any native materials yet, but I've gotten through the first two PAVC books, which is equivalent to about a year of Chinese at a university. I'm not particularly good at listening (or anything yet), but I have noticed that I can pick out some words when I hear people speaking in Mandarin. I gave lang-8 a look and I didn't really like it because I don't really like writing about random stuff (I would rather have a conversation with someone) and no one gave me any good feedback. I honestly don't feel like my speaking ability has progressed very much since completing Pimsleur, which is kind of embarrassing. I'm going to start speaking with natives more often so I'll hopefully get better. I'm planning on doing SRS sentence drills (with Anki) that are similar to Pimsleur because I feel like Pimsleur really helped me become more conversational so this should help me too. Pimsleur wasn't super annoying or difficult. Repeating lessons helped me get faster at responding in Mandarin and it became fun trying to answer questions really quickly. The repetition and listening really helped my accent too. I feel like one of the things that made Pimsleur less boring was doing 5 lessons per day instead of 1 lesson per day. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elucidation Newbie United States Joined 3913 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 8 of 11 19 June 2014 at 7:02am | IP Logged | ||
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Day 100:
I haven't been listening to Mandarin as much as I was before because I've been pretty busy, but I am making sure to get in at least 3 hours of concentrated listening per day. I'm currently listening to lesson 6 of PAVC 3. PAVC 3 has been rough so far. I've sort of hit this plateau and I feel like I've been progressing pretty slowly recently. Learning and remembering the hanzi has been going pretty smoothly and I haven't had very many problems going at 25 hanzi per day. I just hit the 2500 hanzi mark and I feel pretty good about it. It's nice being able to read characters and it definitely makes learning new words way easier. Even though I've been doing pretty well so far without using SRS, I've been considering using it for a few reasons. Even though I'm able to use mnemonics that help me learn new words and new characters pretty well, I've noticed that it's pretty difficult to "think in Mandarin". It's difficult to use the right sentence structure and I haven't found a good way of being able to learn the sentence patterns well enough to express myself conversationally. I'm going to try to take sentences from PAVC 3 and translate them into English. From there, I'll be able to make flashcards with English on the front and the Mandarin on the back so that I can drill myself and be able to come up with the Mandarin sentence relatively quickly. This should help me get used to thinking in Mandarin. I feel like using Anki to do this would be the best option (it's definitely better than normal flashcards), so I'm going to start doing that in a few days. Hopefully, this will help me progress faster and overcome this plateau. I've been talking to a few of my Chinese friends in Mandarin and they're pretty impressed with my accent, despite my inability to have a very meaningful conversation. It feels like I'm learning so slowly, but I'm glad I'm making at least some progress every day. I just want to get through the PAVC series so that I can live, breathe, and think in Mandarin. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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