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Process for beginning Asian languages | ||
Tags: Asian Languages | Beginner | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4447 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes  Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 9 of 20 27 June 2014 at 3:44am | IP Logged | ||
I was watching a Chinese singing show from Beijing that featured 好弟 (Hǎodì) the singer from Nigeria. In the show he talked about the first year he was singing in a restaurant in English and almost left the country because he couldn't get an audience. And then he returned from Africa and seriously started learning to sing in Chinese. Luckily he found a voice coach who also speaks English and had all the lyrics written down phonetically. The speaking part came hand in hand with the singing. In the show he mentioned that a few years ago he started dating a Chinese, got her number and they exchanged text phonetically with Pinyin. On stage Hǎodì speaks Chinese with enough fluency that he is often acknowledged as a native speaker. His older brother 郝哥 (Hǎogē) is also a singer in China. They both learned to sing dozens of songs phonetically. Like a lot of Chinese-Americans who speak fluent Mandarin you'll be surprised how many can write the characters besides their given names. Every Chinese phrase book you come across would have the phonetics written beside the characters. In Japanese, you can represent the Chinese characters (Kanji) phonetically. When you're singing a song in Japanese with a Karaoke, you notice the Japanese alphabetic characters on the screen and you will find Japanese alphabetic characters over the Kanji in fine print. Edited by shk00design on 27 June 2014 at 4:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4641 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 10 of 20 27 June 2014 at 6:08am | IP Logged | ||
I took the approach of learning the meaning of around 1700 kanji(Chinese characters) before learning Japanese. Now I am attempting to learn vocabulary solely through reading. It's working well so far, but I'm not at an advanced level yet. The prevalence of SRS programs among Japanese learners does make me worry that maybe I'll hit a dead end. When I read a German word I see how it sounds and from that try to remember what it means. When I read a Japanese word with a single kanji I see what it means and from that try to remember how it sounds. German: 'das Auto' → car Japanese: '車(car)' → kuruma When I read a Japanese word with multiple kanji I see a comination of meanings which aid me in remembering the meaning of the word as a whole. This can be similar to remembering German compound words. German: 'Mittagessen(midday eating)' → lunch Japanese: '昼飯(midday meal)' → lunch However most compound words aren't particularly transparent. 勉強(exertion strong) → study Often one of the kanji will have no relation to the meaning at all. 友達(friend accomplished) → friend I still find this easier than going from pure sound to meaning like in European languages. The difficult thing for me is remembering how the words are said. As someone who likes to focus on passive learning it's basically forcing me to activate vocabulary from the start. Edited by AlexTG on 28 June 2014 at 12:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4447 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 11 of 20 27 June 2014 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are scripts that are alphabetic. The symbols correspond to what a word would sound like Arabic , Hindi
or Thai. And then there is Chinese with thousands of ideograms. Each does not suggest how it would be pronounced except you are going by other characters that look similar. When you enter Chinese characters on computer you can use a graphic pad and scribble a character as close as you can or type in each char. phonetically like most people do. Personally reading a sentence: "wo shi meiguoren" instead of 我是美国人 isn't a big deal since this is the way I enter my text messages or type my Emails. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4311 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 12 of 20 27 June 2014 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Has anyone studied an exotic language after learning two or more languages primarily
through shadowing or similar? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Irish_Goon Senior Member United States Joined 6418 days ago 117 posts - 170 votes Speaks: English* | Message 13 of 20 27 June 2014 at 7:56pm | IP Logged | ||
That's an interesting question. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| L1539 Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5361 days ago 27 posts - 55 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 14 of 20 28 June 2014 at 1:35am | IP Logged | ||
I think listening comprehension is usually the last thing that people get good at when learning a language. Even if you can't understand what you're hearing, if you can read and write the words, then it's not meaningless. And you have to build up this vocabulary first to eventually understand what you're hearing, so even if you're only interest is speaking, it still isn't meaningless. Edited by L1539 on 28 June 2014 at 1:35am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 15 of 20 28 June 2014 at 5:13am | IP Logged | ||
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I started Cantonese doing audio only the same as I did with French, using Pimsleur, FSI and DLI and mostly ignoring the writing system. After a while it felt like I wasn't making any progress, mainly because tones made my listening comprehension difficult.
Not sure if I would've eventually gotten the hang of tones eventually, but I decided to focus on Chinese characters. I learned primarily through Anki (with a little bit of text book studies to learn how radicals function) and my Anki deck had a lot of redundancies built into it, so I'd study some single characters, then some compound words and sentences using characters I knew before moving onto new characters. One of my decks had all the vocab and sentences from FSI, and after learning them through writing I was able to breeze through the FSI audio course. I'll reach 1500 characters in several months, at which point I plan on incorporating movies with Cantonese subtitles into my study in addition to continuing learning new characters through Anki. I've also recently started Japanese doing audio only with Pimsleur and Assimil (I don't want to learn to read Japanese til I reach basic proficiency in Cantonese) and so far its been much easier than doing Cantonese or Hungarian audio. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Irish_Goon Senior Member United States Joined 6418 days ago 117 posts - 170 votes Speaks: English* | Message 16 of 20 30 June 2014 at 1:10am | IP Logged | ||
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I love Assimil but I am not quite sure that those books can be utilized as effectively in a language like Mandarin compared with something like German.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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