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Hitchhiker’s guide to the Chinese Galaxy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4960 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 81 of 230 18 June 2013 at 5:47am | IP Logged |
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Oh, I am following a couple of pieces of advice: As I think I mentioned already I will later on (a few months) begin "Chinese Breeze" (after I finish read Basic Written Chinese which is a very gentle introduction to reading/writing Chinese), so as to start developing the habit of reading characters and recognizing words in a system that does not use the space bar.
I will also follow Irrationale's advice and learn words from my dictionary, in order to pick up a bunch of high-frequency words that are NOT in BSP or NPCR. I have Tuttle's Learners Chinese, which claims to include 4000 high-frequency terms including all terms required by the HSK. I will use that, but perhaps also buy a frequency dictionary as a complement. The work-load to come is absolutely confounding. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4960 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 82 of 230 18 June 2013 at 5:26pm | IP Logged |
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Unit Completion Entry 20
Cycle One (Lessons 1-6) Book 1 Lesson 1 New Practical Chinese Reader 6.18.2013 Note: Obviously it was ridiculously simple. Knew all the words, all the characters, all the "grammar" (there was none!), etc., etc. Nevertheless, it was a good review of pronunciation (never hurts to do some of the basics again). This maybe one of the only if not the only lesson I complete in a day! Edited by outcast on 18 June 2013 at 5:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4960 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 83 of 230 18 June 2013 at 5:37pm | IP Logged |
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A short word on the pronunciation and the recordings, comparing NPCR vs. BSC:
This is a good example of why it is good to generally do at least two courses in a language. The Basic Spoken Chinese pronunciation practice lessons are far more extensive than New Practical Chinese Reader, not only in the amount of recordings, but provide far more detailed explanations of how to make the sounds (even pictures of mouth position), and lots of explanation on the tones, sandhi, neutral tone, etc. I am glad I learned pronunciation through BSC. On the other hand, while the pronunciation recordings in Basic Spoken Chinese were good to excellent, sometimes the dialogues in the main lessons sound a bit distant, on top of the fact the speakers talk FAST (or at least fast for beginners). These two things are not deal breakers at all because it is still quite hearable in ALL dialogues, but perhaps the recordings of the dialogues could have been made with better sound fidelity (the audio for the "break-down" of each dialogue is always excellent quality though!). New Practical Chinese recordings (so far, and it is a small sample), are VERY, VERY CLEAR, not only the audio is superb in quality, the speakers have very clear output. The down side is that there seems to be no recording pause when its time to repeat the phrases, so one must manually pause. Also, it's hard to tell what sections of the book require or have recordings (in Basic Spoken Chinese they have a small but quite thoughtful attention to detail: all sections with recordings are flagged with a gold-colored CD next to them!). That said, it is not a deal breaker, but again, all those observations highlight that nothing is perfect, but many things TOGETHER can fill each other's imperfections for a more complete learning experience. Edited by outcast on 18 June 2013 at 5:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4960 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 84 of 230 20 June 2013 at 5:58am | IP Logged |
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Unit Completion Entry 21
Cycle One (Lessons 1-6) Book 1 Lesson 2 New Practical Chinese Reader 6.19.2013 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4960 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 85 of 230 22 June 2013 at 7:19pm | IP Logged |
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Weekly Progress Entry 14
6.21.2013 Ok so I was rolling along this week, but due to outside circumstances AND some over- zealous studying early in the week staying up very late, I have had very little sleep last few days. This caught up to me Friday, when middle of the day I had a difficult time staying concentrated why driving a very short distance to a store. I was somewhat ahead in my weekly goals so I decided to just rest yesterday, no studying, and I slept over 11 hours. Feel much better today and will get another good night sleep. I am planning some big life-style changes and sacrifices for the second half of the year in order to reach C1 in German and French, my Chinese plans are not affected by this. I will by terse wit this WPE: I am pretty much done with Unit 5 Basic Spoken Chinese, probably either today or tomorrow, which is within goal. There was quite a bit of grammar in this Unit and I am still trying to internalize it but the drills and transformation exercises went well and I practiced them several times. I have started New Practical Chinese. First lessons are a breeze, but I like having to practice pronunciation again, and listening to different Chinese speakers. I am taking advantage of the easy lessons to learn the vocabulary the lessons introduce in the pronunciation drills (why not): stuff like cola, hamburger, grandpa, drinks, to pull, etc. I think it will be good to do NPCR to pick up extra vocabulary, get more speaking practice, and to "review" grammar points from another source instead of re-reading BSC (which I will actually do, when I "review" this entire course over again, when I do the Writing/Reading Lessons of the course, more on that in another entry)*. I will start my first tutor lesson this week, maybe I will do two of them thanks to a good opportunity that presented itself: Right now I have free German tutoring lessons (long story), at least for the entire summer. That means I can use the money from this to do an extra Mandarin session. I will no doubt take advantage of that. The characters are doing well, I was ripping through them early this week, I could have beaten sunday's deadline by several days, but then the lack of sleep and the rest slowed me down and did not learn any new characters last couple of days. Still, I only need to learn about 20 more between today and tomorrow and still get to 100. Next week, well obviously my goals are: 1. Begin Unit 6 Basic Spoken Chinese 2. Continue First cycle Lessons 1-6 New Practical Chinese Reader 3. Begin my first tutoring sessions 4. Begin the next 100 set of characters on the way to 900 (!!) Till the next WPE on 6.28.2013! * Basic Written Chinese is a parallel course to Basic Spoken Chinese's lessons. It focuses on characters, reading, and writing. I thought about doing the lessons simultaneously but then decided against it to ease the load. I will do the Written book after I finish the Basic Spoken Course. It will be an easy intro into reading Chinese, and at the same time I will be able to review both characters and all the Units and Lessons of the spoken course. Win-win. Edited by outcast on 22 June 2013 at 7:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4960 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 86 of 230 24 June 2013 at 9:58pm | IP Logged |
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Unit Completion Entry 22
Cycle One (Lessons 1-6) Book 1 Lesson 3 New Practical Chinese Reader 6.24.2013 Note: between 6/20/13 and 6/22/13 I did almost no work in languages, due to external reasons. Returned to "duty" yesterday. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4960 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 87 of 230 25 June 2013 at 6:50am | IP Logged |
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Unit Completion Entry 23
Unit 5 Lesson 4 Basic Spoken Chinese 6.24.2013 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4960 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 88 of 230 26 June 2013 at 7:19am | IP Logged |
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Major Milestone 4 and 5
Ok, so I have finished Unit 5 of Kubler's Basic Spoken Chinese, which means I am half through the book. I have decided before going on to Unit 6 to do a fairly involved review of the first five units. There is so much information on word usage, grammar, and culture to assimilate. I may have only absorved 30-40% of it all (though probably 75% of the grammar). Nevertheless, just reviewing Unit 1 today I had forgotten things like the word order of 也， 都， 很 in a sentence, about how monosyllabic stative verbs/adjectives can be placed before any noun to form a nominal phrase, etc. The book has tons of useful information, but it will take time to absorb it all. So it is a good idea that I review now while the Units are still somewhat fresh in my mind: and this time the information will stick longer than the first (just the nature of memory). The other milestone is the first meeting with my tutor. It was great and went as expected: I could not recall so many of the vocabulary terms I had learned (to be fair, the meeting was early in the morning, and I had not opened a language book in over 3 days), so I was quite "cold" at the time. But I did get a few things right and very strenuously put a few Chinese sentences together. But I am now studying overtime to be ready for the next session. But again, she was blown away by my pronunciation, even going as far as saying I had a "gift": she had never heard a beginner student make Mandarin sounds so well. I told her the secret is crazy amounts of practice, practice over a period of weeks, lots of repetition, a good ear (which I do admit to have), and having taken the time to study IPA, and the basics of phonology and the anatomy of the human mouth. It's clear it will be a long haul with Mandarin, but that was not unexpected. And I'm ready for it. Edited by outcast on 04 August 2013 at 3:33am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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