kealist Senior Member United States kealist.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6237 days ago 111 posts - 124 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Uyghur, Mandarin, Shanghainese
| Message 41 of 62 31 August 2008 at 4:03pm | IP Logged |
So, I have changed my mind. Xunlei is great. They have all sorts of movies and tv shows on it. Such as Spongebob Squarepants dubbed in Mandarin. Aside from within the program I have not seen any ads, so it doesn't seem too dangerous. Suggest looking through the website to at least see what kind of things you can find.
I am catching back up on my character revisions. 200 left to do before I get into new chars again. Should learn some new ones later tonight.
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kealist Senior Member United States kealist.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6237 days ago 111 posts - 124 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Uyghur, Mandarin, Shanghainese
| Message 42 of 62 02 September 2008 at 10:40pm | IP Logged |
Character update
Learned today: 38
Total: 1114
goal is to learn at least 25 / day (if not more) for the rest of the year. Gotta start with a month and keep it up. If I keep it up, I should be around 4200 characters by Dec 31st. I'm also working on pronunciation of characters from now on.
changed my anki model type to be more useful. Too bad I can't change all my previous cards automatically. Oh, well. it's not so important. Still working on the original post organization a little as well.
Edited by kealist on 02 September 2008 at 11:17pm
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kealist Senior Member United States kealist.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6237 days ago 111 posts - 124 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Uyghur, Mandarin, Shanghainese
| Message 43 of 62 05 September 2008 at 1:53am | IP Logged |
Character update
Learned yesterday and today today: 38
Total: 1152
missed my goal, but I still made progress.
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doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5987 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese
| Message 44 of 62 05 September 2008 at 10:32am | IP Logged |
Is there a certain order for the characters you're learning? or some source? I started out with a frequency-ordered list until about 1100, and then i started producing cards from HSK character lists, so i did up to the intermediate level in HSK.
Keep it up :)
I noticed a huge increase in my reading ability after around 1500.
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kealist Senior Member United States kealist.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6237 days ago 111 posts - 124 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Uyghur, Mandarin, Shanghainese
| Message 45 of 62 05 September 2008 at 11:22am | IP Logged |
doviende wrote:
Is there a certain order for the characters you're learning? or some source? I started out with a frequency-ordered list until about 1100, and then i started producing cards from HSK character lists, so i did up to the intermediate level in HSK.
Keep it up :)
I noticed a huge increase in my reading ability after around 1500. |
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Thank you for the encouragement. Keep up the work on your studies.
Well, I started doing all the "radical" components from zhongwen.com and then went through and did the second level of the genealogy tree structure. Now I'm going depth first in the tree, as well as adding characters I don't know in words I see, so some of them are kind of random, some are obscure. I wish I was doing the readings at first because it's cool to see the phonetic groups, and I'm starting to understand how characters (components) are used phonetically. An interesting article about characters (of the English sort) can be helpful. Hanzi are much more logical than I thought.
Streaming Indie Chinese music
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kealist Senior Member United States kealist.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6237 days ago 111 posts - 124 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Uyghur, Mandarin, Shanghainese
| Message 46 of 62 05 September 2008 at 4:41pm | IP Logged |
before: 1152
learned today: 57
total: 1209
I have learned characters 1-x, 2-x, 3-x now. I like going through the dictionary in this way. It's good to learn all the similar characters at once because it forces me to distinguish between them.
My process is to write the character based on the English keyword, and then read the character according to a generic pronunciation. Not focusing too much on pronunciation, but I will at least read it several times, and start to see the phonetic relations.
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kealist Senior Member United States kealist.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6237 days ago 111 posts - 124 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Uyghur, Mandarin, Shanghainese
| Message 47 of 62 20 October 2008 at 9:10pm | IP Logged |
Well, I really lost a lot of motivation somewhere along the line for studying 漢字. Must have something to do with the ladies, I'm not sure (joke). Anyways, I have continued to at least listening to some music or Anna Karenina most days in Chinese, although I haven't really done any active learning. I was thinking about going through Assimil some more or maybe trying Michel Thomas for mandarin, because the course has peaked my curiousity.
I tried Michel Thomas for German, the first half an hour or so, and I was pleasantly surprised at how helpful it was, at least for getting a handle on the language. Yes, I can ask you if you want to drink water. But I'm interested to see how they do it for Mandarin.
My German friend comes back for a visit in a month and I was thinking to go through the whole foundation and advance Michel Thomas German course before then and surprise the crap out of her.
I have gained some motivation to study Uyghur more actively, until I tried to read the first paragraph of this novel I have, and ran into the same brick wall that I usually do with Uyghur literature--tough grammar with lots of words not in dictionaries. What does mangsa-mangsa mean? I just don't know. I did pick up the Dunwoody Uyghur reader (and CDs) which has glosses, so maybe I can step through the readings and get myself to a more advanced literacy level.
I've also gained a curiousity in Shanghainese because of a lady friend. I picked up the Dunwoody Shanghainese textbook, and it looks like a good start. Tried to buy some other textbooks on amazon.cn, but it won't accept any of my credit cards :-/ Shame really, because I could have bought about 30 books for around $60 and lots of audio. We'll see if the Shanghai project ever takes off the ground, but it's exciting nonetheless. I also bought the Dunwoody Wu Chinese dictionary just in case. It looks like a useful one.
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kealist Senior Member United States kealist.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6237 days ago 111 posts - 124 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Uyghur, Mandarin, Shanghainese
| Message 48 of 62 23 October 2008 at 1:38pm | IP Logged |
Since I have lost most sense of organization, I'm going to reorient myself today. Give myself a plan to stick with.
Daily plan:
- Do one reading out of Uyghur Reader each day. Listen & shadow the audio.
- Do one unit out of Shanghai Dialect each day (once I have the audio digitized). Shadow and treat these like Assimil lessons.
- Do one or two lessons of le chinois sans peine each day shadowing and such. I have retyped about 30 of the lessons into traditional characters.
- Learn 10 漢字 each day. Get back on track with my 900 awaiting reviews in Anki. I want to review at least 100-200 a day, so I will be back on track in a week or so. Some of the characters are better lodged in my memory than others at this point, so some of it will go quickly while some of it will be relearning
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