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A Cinephile’s Multi-Lingual Attempt | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6231 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 9 of 29 20 May 2013 at 5:27am | IP Logged |
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What are you using for audio for the Sidney Lau?
I'm dabbling a little in Cantonese and am wondering which you have found more useful; FSI or Sidney Lau? Edited by liddytime on 20 May 2013 at 5:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4256 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 10 of 29 20 May 2013 at 6:00am | IP Logged |
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For the Sydney Lau I use the audio recorded here here, which is just for the dialogues of the first 4 volumes, and none of the drills.
I find Sydney Lau the most helpful with absorbing the grammar. Their explanations are a bit too technical for me to fully grasp, but I like to read through them quickly to get the gist of what the chapter is about. Then I find going through all the drills 1 time perfectly illustrates for me all the grammar points so I completely understand them. Then I shadow the audio for the dialogues, while looking at the English translations in the book, which helps me absorb all the grammar rules and slowly build up a more intuitive understanding. I found the FSI materials interesting to read, but their drills were way too complicated for me to be able to absorb any of the material. I did however, make an Anki deck out of the FSI transcriptions here, though mostly for reinforcement of things I've already learned and practice with Chinese characters. So I would say I learn best through Sydney Lau, and review/reinforce with other materials for variety. Edited by YnEoS on 20 May 2013 at 6:04am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4256 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 11 of 29 28 May 2013 at 6:19am | IP Logged |
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This was a bit of a rough week, made better progress with some languages than others, and I'm adjusting my plans for certain languages, so here we go.
Cantonese ------------ Completed: Pimsleur I Current Tools: Sidney Lau Vol 1 Lesson 10, DLI Vol 1 Lessons 23, FSI Lesson 6, Teach Yourself Lesson 3-5, Anki, Naked Cantonese Lesson 30, Popup Cantonese Thoughts: I might be over-reacting a bit, but the speaker for the audio recordings of the Sydney Lau book changed, and I find them a lot more difficult to shadow now. Now if the book has an alternate way of saying a sentence, the speaker will say the sentence a second time an alternate way. Maybe I just have to get used to it, but it really though me off. I made progress this week, but didn't study every day, and I realize I need to have some sort of short practice ready for when I don't have time to study for a long time. So I recently edited my DLI lessons, so they're just the "listening" portion, without pauses that I can shadow. I've also broken each lesson into individual tracks, so I can better customize my study routine, and I don't have to search through big audio files, or feel like I need to study for a whole half hour chunk of time. I'm thinking of making an Anki Deck for the Sydney Lau sentence pattern drills, and if I'm really ambitious, the dialogues with edited audio, for easier study. Having to type out all the Cantonese though, is quite a slow process, so I may just try and keep using the book as is, since it's already a pretty good format. French ------------ Completed: Pimsleur I, II, III, Advanced Michel Thomas & Foundations Current Tools: Pimsleur Plus, Assimil Passive Lesson 4, L-R Three Musketeers Chapter 8, Duolingo Thoughts: My French definitely fared best this week of all my languages. I decided since I'm almost done with Pimsleur to start working my way through Assimil. I also decided to try out Listening-Reading since it was so highly recommended I didn't want to spend years learning through traditional methods without at least trying it. I got 4 hours of Listening Reading, and I absolutely love it. Mostly just because reading is one of my main reasons for learning languages, and reading the text in English while hearing it in it's original language is lots of fun and focuses my attention a lot more. I would use L-R for a book, even if I wasn't studying it's original language, just because it's fun to hear the original language. So far I haven't been using the intense method of 6-8 hours a day, but I picked up quite a few words, especially ones that were used a lot like hand, sword, king, etc. I'm definitely going to keep doing it casually, not sure yet if I'll repeat the same book, or do it for more intense hours, but I definitely will keep it as one aspect of my study. Indonesian ------------ Current Tools: Pimsleur I Lesson 16, Learning Indonesian Lesson 10, Teach Yourself Lesson 1, Linguagphone Lesson 1 Thoughts: I got a bit cocky this week and tried to do Pimsleur Indonesian at the same pace I do French. I quickly felt like I was getting lost, and decided to go to a more review heavy pace. But to my surprise I didn't feel like I needed to backtrack at all, so I guess I did get a nice boost forward. So far Indonesian is a lot of fun, and I seem to be getting the hang of it faster than Hindi. I also toyed around with the Teach Yourself and Linguaphone courses a bit. Hindi ------------ Completed: Pimsleur I, Pimsleur Reading I, Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Script Current Tools: Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Lesson 2, Linguaphone Lesson 2 Anki Thoughts: I realize my old plan of studying with Anki and pure Hindi audio was a bit foolish. Words just aren't interesting out of context, and context isn't interesting if you don't know the words. I've decided committing at least 10-15 minutes a day to Teach Yourself or Linguaphone would be a much better use of my time. German ------------ Completed: 5 years of public school German Current Tools: Pimsleur German I Lesson 5, Duolingo Thoughts: No studying this week Overall Thoughts ------------ Hit a few stumbling blocks this week with Cantonese and Hindi. At one point I felt a bit overwhelmed by the number of languages I'm taking on, simply because I felt like I wasn't going to be able to remember everything. But as soon as I start lessons for a language, all I've learned comes pouring back in. So I'm going to try and stay on my path, and hopefully this approach pays off in the long run. A big tell will be seeing how my Hindi progresses over a long period of time with minimal study. Edited by YnEoS on 31 May 2013 at 5:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4256 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 12 of 29 02 June 2013 at 8:24am | IP Logged |
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Solid week, used a lot of new resources, and I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of my new routine with each language
Cantonese ------------ Completed: Pimsleur I Current Tools: Sidney Lau Vol 1 Lesson 10, DLI Vol 1 Lessons 23, FSI Lesson 6, Teach Yourself/Linguaphone Lesson 10, Colloquial Cantonese Lesson 1, Anki, Naked Cantonese Lesson 30, Popup Cantonese Thoughts: So I found 2 wonderful new methods to start using. First an old teach yourself/linguaphone hybrid course from '76, and the most recent colloquial Cantonese. They're similar to the other Teach Yourself course I was using, but very very importantly they have English translations of the dialogues. I dropped my old Teach Yourself course completely from my program, after trying TY with other languages and realizing that not having an English trasnlation of the dialogue is not the norm. I feel like I've had a pretty good dose of grammar, so I didn't use Sidney Lau much this week. I'm been focusing pretty solely on the old Teach Yourself/Linguaphone hybrid course, which has been a pretty incredible discovery. It's not that it's a good course in fact it has lots of problems (no written cantonese, really weird romanization, dialogue audio is sometimes shorter than what's in the text). But what's great about it for my situation right now, is that it is a very slow beginner's course, but still goes beyond my current level of learning. I haven't used Colloquial Cantonese much, but it seems like it's well formatted, but with a higher learning curve than the TY/Ling course. So I think for now I'm going to do the courses like TY/Ling ---> Colloquial ---> DLI ---> FSI probably with some overlap, I'll start the basic courses of one when I get near the end of another. Sydney Lau is still my favorite thing in the world for grammar, so I'll be using that alongside everything else. I think right about now I've surveyed just about every decent Cantonese recourse around. I'm really glad I found more beginner friendly courses, I think they'll bridge a huge gap I had in my Cantonese learning. French ------------ Completed: Pimsleur I, II, III, Advanced Michel Thomas & Foundations Current Tools: Pimsleur Plus Lesson 8, Assimil Passive Lesson 9, L-R Three Musketeers Chapter 13, Duolingo Thoughts: What can I say, French is still moving on nice and smoothly, the transparencies with English, and the huge amount of recourses available I think is making a huge difference. I'll be done with Pimsleur soon, so we'll see how Assimil feels on it's own with L-R. I got 2 hours of Listening Reading in this week. Funny thing I noticed recently. I've probably watched several hundred french films in my life time, and I don't think I've picked up a single french word from watching them. I do however also know the French and English titles for a whole bunch of films, and I notice when I do L-R once I hear the words in the titles I pick them right away. Just thought that was funny. Indonesian ------------ Current Tools: Pimsleur I Lesson 21, Learning Indonesian Lesson 10, Teach Yourself Lesson 2, Linguagphone Lesson 2 Thoughts: Indonesian is going pretty steadily. Nothing incredibly new about my program this week. I seem to be having a simpler time with Indonesian than I had with Cantonese or Hindi when I did them the first time. Hindi ------------ Completed: Pimsleur I, Pimsleur Reading I, Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Script Current Tools: Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Lesson 3, Living Languages Lesson 3, Linguaphone Lesson 2 Anki Thoughts: I think using other language programs is working a lot better than my old shadowing/flash cards method. I tried living languages this week, and I believe it's my favorite Hindi recourse right now. The dialogues are spoken a bit too fast for me, but the exercises after give me some practice with the words in more digestible quantities. Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi is probably more my speed, but I don't like all the exercises. I'll probably edit down the audio soon to make the program easier to use. Not doing a lot of Hindi practice, but I feel I'm maintaining the language. I believe I'm slowly advancing, but it will take more time to know for sure. German ------------ Completed: 5 years of public school German Current Tools: Pimsleur German I Lesson 5, Duolingo Thoughts: No studying this week Overall Thoughts ------------ Solid week of studying, really learning the ins and outs of what sort of resources work for me and what don't. Coming near the end of my French and Indonesian Pimsleur lessons, so important language learning decisions ahead. Edited by YnEoS on 09 June 2013 at 5:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4256 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 13 of 29 09 June 2013 at 4:49am | IP Logged |
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Very interesting week, going to be a very long post for most of my languages.
Cantonese ------------ Completed: Pimsleur I Current Tools: Sidney Lau Vol 1 Lesson 10, Yourself/Linguaphone Lesson 17, Colloquial Cantonese Lesson 2, DLI Vol 1 Lessons 23, FSI Lesson 6, subs2srs + Anki, Naked Cantonese Lesson 30, Popup Cantonese Thoughts: Continuing strong with the TY/Linguaphone course, I've just been advancing 1 lessons per day and reviewing the old lessons. Even as the course gets above my level I'm never completely lost. I'm gonna start doing more of Colloquial Cantonese in addition to this, and hopefully they'll start building off each other. These programs definitely cut down on my time I need to study each day to feel like I've progressed. With DLI and other methods I usually needed at least 45 minutes or sometimes over an hour of study to feel like I've done more than just review what I know. Now even if I only have 20 minutes I feel like I've learned a little bit. Of course I try to study longer when possible, but it's nice to know that I will be able to make time to study every day without making a huge commitment. I also started fiddling around with Subs2SRS this week. I haven't figured out how to use it very well yet, but I think it will be an important part of my advanced studies for languages that don't have a lot of literature available for them, but hundreds of films. French ------------ Completed: Pimsleur I,II,III,Plus, Advanced Michel Thomas & Foundations Current Tools: Assimil Passive Lesson 16 (Without Toil & New with Ease), Madrigal's Magic Key Lesson 4, L-R Three Musketeers Chapter 20, Duolingo Thoughts: I've been really enjoying the transition to Assimil so far. I read about a few people using multiple versions of Assimil to study, so I decided to try it out. I started using New French with each, and really love it. It's like a completely different course, and now I get twice as much material without increasing the difficulty. Since I want to eventually study lots of other languages through the French Assimil, I feel doing 2 different Assimil courses will get me to that level faster. I also recently discovered the Madrigal's Magic Key Program this week. I'm not too far into it yet, but so far it seems wonderful. Michel Thomas helped me a lot with my French, but I found it a bit dull to work through at times. Having a similar course only completely in book form allows me to go at my own pace, and there seems to be a lot more vocabulary. Even though I already completed the Michel Thomas program, this saves me time of having to review it. If only this was available in more languages. German ------------ Completed: 5 years of public school German Current Tools: Assimil Passive Lesson 1 (Without Toil & Nouvel Sans Peine), Madrigal's Magic Key Lesson 4, Duolingo Thoughts: When I finished doing Pimsleur French this week, I decided it was time to start up German again and I began doing Pimsleur German lessons, hoping to reactive it slowly. I actually found it to be quite a bit of fun, but after a few days I told myself I should be more serious about language study, and not waste time with a program that wasn't teaching me very much. So I have decided to move straight on to Assimil and Madrigal's Magic Key, which are much more appropriate for my level of German. I'm also trying a bit of an experiment. I'm doing 2 Assimil courses, as with French, only this time I decided to 1 in English (without toil), and 1 in French (nouvel sans peine). After I finish the regular Assimil courses I want to move on to using German, which is French only. So I figure it would be helpful to get some practice doing a basic course in French as well. Though since my German is a higher level than my French, I'll probably be learning more French from the lessons than German. I also think it would be good to get in the habit of learning from L2, and French and German seem like a good combo, because they have so many different words that are transparent to English speakers, I could probably figure out a lot of advanced sentences with just the French and German together. And if I feel like I'm not learning well or wasting too much time, I can always switch back to English. Hindi ------------ Completed: Pimsleur I, Pimsleur Reading I, Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Script Current Tools: Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Lesson 6, Living Languages Lesson 3, Reviewing Pimsleur I Lesson 3, Anki Thoughts: This was the only language this week that was really frustrating. I hit a wall with Living Languages, for most of the week I felt I was learning very little. My usual method of shadowing these courses just wasn't pushing me along with only 15-20 minutes of study per day. For a moment I though of quitting Hindi til my French was good enough to use Hindi Assimil. But then I thought, Hindi Assimil is only 50ish lessons, and probably will be much more difficult than Hindi French. So I'm determined to stick with Hindi, even if I don't progress much if I give time to let the basics sync in, I think that will make my later Assimil more digestible. So as always, when I feel like my materials aren't getting me anywhere, the answer is always to change my study plan and edit my materials to be more effective. I edited down the Beginner's Hindi lessons from 10-12 minutes per lesson to 4-5 minutes per lesson. So now I can study 4-5 beginner's Hindi lessons in a day rather than 1 or 2. I could've edited them shorter and left just the dialogues, but I wanted to preserve some of the relaxed atmosphere of the course with it's verbal grammar explanations. So I ended up just deleting the exercises I didn't find helpful, eliminating the pauses for me to speak, taking out useless instructions like "here are some more questions", and any parts where they say what something means in English when it's written in the book. I've only been using the edited material for a few days, but progress has been much better. I'm officially a huge fan of the Teach Yourself Beginner's series, it may require some editing, but I find resources for absolute beginner's incredibly helpful. Since I can't dedicate the time I spend on Cantonese to all my other languages. Also since I decided to quit Pimsleur German, I decided it would be useful to review Hindi Pimsleur during my morning Pimsleur time slot. Since I've been fumbling around for a good Hindi study plan, I feel I'm starting to lose some of what I learned from the course and a review might be helpful. Plus I think with my languages I have less time for, over-learning will be quite useful for future studies. I want to live and breath the basic grammar, so when I move onto advanced stuff it's not so big a jump. Indonesian ------------ Current Tools: Pimsleur I Lesson 27, Learning Indonesian Lesson 15, Teach Yourself Lesson 2, Linguagphone Lesson 2 Thoughts: Still having a lot of fun with Indonesian, though I'm a bit worried now that I'm close to being done with the Pimsleur program. There's no Teach Yourself Indonesian course at the moment, so I'll have to see what I can do with the normal Teach Yourself and Linguaphone courses in 15-20 minutes a day. Teach Yourself is making a Beginner's Indonesian course, but it's scheduled for release November 2013, but by then I'm hoping my French will be strong enough that I'll be able to use Assimil Indonesian. Still, I find Indonesian grammar more intuitive than Hindi, and progressing in Indonesian seems more a matter of just absorbing all the new vocabulary. So perhaps I won't need a beginner course to advance with Indonesian. Well, I'll soon find out how things go. Overall Thoughts ------------ Well, not much more I can say that I haven't already written up there. Does it seem like I'm always changing my programs? It doesn't feel like it when I'm studying, but I feel like every week when I have to post my log I always have to explain all these different study changes. Maybe it's just because I'm tackling several languages at once, so there's always news and discoveries. Plus I'm still fairly new at this so I'm figuring out what methods work best for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4256 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 14 of 29 15 June 2013 at 6:40am | IP Logged |
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Lots of new stuff again this week, so it will probably be another pretty big post.
Firstly I added on yet another language, this time Russian. Originally Russian wasn't quite at the top of my priority list, because lots of great Russian films are available in English. But there are so many great resources for Russian, and I wanted to see what it was like to tackle a more "difficult" language with better resources available, so here we are. By the way I forgot to mention it last time when I added Indonesian, but from now on when I add a new language, I'll put my reasons up for studying it into my initial post. The biggest development this week was my discovery of the Truncate Silence feature in audacity, and the apply chain function. I wish I had come across this way sooner as it is possibly the single greatest discovery I have made in my language learning. Originally I was just wanted to use it for some of the New Assimil courses which had longer pauses from the old ones. And I have indeed cut a lot of time in that regard. However the best discovery for me was removing the gaps from the Pimsleur courses. Originally I just wanted to try this for reviewing Hindi. I figured it would be a nice way to quickly shadow all the material covered in less time, but without the pauses I would lose the active aspect of having to recall the native words. But quite the contrary, it actually increased the active aspect. Now not only do I do Pimsleur courses in 1/2 the time, but I'm much more focused, retain much more of the lesson, and find myself able to spit out certain phrases instantaneously. Trying to say something in a target language before the English narrator stops speaking is quite a rush, and I absolutely love it. I have to use it more to see how effective it is long term, but so far it seems extremely promising. If the pace proves to be too fast, I'd still use Pimsleur without pauses because I can do a lesson twice in the time it would normally take me to do once. Anyways here's the more specific details Cantonese ------------ Completed: Pimsleur I Current Tools: DLI Vol 1 Lessons 12, FSI Lesson 6, Cantonese101 Absolute Beginner S1 L16, Sidney Lau Vol 1 Lesson 10, Yourself/Linguaphone Reviewing 7-20, Colloquial Cantonese Lesson 5, subs2srs + Anki, Naked Cantonese Lesson 30, Popup Cantonese Thoughts: This week I finished going through the TY/Linguaphone course and started the Colloquial Cantonese course. I haven't absorbed everything from the TY/Linguaphone yet, but I can get through all the dialogs pretty comfortably and understand a good chunk of the material. I've decided to try and move on from these beginner type courses, though I'll probably still review them from time to time since I haven't completely absorbed them yet. I removed all the gaps from FSI and now find the course to be a lot more efficient than it was before. So now I'm going to focus on pushing through these courses, and also I plan on using DLI like Assimil, adding 1 new lesson a day. I realize my knowledge is a bit scattered, and just because I find 1 lesson too hard, it doesn't mean the whole course suddenly is above me, just that it's a lesson I'm not familiar with. So I'm going to try and stick to my guns and push through these 3 comprehensive courses and see how much I absorb. On a lighter study note, I also started doing Cantonese101 lessons. They've got a good number of courses now at each level, so I'm gonna see what I can do. I'm working my way through absolute beginner right now, and a lot is review, but still there's some new stuff here and there. They're kind of inefficient time wise, but they're easy to take in, and there seems to be a solid base of material. Plus once I've gone through all the lessons I can review them really quickly with the review courses. I also have been working my way through and Anki deck made from subs2srs out of the wonderful Cantonese children's film My Life as McDull. I'm not sure quite how to use this method yet, as the Cantonese dialog is still way over my head and the English subtitles are way too idiomatic to be useful for anything other than a hint. Still it's fun to get some native exposure, and I think I'm going to try and use a technique of Iversen's where I write my own Hyperliteral translations down, once I'm able to make them. So far I've only been able to do this for 1 card but I'm pretty proud of this small achievement. The English subtitle reads "White teachers for English class?" but to my ear it sounds like "西人教英文？" or hyper-literally "West people teach English language?". French ------------ Completed: Pimsleur I,II,III,Plus, Advanced Michel Thomas & Foundations Current Tools: Assimil Passive Lesson 22 (Without Toil & New with Ease), Madrigal's Magic Key Lesson 12, L-R Three Musketeers Chapter 21, Duolingo Thoughts: French is progressing along nicely, still enjoying the 2 Assimil courses. Madrigal's Magic Key is really great so far, I think I like it much better than Michel Thomas, but so far I haven't gotten to much new material, just review. German ------------ Completed: 5 years of public school German Current Tools: Assimil Passive Lesson 7 (Without Toil & Nouvel Sans Peine), Madrigal's Magic Key Lesson 12, Duolingo Thoughts: Just starting the Assimil, so it's too early to tell how it will go. So far doing the German from French is a lot of fun, though we'll see if I'm able to keep it up as I get further. Russian ------------ Completed: Pimsleur Reading I Current Tools: Pimsleur I Lesson 10, Assimil Passive Lesson 7 (With Ease), Madrigal's An Invitation to Russian Lesson 2 Thoughts: Just started Russian this week. I've been doing the Pimsleur without pauses for the first time, and it's been really intense, but I've been sucking up the Russian like a sponge. Really love the language so far, hopefully I can keep this pace up as the lessons get more advanced. There are 4 different Assimil Russian courses, and I want to do them all, but right now I'm just doing the new English Russian With Ease course simultaneously with Pimsleur because it starts off pretty easy. The dialogs are really short compared to other Assimil's I've done, but it should be a good warmup for Assimil Without Toil which is supposed to have a very steep learning curve. Really excited to have Madrigal's An Invitation to Russian course available for this language. This will probably be my only chance to review this language from the perspective of learning from scratch. Hopefully it will make the Russian grammar a bit easier to take in. All the lessons I've done so far have dealt with the alphabet, so no initial impressions yet. Hindi ------------ Completed: Pimsleur I, Pimsleur Reading I, Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Script Current Tools: Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Lesson 7, Living Languages Lesson 3, Reviewing Pimsleur I Lesson 21, Anki Thoughts: Haven't done as much focused Hindi study this week, with all the commotion from other languages, but I have been reviewing Pimsleur without any pauses during my evening Pimsleur time slot. It's been a lot of fun, there's a lot of stuff I forgot. Indonesian ------------ Completed: Pimsleur I Current Tools: Learning Indonesian Lesson 15, Teach Yourself Lesson 2, Linguagphone Lesson 2 Thoughts: Finished Pimsleur Indonesian, which was a lot of fun. I really love the Indonesian language and am excited to continue it. This week I didn't get much Indonesian practice in after completing Pimsleur, because I was spending lots of time preparing materials for all my courses. Still I managed to edit the Teach Yourself audio down to just the dialogs, so I'll start using that soon and see how far it gets me. Overall Thoughts ------------ I think that covers most of it. I might be taking on a few too many languages, but I'll see how long I can keep it going for. I feel my French, German, and Cantonese have been progressing nicely though, and those are the most important ones for now. Also I'm really excited by my new use of the Pimsleur method, though this will also mean I'm going to start finishing Pimsleur courses a lot faster. I'll probably do a lot of review to help me internalize languages, but eventually I'm gonna start adding a lot more. I think I might start just doing Pimsleur courses and not following up on further study until I have more time. I think it would be fun to be familiar with a whole bunch of languages, even if I never get around to studying them seriously for a long time. Edited by YnEoS on 15 June 2013 at 6:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6974 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 15 of 29 15 June 2013 at 7:39am | IP Logged |
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Good luck on your Cantonese studying! I just recently finished the first four volumes
of Sidney Lau's Cantonese series, and found them extremely thorough and helpful. The only thing to watch out for is some outdated grammar and vocabulary. For instance, the books use "bou3" as the classifier for book, when "bun2" is the classifier that is commonly used nowadays, or "ni1 syu1" for here, rather than "ni1 dou6" in modern usage.. I also tried using the Naked Cantonese podcasts to study, but found that their accents were bad. Not only are they non-native and distracting, but they actually say some of the sounds/tones incorrectly, which can cause confusion. I believe someone once raised this point directly with Cecilie on a Cantonese language learning website (pointing out once that she used a second tone when she should have used a fifth tone, or something like that) and she only blithely responded that as a foreigner, of course she would have an foreign accent. With a tonal language like Cantonese, one has to be careful with these kinds of mistakes. I've most recently been using the Routledge Grammar series for Cantonese, which I have found to be a great supplement to Sidney Lau. There is no audio, but the grammar and vocabulary is very up to date. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4256 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 16 of 29 16 June 2013 at 7:09am | IP Logged |
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Thanks!
I had noticed "ni1 syu1"/"ni1 dou6" being used by different learning materials, but didn't realize one was more modern than the other. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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