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A newbie sets out: Braving Mandarin. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4705 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes  Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 25 of 94 22 January 2012 at 12:23am | IP Logged | ||
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I like the language log! Especially how you write about other things in your day other
than strictly language learning; it's not necessary, of course, but it makes for good reading. Don't feel discouraged or despondent in your studies. If you falter one day, just pick yourself up again the next day and do your best again. All the work you've done already is great to see and will be an excellent foundation for your continued progress. Best of luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eggcluck Senior Member China Joined 4703 days ago 168 posts - 278 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 26 of 94 22 January 2012 at 11:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Well today is the eve of the Chinese new year, so I put in a push to get all my study done early. I may be only here a short time and this this would be my only chance to see the grand spectacle if that were the case. I am very much looking forward to seeing the festivities tomorrow and tonight. I plan to do no study tomorrow for these reasons.
I done it all too early and I was left twidling my thumbs. So decided to go a second round with pimsleur and its ear grating accent. Not much has improved in my opinion department there, I listened a little harder today and I think the actual narration is also very patronising, while the lessons are excruciatingly slow. As things stand I can see myself throwing this course into the rejected pile, though I shall press on with it a bit longer to give it a chance. There was a small spike with the SRS, much smaller than anticipated. I checked the due graph, and the expected huge review spikes are aparently 3 days away, I have found the due estimator to mostly be inaccurate however it is at least capable of letting you know when those horrid spikes are coming. The specture of that monster overdue pile has not bit the dust just yet. Current Status -Assimil - Shadowing 47- 61 - SCriptorium 43-45 - Assimil method lessons 25 and 26 Pimsleur - lesson 2 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 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 27 of 94 22 January 2012 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | ||
Considering where you are in Assimil, I think you are far beyond Level One of Pimsleur. You may want to pick it up with Level 2 to see if this challenges you a bit more. The first 30 lessons are painfully slow but it picks up a bit in Level 2. I am on Level 2 Unit 8 right now and I have to spend a few days on each Level 2 lesson whereas I wouldn't need to spend more than a day on the Level 1 units! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eggcluck Senior Member China Joined 4703 days ago 168 posts - 278 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 28 of 94 23 January 2012 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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I toyed with Pimsleur not to learn new vocab but rather to do some more production in a more mistake friendly environment. The Chinese I have encounted have been very unforgiving of any mistakes. I will consider starting at level 2, but I am one of those that like to "complete" things. I do not actually have level 2 as of yet though and I would need to go and get it!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eggcluck Senior Member China Joined 4703 days ago 168 posts - 278 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 29 of 94 23 January 2012 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well its seems I did some study after all, albeit a reduced amount. The reason being was sadly that the grand spectacle of the Chinese new year was a non event. No paper dragons, no people celebrating in the streets, no lanterns, no drums, no singing and dancing, and only a slight increase above the usual nightly quantity of fireworks. All in all just a regular night despite all the hype. Bitterly disappointing.
The time was not a total loss however as on my excursion I was delighted to come across what I think is the main shopping area and it had a book shop...finally! Though I did not venture in, its location has been noted, so I can go pick up some children’s books, I do not feel quite ready to dive into native books just yet. A brief stop in a ex-pat bar was not a waste either, as I gained some valuable information about the local area and some interesting tea houses to try. Ex-pat communities do have their uses. However this ex-pat community I am starting to find could quite possibly be a language learners paradise. It is not dominated by American businessmen but has a huge mix of Germans, Swedes, a few Czechs, Koreans, and a whole swathe of Japanese and Taiwanese. I was environmentally forced to do a reduced study session today, it is pretty hard to write in gloves ( Chinese accommodation has no heating and no hot water), though that resulted in lots more TV listening, That and having to subsist on apples because all the food shops have been shut for weeks is leaving me rather tired, I was told many won't re-open until the 28th....would have been nice to know this sooner. Current Status -Assimil - Shadowing lessons 48-62 - Scriptorium 44-46 - Assimil method lesson 28 - up to lesson 28 for background listening 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eggcluck Senior Member China Joined 4703 days ago 168 posts - 278 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 30 of 94 24 January 2012 at 2:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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Study again was interrupted by co-workers wanting me to again go out. This time I relented since I am still sulking about the new year disappointment and needed something to distract me. It was a short trip so not too much time was lost, but as usual already having already eaten themselves they were totally inconsiderate to my needs to get something to eat since I had just been woken up and dragged out of bed by a never ending stream of phone calls from them, albeit that eating would mean more apples, half an onion and a piece of carrot, yum.
Got that trip out the way and some hours later I was finally able to get some food, suffice to say given my half starved state the food did not last long. None of my clothes fit any more my tops are like dresses now. Pressed on with yet another reduced study session, seems this is becoming the norm now, I should do something about it. It was again threatened by them wanting to drag me to their local city for some time, while I am half starved I do not want to be full starved as would probably happen if I went, plus I would lose much valuable study time for the sake of too much beer and English conversation. The English can wait, I need Chinese now. Picked up the pace with snail like pimsleur and its tooth grinding narrators accent. Was considering just jumping ahead a few lessons, but I wanted to see the thing in its entirerenty so I choose to just motor through it instead, though 1hr of pimsleur in my current state was quite a test of endurance. I will not leave double pimsleur sessions untill the evening now, just in case they induce some sort of raging fit and make me scream about wanting to remove the narrators vocal cords. Current Status -Assimil - Shadowing lessons 49-63 (no double session done today) - Scriptorium 45-47 - Assimil method lesson 29 Pim-sluuuuurrrr - lessons 3 and 4 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eggcluck Senior Member China Joined 4703 days ago 168 posts - 278 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 31 of 94 25 January 2012 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well a productive study day, I managed to do a full days study, this despite once again my English speaking co-workers once again trying to thwart my efforts by wanting to drag me to 'their' city again today. Do they not understand the travel alone will knock 4 hours out of my day? They probably couldn't care less, they do not seem to understand my desire to keep English usage to a minimum.
I am having the odd thought crop up here and there in my horrible broken and mangled Chinese, perhaps a side effect of the hour upon hour I spent studying. While I started toying with it in November it was not until mid December that I decided to put in a large effort to study in earnest. My hunger, lack of social life ( travelling constantly to another city to surround myself in English is not something I want to do) has turned my want squarely into a need for sure. I am currently frustrated by words I “know” coming up on the TV but not catching them or even understanding them when I do. I am consequently perplexed by all these courses that claim to use native speakers speaking in a native way, never matching....well, real natives. The anki spikes are still coming and even throwing in spikes where there should be none, I think I have made it unhappy and it is trying to have some sort of revenge. My % correct mature has increased now that rotten over due pile has been vanquished, but not yet still to the standard I would like it to be at ( the recommended 80%). In an effort to get more production going I have elected to every night before I go to bed try to describe my day in Chinese over a period of 10 minutes, if that results in 7 minutes of me in silence racking my brain to get out one word, so be it. In other news I now find the caterwauling of the pimsleur narrator tolerable. That does not mean to say that I like it however, just that it is now tolerable. Also the Shadowing part of the assimil studies to me marks a mile stone, though now I start to wonder where I will go once I have been through assimil. This is something I should start to ponder over now. The notion of starting my quick run through of remembering the hanzi tomorrow popped up in my head. Though my day is laready pretty intensive and I am not sure if I would be able to even squeeze in a small session. Also tomorrow my regular schedule may suffer as one of the Bosses will be taking me to see one of the small local towns. This is an outting I actually want to go on, a small town virtually guranteed to have no ex-pats and being accompanied by a native, no English in sight. Awesome ( though the boss does speak English and I suspect he will use that, but I will do my best to reply in Chinese as best I can)! Current Status -Assimil - Shadowing lessons 50-63 - Scriptorium lessons 46-48 - Assimil method lessons 30 and 31 Pimsleur - Lesson 5 Edited by eggcluck on 25 January 2012 at 2:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eggcluck Senior Member China Joined 4703 days ago 168 posts - 278 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 32 of 94 26 January 2012 at 3:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Full study today, the trip never happened, such is life.
Well as the end of the month draws in, it is time for me to look at things and evaluate how they have been going. First off, I have not made the progress I would have liked to have made, I have considered reasons to both why and if my expectations were reasonable. Having decided that my expectations were reasonable the only other answer would lie within the way I am approaching things. By the end of the year I want to be B1 but by this April I want to have some basic functionality, everything else in between are steps on that road. The biggest thing holding me back is my irrational fear of anything remotely social involving Chinese. No matter how many times I rehearse in my head before I go into that small local shop, once I am in a spew out single word utterances just before I drop my wallet and spend a few minutes chasing my change that is now gleefully rolling around the floor in its bid for freedom under some shelf unit. I must face this fear down, and expel it from my midst. My thoughts turn to my attempts at ice skating with some fellow first timers, they cave in after 30 minutes, except for me; 3 hours later with raw knuckles, a bleeding nose and no skin on my elbows, I was skating. In the army I also finished a three day march with broken toes, scarred arms and an abundance of blisters. Determination I have, I can see this through. There is no mummy to run crying to here. To deal with the aforementioned fear I think need add in some relevant goals. It is to that end that I have started my search online for a language exchange partner, giving that it is ultimately a language learning environment I feel more at ease about it. Should I be successful in acquiring one then I hope some meet ups will boost my confidence somewhat as well as being a vital first step in getting a life! To date I have had 2 real responses and one solicitation from a language school. I will contact them after this has been written. Furthermore I must now commence operation barber shop, there are rules about how long my hair is allowed to be and I have exceeded that limit, I am safe until the 12 of Feb, so a goal now is to have it cut by the 9th! This will indeed help me with the fear factor too, I have no choice this must be done. The steps appear simple enough, find somewhere with some relevant haircutting vocabulary ( suggestions welcome!) by the 28th, study up to the 31st. Do some solo role play for a while, expanded vocab repeat role play etc. Then get a hair cut! Next is the learning that I am doing does not seem relevant to actual daily life, given my current lack of resources I will have to start with word lists I make myself pulled from some free online dictionary somewhere. The haircut word list seems a good place to start. The bulk of my studies are currently based around the assimil book. With the assimil run I am trying press ahead with two lessons a day to speed onto the active wave. This is because the assimil run way is actually a third wave trailing behind the shadowing and scriptorium runs, so I saw the assimil run as review and no big deal is pushing forward with it. I will now slow down to one session a day instead, apart from freeing up 40 minutes to spend on the aforementioned word lists, I think there are better ways to start getting into production. Such as my bed time self chats and now things like operation barbershop, with a hopefully impending language partner. Thus I now feel no need to push as hard and will use the time elsewhere. As much as I like the assimil books there is glaring holes in the vocabulary within the book that I need to address in order to meet my objective of basic functionality. I read ahead to see what there is. To my amusement the first thing I noticed was the lack of “turn left” etc. Given that taxi drivers here rarely even know the street down the road I must find a way to address this issue myself. For now my solution is the word lists for each of my little goals I create to battle with my social fears. As I move through with shadowing the assimil method follow ups still bring to my attention things that have not quite sunk in. As the assimil method is slower and more focused I now consider it an integral part of the study attempt. I see the shadowing more as a pronunciation drill now. The 2 shadowing sessions will be reduced to just one, this will free up 30 minutes. Anki has been a thorn in my side that insists on continually prodding me with its review spikes. Yet I am convinced it still has its uses, though in the overall big picture I think it is something that can only ever play a minor role and as such the beast needs to be kept at bay. Currently for Chinese I was adding cards for reading and listening after each assimil session for some choice sentences. With the listening I would write out what I hear. This has shown me that the scriptorium run while useful can not do it all by itself. I came to the conclusion my method of using SRS was inefficient and now I have effectively halved the number of cards I am adding by only doing listening cards, I can just read the answer after all. Hopefully this will calm the beast and aid me in making sure I do not spend too much time on it. Now onto “pimsluuuurrrrrr” , I have found if I lie down I can actually stomach the accent much more than what I previously could. While I am only at lesson 6 of unit one and could probably skip ahead I think I will just take it easy and do one a day. I might do more if time permits and I have nothing more interesting to do, like playing games pretending to give an imaginary haircut in my apartment like all sane adults do. I often wonder what my neighbours think given my shadowing sessions they must think I am quite batty...but then again with what I hear coming from them I seem sane by comparison. Early days still for evaluating taking to myself ( oh how writing that made me smile!), but already it has proven to be immensely useful in pointing out the disparity between what I want to say and what I can say. I have increased the time I will spend on this by spending a bit of time each assimil session to talk about the content and what I think. I will also do with with pen and paper in hand to scribble down what I wanted to say but could not for later attention. TV listening is chugging along, I can catch the odd word but still have no idea what it means, this will take time. Though at least now for the time being there is a program on that I actually like (shame it is on at 1am), but each program lasts only a few days, I will be sad to see it end! The other problem I face is my English speaking co-workers and there efforts to cajole me into trekking across a city to them for the joy of talking in English. As they are co-workers ( that I seldom see due to them being in a different city) I have to try and be tactful and not upset them to much. Yet at the same time I see them as very selfish and an obstacle in my language learning goal. They serve no useful purpose, not even the purpose of some sort of social life given their location, it is more important for me to form a social circle in the city I am in, I wish they would just understand that and let me be. I have yet to find an effective method to deal with them. Though just going and trying to talk to them only in Chinese seems fun. I have not forgotton my ambition to burn through RTSH, though my time is already heavily laden and there is still much more needed stuff to do. I may start it soem time as a time filler, though it seems I have little need for one of those at the minute. While some of these changes have already been implemented, all of them will begin in earnest tomorrow. I have no idea how efficient my study is or how much time I spend on what. My wrist watch has a stop watch so it is time I started using that and making a note of time taken for each thing. Over all I think I am now touching on all 4 skills, though some of them are on learner materials, at the end of the day reading is still reading etc. I am not at least speaking to myself and via the TV get a dose of true native speech so I am happy enough with this adjusted study place for now. Current Status - Assimil - Shadowing lessons 51-64 - Scriptorium lessons 45, 48,49 ( yes I did a boo boo) - Assimil method lesson 32 Pimsleur - lesson 6 1 person has voted this message useful |
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