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Fluent in 300 months: starting Mandarin | ||
Tags: Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| benjamin Triglot Newbie France theautodidacticist.cRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4193 days ago 8 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 11 08 June 2013 at 11:01am | IP Logged | ||
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After toying with the idea for several years, I finally decided to take a shot at learning mandarin. Since I don't have any real need to learn the language, I'm trying to raise the stakes by going public with my efforts with the hope that fear of internet humiliation will act as an added disincentive against slacking.
In this log, I'll be concentrating on the quantifiable elements of my learning journey, but I'll also be writing a blog that will be more detailed and hopefully more entertaining as well (I've already written a series of background posts about my decision process and past experiences): http://theautodidacticist.com/ A bit of background: After various stints of English teaching in France and Spain, I've managed to reach a high level in both languages. As a result of countless hours spent teaching languages to both myself and others, I've become increasingly interested by the language learning process. After reading about other techniques on this forum and elsewhere on the internet, I've come to realize how haphazard my experience was learning French and Spanish. Really, I'm curious to see what I can do with better organization and better methods. Why Mandarin? Several Reasons: -I'm looking for a challenge, specifically a language that doesn't use the Roman Alphabet -I'm drawn to the culture: the food, the history, the special-effects heavy action movies, the food -I want a 'mainstream' language with a wide variety of learning resources; I plan to try as many as I can -No plans to travel to China for now, but wherever I'm living I seem to meet Chinese expats. These interactions will eventually lead to practice opportunities, but they are also good for staying motivated. Goals: Since I don't have an urgent need to learn the language, they aren't set in stone. Rather that worrying about results, I plan to concentrate on the process with the hope that the results will follow. For now, this is my general plan of attack: -No less than 30 minutes per day, preferably 1 hour on average -I've been doing Pimsleurs for about 2 weeks now and plan on continuing with it for the time being -I have Assimil's Chinese with Ease Vol. 1, which I'll be starting this weekend -No specific goals for when I'll finish these programs. To break the monotony I plan on rotating other programs in regularly - I'll be more concerned with using my time efficiently and missing as few days as possible. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| benjamin Triglot Newbie France theautodidacticist.cRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4193 days ago 8 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 11 15 June 2013 at 2:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just made a new post on my blog after completing the first 20 lessons of Pimsleur: http://theautodidacticist.com/2013/06/13/the-pimsleur-method -first-impressions/
I plan on continuing with the program, but I will definitely be using it as a supplement rather than a primary method. Still, it's a nice intro to spoken Mandarin a good way to reinforce your accent. I've also taken a stab at Assimil, but I haven't quite settled on how to use it. Most likely I'll be making an Anki audio deck with recordings from both Pimsleur and Assimil, but I'm still trying to figure out the best way to structure it. I've been reading on the forum a lot, but I'm a bit overwhelmed by the possibilities. I like the idea of putting the recorded sentence and simplified Mandarin on the front with a few characters in bold to be defined on the back of the card. I don't plan on actively learning to write the characters for a while, but this should hopefully help me to start recognizing them. As for production, I'm not really sure what to do yet - if anyone happens across this thread I'd love to get any and all input! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5867 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 3 of 11 16 June 2013 at 6:24am | IP Logged | ||
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For production apart from actually trying to speak there's always the FSI Chinese course, though to be honest i didn't like it as much as some of the other courses. The format's a bit different, possibly because it's not quite as easy to define concrete grammar structures in Mandarin. By that i mean in Spanish/French you've got the different verb tenses, the subjunctive, use of pronouns, etc. In Chinese you've got... word order? Some particles, measure words, etc. Not quite the same as learning how to conjugate a verb or decline a noun/adjective. If nothing else, i think the pronunciation module is well worth going through.
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| 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 4 of 11 16 June 2013 at 7:59am | IP Logged | ||
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Best of luck with learning Mandarin!
I thought I might mention...
Not sure how big this reason factors into your motivation, but I thought that I would mention that for the 1970s-1990s, most Chinese action films were made in Hong Kong and are in Cantonese rather than Mandarin. At the moment the Hong Kong film industry is in a bit of a slump, and the mainland film industry is rapidly growing so a lot more action films are being made in Mandarin these days. Who knows what it will be like in the future, but if your interest is in more modern films, Mandarin will probably serve you well. (Though, my personal preference is for the 70s and 80s era of Cantonese action films). Edited by YnEoS on 16 June 2013 at 4:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| benjamin Triglot Newbie France theautodidacticist.cRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4193 days ago 8 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 11 16 June 2013 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for the encouragement! I haven't seen too many Chinese action films yet and my knowledge of the Chinese film universe is scant, but now that I'm looking back it's true that most of them were Cantonese. I do like the older films, but I'll take modern over-the-top action as well (one example I saw about a year ago was Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame). The presence of a film industry wasn't a determining factor when I chose Mandarin, but I do hope I'll be able to find a few favorite directors to provide a decent stream of stuff to watch once I get to the intermediate level - this is what I've done before to keep up with my other languages that I'm not actively using and I find it works pretty well, but only if I like what I'm watching. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| benjamin Triglot Newbie France theautodidacticist.cRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4193 days ago 8 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 11 20 June 2013 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Off to a slow start with Assimil - had a house-guest this past week and since my
"house" is only one room I didn't get to spend much quality time with my books. Hopefully this weekend I'll be able to nudge my average back up towards 45 minutes to 1 hour per day that I'm shooting for. Ankidroid seems like a very powerful tool, and I think it suits my learning style well. However, it's definitely more complex than the other SRS apps I've used in the past and I've been feeling the learning curve a bit. This past week I spent more time learning my way around Audacity, figure out how to enter pinyin and simplified text efficiently on my mac, and creating my first deck compared to the amount of time I actually spent studying. I also ran into a bug where Anki wouldn't recognize my deck's mp3 audio and spent several hours troubleshooting it (in the end I had to remove and re-add all of the audio files - not too annoying considering I only have 15 cards so far, but this will be a problem if it happens again). I still think that it will be a good time investment for me to make my own cards now that I know what I'm doing, but I really need to get it down to a science. Going to aim for a solid 100 audio cards by the end of next week. Currently I've got 10 lessons of Pimsleur Mandarin 1 left, and I plan on finishing that the following week. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| benjamin Triglot Newbie France theautodidacticist.cRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4193 days ago 8 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 7 of 11 06 August 2013 at 12:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Breaking the silence to write that, while I've neglected this log, I've kept more or
less on track with my Mandarin goals. Over the past month or so I've been getting my 30-60 minutes of Mandarin per day primarily from listening to audio courses during my commute. I completed Pimsleur Mandarin Chinese 1, but found myself getting bored with the program, so I switched to Michel Thomas. Despite its flaws, I've found MT much easier to listen to, especially while riding a bike in traffic (wrote a post about it here - theautodidacticist.com). This afternoon I'll finish the MT advanced course, after which I plan to continue with the vocabulary builder. If native material still seems too difficult I may come back to Pimsleur after, but hopefully I won't need to. To summarize, here a few conclusions that I'll be basing my plans on moving forward: -I see audio programs like Pimsleur or MT as an invaluable supplement, not a standalone solution. I'll keep listening, but only while doing something that wouldn't otherwise allow me to study (commuting, cooking, etc). -Because I'll be using the courses as a supplement, I won't stress as much about getting every answer right. If I feel like I'm missing too much or getting behind I'll go back and repeat, but otherwise I won't worry about it. -I won't be making Anki flashcards from Pimsleur or MT any more. After making enough flashcards to feel like the process should have become streamlined (around 100), it still felt far too time consuming hunting through 30 minute long MP3s that I had listened to earlier. Although I had dabbled before, this week I started using Assimil in earnest, and I've been very pleased so far. My current approach is to work through the lessons quickly (15-30 minutes), listening to the audio directly in audacity and chopping up the MP3s for Anki as I go. I then rely on SRS to review what I've worked through. So far this approach has felt much more efficient that what I was doing before, and I'm excited about continuing with it. The plan going forward: -Continue listening to MT or Pimsleur 30 minutes per day -Work through 1-2 lessons in Assimil per day (the fact that I've already studied Pimsleur and MT has made it possible for me to move through the early lessons quickly) -Review Assimil 30 minutes per day during slow periods at work (aka the entire month of August) -Watching movies from this list: http://www.imdb.com/search/title? languages=cmn&title_type=feature&sort=moviemeter,asc Edited by benjamin on 06 August 2013 at 12:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| benjamin Triglot Newbie France theautodidacticist.cRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4193 days ago 8 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 8 of 11 09 August 2013 at 11:34am | IP Logged | ||
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Finished the Michel Thomas advanced course and started into the vocabulary builder,
expecting to finish that next week. As you'd expect the course introduces new vocab at a much faster rate, not sure how much I'm retaining, but there is a lot of overlap with Assimil so I think it's good reinforcement. Once I've finished the course I might listen to it again, but hopefully I'll feel comfortable enough to move on to either podcasts or the more advanced Pimsleur lessons. Moving through Assimil at a good clip with 2 lessons a day, which has put me at lesson 22. Since work has been slow I think I can keep up the pace for a few weeks (especially because work has been slow), so I'm planning on finishing the passive wave by the end of the month. Watched Raise the Red Lantern last night with English subtitles and enjoyed it a lot, if anyone knows of other films in the same vein to recommend I'd be obliged! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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