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L-R with Mandarin | ||
Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| hobom Triglot Newbie Joined 4219 days ago 33 posts - 61 votes  Speaks: German*, English, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 17 of 20 20 July 2013 at 7:20pm | IP Logged |
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Today I have kind of reshaped my study procedure. I do not think that at this point I am ready to just do Reading L1 while Listening L2. So at this point I work with the Text in L1 and L2, and the recording in L2. I read a sentence in L1, and then I try to understand the corresponding sentence in L2 using a pop-up dictionary. After I have done that I listen to the sentence. That's very time consuming, today it took me approximately 8 hours to go through approximately an hour of material. However when I relisten to the passages I am able to understand approximately 50 or 60 percent without looking at the text.
I also had a closer look at Mandarin word order. The usual statement that Mandarin has an SVO order is misleading, the order is in most cases topical. The topic is placed first in a sentence, so the word order can also be for example OSV. This relative freedom makes it harder to identify corresponding words while you do L-R. So for today I feel that my progress is ok, I feel like I am getting an idea of Mandarin and L-R. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| hobom Triglot Newbie Joined 4219 days ago 33 posts - 61 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 18 of 20 27 July 2013 at 12:44pm | IP Logged |
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So an update on my activities last week:
After I decided to lay some foundation for the actual L-Ring, I worked slowly through the text, line by line, using a pop-up dictionary. I had basically three goals: To get at least halfway decent passive vocabulary by this, secondly to be able to identify sentence parts. So I listened to a sentence and without looking at the chinese text I tried to guess which words were subject, which adverbs and which verb. If I wasn't able to identify it, I listened to the same sentence a second time and afterwards looked at the chinese text and listened a third time. The third goal was to be able to transcribe the words being said (without the tones). It took me two days of not-so-focused study to get at a stage where I felt it would make sense to go through the book without a parallel text. So for the xth time I listened to the same book, and on the third day after I had been doing approximately 7 or 8 hours LR something happened. I thought i was doing rather good, in every sentence I could guess the meaning of one or two words. Then the recording got to a very emotinal passage which I very liked. Suddenly I kind of felt that I could remember the Chinese passages better, I didn't actually have to force myself to focus on what I was doing, and I felt a big interest to just know what it means. I guess this is what psychologists call "flow" state, or what atamagaii called "love" for those books. Although I know that she said that it was important, only then did I actually felt what she meant. It's not only about being able to do long hours of L-R, I have done this previously with rather disappointing results, it's also that you have a desire to understand what is being said, the language is just a tool and so on. Or in psychologists' terms: The brain remembers things which are meaningful for you (which means emotion) far better than things which are not. It is as simple as that. I read it and didn't pay attention to it, because I probably didn't want it to be true. It is the one thing which I cannot influence. I can choose the best methods, I can put as much self discipline into studying as I want, but it will not change the fact that I don't love a particular book. Anyway, after I reached the above mentioned state it was quickly gone. The recording suddenly skipped around 100 pages. It took around half an hour for me to find my place in the recording again. I shouldn't complain, I didn't pay a dime for the audio, it was a fan version. After I found the passage, I could not really get back the "flow" state. After I got the end I started the book the second time the next morning. I was able to understand more than the first time, but I didn't feel satisfied, and I wasn't able to pick up as much as I thought I should have. The reason is probably that my chose the completely wrong book. While it is interesting, it contains much, much chengyu, which are chinese idioms used especially in writing, usually 4 syllable expressions, which can be used as nouns, verbs or adverbs. Very seldomly there is an appropriate idiom in the target language, otherwise the translator has to be creative in order to faithfully convey the meaning of the original. They are huge problem, because most appear only one or two times in the book, so you cannot memorize them. Even if you have a translation of them in one context, it is hard to understand their meaning. Moreover they cause sentence(s) in your translation to be grammatically very different compared to the original, so they make your life harder while L-Ring. Even when there was no chengyu, the translaton often mixed some sentences up or omitted them entirely. So although the translation was an enjoyable read it was not particularly faithful to the original (my impression). Therefore I have decided to actually use on of the few available parallel texts with pinyin, it is the old man and the sea. The advantage of it being a translation is that it has few chengyu (when I posted the test into mandarinspot, I could not find any 4 character expression). Even better, the translations are grouped together on a sentence basis. Unfortunately it is rather short (4 hours) but I hope it will be enough for the time being. Today I will go through it in one go. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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