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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| oruixo13 Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 4231 days ago 33 posts - 35 votes Speaks: FrenchB2, Spanish*, EnglishC1 Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 29 20 October 2012 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Here I am, with three languages under my belt (I know, there's always room for
improvement) and wanting to learn the next. This time it is an unrelated language: Mandarin Chinese. The other three (English, French and Spanish) were acquired under diverse circumstances. Spanish is mother tongue. There's nothing else to say. French is my second mother tongue. I have French relatives that I love and therefore I want to communicate with them. So far so good. English. Well. I don't know what to say. I still have a strong accent. Or maybe it's just that I love to criticize myself. Anyway, I am currently studying in Australia, and to get here I had to pass the TOEFL test. The speaking section is my weakness, but still nothing compares to a few years ago. I am happy with it. Now. Mandarin. That's my challenge. My approach. I will learn the Traditional Script. Not only because I prefer Taiwan that Mainland China, but because I think that it is easier to learn. From now on I'll use mnemonics to learn the characters. I purchased Pimsleur Mandarin Chinese I, II and III on eBay. Big investment. I took from the library "Reading and Writing Chinese", the traditional version by McNaughton. Also "Fun with characters". Now, let's explain a little bit how I'll go about learning everything. Speaking: using Pimsleur. I think it is great because you don't only get the right tones but also the rhythm. After that, I will continue to learn sentences and not only isolated words. Writing: I'll learn only the meaning of the characters. That's right. When I first encounter a written on my book I'll focus on the meaning. Why? Because I saw it on Heisig's books. After I learn how to pronounce a word on my listening tasks, I'll merge both meaning and sound. For example: what is the first word that you learn in Spoken Mandarin? 我 Wo3 = I. But in my case I'll learn first how to write "手 = hand" and then "戈 = lance/spear". Obviously, I won't use the word hand in the beginning, but I'll learn how to recognize the script. Does it make sense? Also, I won't be writing by hand anything. In my book of course there's the stroke order. I'll take a glance at it, but it's not my priority. What else. I am a beginner. I am motivated and hope to continue to be but I don't know much about the language, or language methods or whatever. I strongly encourage you to give me pieces of advice any time you want. Really. This is just an experiment. I am not studying full-time as I am a college student. There is not guarantee that I'll accomplish my goal. In fact there is no goal. Just learn something different and have fun. But I want to move fast. I know what is like to study in a classroom and I HATE it. I'll have little milestones along the way. -Finish all three levels of Pimsleur in 3 months + 1 month extra if I have to review more. -Fun with characters. 450 in total. -Reading and writing Chinese. 1000 characters. Again. Only meaning as long as I don't know the pronunciation from Pimsleur. After that, I'll start doing FSI Mandarin a modular approach. I'll need advice on that, though. I would like to thank irrationale because of his fantastic adventure with Chinese. Really inspiring. English is neither my native language nor my focus now. Excuse me if I commit spelling mistakes. Cheers. ADVICE ADVICE ADVICE ADVICE ADVICE ADVICE ADVICE ADVICE ADVICE ADVICE! PD: As my first post was too vague, I am now going to set a schedule more precise. - Pimsleur in 3 months. 11 January all levels of Pimsleur finished - Assimil Chinese with ease. 105 lessons. One lesson each day. 31 April finish Assimil. - As I have a lot of time in commuting from home to uni, I also spend around 2 hours each day listening to previous Pimsleur or Assimil dialogues. That could help me consolidating my knowledge. - I do not want to have a too strict calendar. It is important to me to stick to that plan but I reserve to myself the right to reschedule at any given time to better fit my needs. Nevertheless, I think 30 minutes a day with Pimsleur and maybe another 30 minutes for each Assimil lesson is not too engaging. - Does someone know what level we have after finishing Pimsleur or Assimil? A1,A2,B1... I'll browse this web to try to figure that out. Edited by oruixo13 on 02 November 2012 at 7:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4636 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes  Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 2 of 29 20 October 2012 at 4:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hi. I corrected some little mistakes in English. As for mandarin, your project to learn traditional script instead of the simplified surprises me, especially since only about 2000 characters have been simplified and they're generally more used than the traditional ones. You can learn both at the same time, I don't think it adds too much work. As for beginning with Pimsleur, I recommend it myself. I've been dabbling for a year in mandarin and began with that and my pronunciation is very good, according to Chinese people I know. I think it really does help to get a decent pronunciation and that alone gives a strong foundation for future learning. I only did Pimsleur I though. I found it very interesting and challenging (although repetitive). As for your method of learning characters separately from their pronunciation : I just don't see the point to this. Why not learn everything together while you're at it? I mean, you can of course learn to recognize more characters than you can write, but really, after you've learned to write a few dozen characters, you'll instinctively or almost instinctively know how to write most of them. Especially if you begin by learning some fundamental characters. Also, writing is essential in learning, in my opinion. Writing on paper actually imprints the knowledge in your brain and the difficulty of writing chinese characters is greatly exaggerated. After looking through many different methods and textbooks (none of them really made me want to jump in), I settled for the Tuttle series Basic Spoken Chinese and Basic Written Chinese. I really would recommend it, although I haven't go through it completely yet and can't make a definitive review. Through it, you learn everything : listening, speaking, writing, reading, grammar and even some geography and cultural notes. The recordings feature various speakers. The book lets you choose to learn either traditional or simplified (or both) script and in the Written C. books, each lesson is printed twice, the second time in traditional characters and written traditionally, that means from right to left and from up to down. Of course, traditional characters aren't that numerous and they are added few at a time. Anyway, in my opinion, the best course of action for learning mandarin would be to start with Pimsleur 1 or even 2 and 3 if the motivation is there to complete this series, and then to move on to the Tuttle series (or even to just start it as soon as possible, even while doing the Pimsleur lessons). Everything is covered that way. I would also recommend finding a Chinese person to practice and study with. Maybe you can find someone who wants to learn some french or Spanish, or work on their English, and exchange services. That's what I'm doing. Edited by Homogenik on 20 October 2012 at 4:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| oruixo13 Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 4231 days ago 33 posts - 35 votes Speaks: FrenchB2, Spanish*, EnglishC1 Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 29 21 October 2012 at 2:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you for the corrections.
The point about learning only the meaning at first is that if I try to remember also the sound, I'll forget both. And also it is useless to know the pronunciation of an isolated word. When studying Mandarin I have to keep in mind three words: context, context and context. I found the transcript of Pimsleur Mandarin I. Quite happy, as it saves me a lot of time. Also quite happy because when reading the transcripts of conversation that I already know, I recognize some characters that I know!! Also, ye3 Things, (everything that's between the east and the west), dong1 xi Creating my own deck in Anki. Short and simple stories. Edited by oruixo13 on 11 November 2012 at 12:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5771 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 4 of 29 21 October 2012 at 3:29am | IP Logged | |||||
The pinyin for thing is dong1xi. The sound of the pinyin t and d are a bit different....suggest going through the FSI Pronunciation and Romanization modules at http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Chinese Some of the sounds are a bit tricky for westerners. Edited by Snowflake on 21 October 2012 at 4:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| oruixo13 Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 4231 days ago 33 posts - 35 votes Speaks: FrenchB2, Spanish*, EnglishC1 Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 29 21 October 2012 at 5:32am | IP Logged | |||||
My mistake. I think it is also the same dong1 as in Canton region and in Tokyo. I don't know how to write them, though. Also, do you recommend me to do FSI to learn pinyin or just Pimsleur? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6721 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 29 21 October 2012 at 10:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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If you want to learn pinyin, Pimsleur isn't the your best choice (unless the material has changed). Maybe FSI is good for that. Pinyin is pretty straightforward after all, you can learn how the individual sounds are written in a couple of minutes. I can't even remember where I picked up pinyin (maybe Teach Yourself Beginner's Chinese by Elizabeth Scurfield), but you can just look it up on Wikipedia.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| oruixo13 Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 4231 days ago 33 posts - 35 votes Speaks: FrenchB2, Spanish*, EnglishC1 Studies: Mandarin | Message 7 of 29 21 October 2012 at 2:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks Jeff! I'll do that because I am sometimes very confused regarding what is the
correct spelling of what I am saying in Pimsleur. Actually I know a little bit of pinyin. But it is very difficult to me to remember the difference between sh,zh,j,q...I guess I need to work on that. Today I downloaded a Pinyin input program on my Ubuntu machine and it works smoothly. I am so happy with it. I played around a little bit and find out that only pressing Ctrl + Space-bar you can input pinyin. Also I think the system is pretty intelligent, as it remembers previous entries. Furthermore, you can enable the input system only in one tab/screen and keep the others tasks working on English. Sweet! I know, you all already knew that. Please be gentle with me, I am a newbie. I finished Pimsleur 1.9. I reviewed the first book of characters (176). I know them all. I can use around 17 in actual (spoken) sentences. Tomorrow I'll begin book number 2. Looking forward to it. I have a doubt. My book says that (xiang3) 想 means "to hope/to think". Pimsleur says that is "would like". Which one is correct? Does it have all three meanings? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dcbaok Groupie United States Joined 4294 days ago 46 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 8 of 29 21 October 2012 at 6:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Congratulations on your progress. If I may ask, what is the name of the pinyin input program? Is it for writing pinyin or for writing characters by typing pinyin?
Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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