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Mandarin not improving, any suggestions? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| graemegraeme Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4873 days ago 7 posts - 16 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 9 of 25 09 June 2012 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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I had a sort of 'breakthrough' moment today which has inspired me to write a quick
post. I very rarely post on forums and as you can see I started this thread almost a year ago. Anyway I thought I would share a bit of my experience learning Chinese since last year in the hope that it might encourage anyone else who is feeling like I was then. Since I last posted on this forum I have started learning characters. This was a massively important decision. Learning spoken Chinese and learning characters is something I think has to be done initially separately, in tandem, but soon will start to overlap and become useful. I don't recommend any brute force methods. After I passively picked up a few characters here and there, I bought Chinese Breeze Level 1 500 character book. I sat with my Pleco dictionary handwriting feature (Another tool I cant recommend enough)and looked up all the characters I didn't recognise. Having a narrative, albeit a pretty boring and ridiculous one (in the case of Chinese Breeze), to me makes a huge difference. Pinyin is all well and good to start with, but the characters make things fall into place after a while, particularly when trying to understand the etymology of compound words etc. Mastering pinyin was crucial for me though, Being able to instantly spell out an unfamiliar word in pinyin, enter it into a dictionary and scroll down and find an appropriate definition is really helpful. Other than that, I have been listening to about 200 Chinesepod intermediate lessons on random, every day during my commute. I never write down new vocab or grammar patterns, just rely on lazy old passive listening (probably explains why I'm at the level I'm at after a year and a half) but it's starting to pay off. Chinesepod is an amazing resource, shame it's so expensive. John Pasden in particular, seems to (probably somewhat tediously for him) always ask Jenny (his co-presenter) just the right questions about for example, grammar that to us seems so alien, but a Chinese native might just skip past. I also try to watch Chinese and Taiwanese films as often as I can, usually with English subtitles. I will sit and try and enter unfamiliar things in pinyin into my dictionary. I've had a few language partners with limited success. I'm at the stage where I could really do with meeting someone with English worse than my Chinese, pretty hard to find in the UK. So the next step is go to China or Taiwan, for a year, try and find a job teaching English, get as close to fluent as I can. Anyway, my 'breakthrough' moment today was watching this terrible Chinese romcom called "love in the buff". It only had chinese subtitles, but I decided to try and watch it all the way through anyway, and found I could understand about 70%. I still have a massively long way to go but you have to enjoy these little encouraging moments sometimes. I think applying a sort of blind faith policy to learning chinese is helpful, if you are like me, un-organised and not very academic. Keep listening to things, trying to read things, guessing things, and hope that eventually all the little bits of information will start to knit up with each other and form some kind of comprehensible image. Cheers 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6910 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 25 09 June 2012 at 7:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for an inspiring post! I've been struggling with Mandarin myself from time to time. I haven't explored Chinesepod in detail (only listened to a handful of podcasts), but your story is encouraging.
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| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6950 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 11 of 25 10 June 2012 at 6:45am | IP Logged | ||
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I'd also like to say thank you for the inspiring post. Going from Pimsleur to
understanding 70% of a TV show in a year and a half sounds like great progress. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Toffeeliz Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5681 days ago 116 posts - 130 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Russian | Message 12 of 25 10 June 2012 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm really glad you changed your mind about learning characters. All told, the simplified characters used in mainland China are not that difficult to write. I would advise you to hand-write as much as possible. I know that it seems unnecessary, but it helps you to remember words and is good practice should you decided to take on a HSK exam (I think the higher grades ask for some writing, I forget). Take some time to study the particals in the characters and what they mean. These can help you to guess pronunciations and meaning. Some people would recommend Heisig but you can save time and effort (and save yourself from learning incorrect meanings) by looking online for the PianPangBuShou, depending on how your reading is atm and if you can navigate the web in Chinese.
I think ChinesePod is the best of the Asian language podcasts available, but I'm upset at how commerical it has become. You can't go wrong with the New Practical Chinese Reader series either. As per your first post; It took me about 2 and a half years to become conversational in Mandarin. Maybe a little after or before, I can't remember. It took about 6 months for anything to click and make sense in my mind. I'm impressed with your progress! The best thing you can do is go to Skype/ sharetalk.com. It is bursting with Chinese natives that wish to practice! Write some short stuff and post it on lang-8.com too. Don't write anything too long at this stage unless you have a native to point out your mistakes and the reasons why. Good luck, and sorry it this is a little long-winded haha! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| graemegraeme Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4873 days ago 7 posts - 16 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 13 of 25 10 June 2012 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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@jeff_lindqvist
You should definitely have a look at Chinesepod, they occasionally have a promotion where you can sign up for a month for $1 or something, then you can download as many lessons and PDFs as you want during that time. @Lucky Charms Cheers but to be honest I was pretty lucky with this particular film as it had such basic dialogue. I still only understand about half of what's being said in the majority of Chinese films, and that's with some guessing. I should add that I had the Chinese subtitles on which was really helpful and I suppose is really the crux of my argument about learning characters. @Toffeeliz Yea I think that handwriting is probably good advice, quite difficult to get motivated to do and I feel like writing from memory is almost impossible. I do think that looking up characters with the pleco handwriting input is really helpful and the actual writing helps with remembering. I'll definitely have a look at PianPangBuShou, I'm not at the stage of navigating the Chinese internet yet tho, might be able to make sense of it with chrome's zhongwen plugin. Yea I should practice on Skype more you are right. I hope to become conversational myself within the next year, I'll see if I can match your progress. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5694 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 14 of 25 10 June 2012 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the update, graemegraeme! It's so exciting to hear about someone really tackling this difficult language and getting so far in such a short amount of time. I've been getting back into studying Mandarin myself lately, and reading your story definitely inspires me. Have you considered making a language log here on the forum so we can follow your progress? I would read it. :)
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| COF Senior Member United States Joined 5832 days ago 262 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English* | Message 15 of 25 11 June 2012 at 2:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Another problem with Mandarin is that the native speakers don't tend to be particularly helpful or encouraging either.
Rather then try to understand your poor pronunciation, or advise you on correct pronunciation or grammar, often they tend to just snigger and then go into English. I don't think they mean to be rude, but I think many Chinese people don't really believe any Westerner would genuinely want to learn Mandarin to a proficient level, and think that Westerners attempt to speak Mandarin is just a polite gesture and nothing more, and thus they laugh because they're pleased that the nice foreigner has made the effort to learn a bit of Mandarin. After all, everyone is learning English. Why on earth would a person lucky enough to have the world language as their native language bother putting themselves through the hardships of learning a language that isn't the world language? I think that's the thought process going on there, or at least sometimes it is anyway. Edited by COF on 11 June 2012 at 2:57am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4666 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 16 of 25 11 June 2012 at 3:02am | IP Logged | ||
Was that your experience as a learner of Mandarin? 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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