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Tackling difficult passages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| ajelsma Newbie United States Joined 4610 days ago 26 posts - 26 votes | Message 1 of 14 19 September 2012 at 8:33am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello everyone,
I am sorry if this is posted in the wrong place. I am a college student and placed into the highest Chinese class I can but this is not high enough. I　went to a professor within the Asian studies program (my major) and asked for harder resources. She gave me two articles one about adoption in China and the other about a resumes in China. I spent a while tackling the first page of the adoption article and got extremely discouraged by the next page. As a college student I do not have much free time or much sleep. In order to learn the first page/paragraph I used a form of scriptorium but because I was in the library it was more simple. Do you all have any advice to tackling difficult passages and persevering through? I also think I may have an issue with make these active vocabulary. Thank you all for reading this and any help would be appreciated :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 14 19 September 2012 at 9:52am | IP Logged | ||
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You asked for harder materials, and your profesor clearly took pains to give you exactly that - and maybe the things she found were too difficult after all. So the first lesson will be to ask for something slightly easier the next time - hard, but not impossibly hard. However you should be lauded for not just sticking with easy materials if you can manage harder stuff.
Scriptorium is good for many things, but not for things which are totally incomprehensible. I do something similar, but unlike profArguelles (who as for as I know coined the word scriptorium) I don't read the texts aloud - though maybe I should. For me the focus is on taking the text sentence for sentence and pulling it apart, making sure along the way that you know and understand almost everything in it - words, constructions and idioms. And writing the thing down slows you down so that you have time for that. But it is always a balancing act because you shouldn't ever let yourself be totally blocked by an element. If your dictionaries, grammars and common sense can't solve the problem for you within a reasonable time then just copy the thing and continue. If a certain text only consists of insolvable passages then it is too difficult. There are types of study where you look at language decoding as some kind of decrypting a secret code (for instance if you try to make sense of an extinct language or writing system - Ancient Chinese might qualify), but then scriptorium isn't the way to go. Right now you are in a mess. You asked for something hard, and you got it, and you may have to use codebreaker tools to crack those texts you have got. Or find better dictionaries or related, but easier texts which might contain the necessary vocabulary (and the relevant signs). And for most of the time you won't even be looking at the text while doing those things. Some might be tempted to give up in that situation and just do the doable parts. Edited by Iversen on 19 September 2012 at 9:56am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 3 of 14 19 September 2012 at 10:31am | IP Logged | ||
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I know you said you placed high, but as someone who has studied Chinese in the past, I have a couple questions:
1) Do you know 2000-3000 characters and their most common associated vocabulary? If not you are not going to be able to tackle such tougher material. 2) Without using either the internet or a pinyin indexed dictionary, can you look up characters in an old style dictionary by radical? I ask this because if you are using such an older book dictionary, you need to know the radicals well. Even if you mainly use simplified characters, a lot of family names and such will still be in traditional characters like you might find on that resume. But here is another question. Is English your native language, and if not are you solely learning Chinese through English instead of your native language? I ask this because of a couple of peculiarities in your post. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4932 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 4 of 14 19 September 2012 at 11:39am | IP Logged | ||
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I seriously think that your problem is most likely the lack of vocabulary. Learning Chinese is an ultimate vocabulary grind.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4932 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 5 of 14 19 September 2012 at 2:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have question to you. Can you spot any articles in this page where you could understand the main ideas? How many words or meanings you cannot grasp in the easier articles?
http://www.people.com.cn/ Edited by petteri on 19 September 2012 at 3:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ajelsma Newbie United States Joined 4610 days ago 26 posts - 26 votes | Message 6 of 14 19 September 2012 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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The article only has a word or two per sentence (if that) that I do not know. I will just
get discouraged when working through the part because of the words. It's not that hard I was just interested if anyone has any way to fight through articles to learn. I face this problem when learning by myself. I do not want to do the graded reader approach just need a way not to get frustrated and continually work through the article. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 7 of 14 19 September 2012 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | ||
I notice you did not answer my question about how many characters you know or if English is your native language. The way not to get frustrated is through comprehensible input. Which means according to experts, knowing 95-98% of the vocabulary, though 90% works for me. By the way, has it occurred to you that the professor who gave you these items to read, has in the past had other eager students approach her with the idea of getting harder material? And that her standard way to handle such requests is to give very hard material so that the student settles down to a learning pace that can be handled well (without undue frustration)? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6198 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 8 of 14 20 September 2012 at 12:39am | IP Logged | ||
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I had the same thought as Peregrinus, that the teacher may have given a text that was too hard in order to discourage you from bothering her in the future. Maybe that is not the case, but it's something to consider.
Personally, I would not go to a teacher for harder materials, but maybe I have too much experience with passive-aggressive instructors. Lots of people learn Chinese and other languages through self-study and you can gear the learning to your own needs. Have you tried the GLOSS website at all? It's language learning site by the DLI with lessons based on native broadcasts, each with a series of learning activities that can help guide you through material that may at first seem too difficult. There are hundreds of lessons at many skill levels. You might want to take a look at some of those. http://gloss.dliflc.edu/Default.aspx (That link, I believe, will display with extra spaces, so you should remove the spaces when you copy & paste or just re-type the address in your navigation bar leaving out the spaces.) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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