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My descent, or Mandarin through French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| gfree Newbie United States Joined 4902 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 1 of 5 06 July 2011 at 4:22am | IP Logged |
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After reviewing a few languages, and by some suggestions by others, I arrived at the goal of learning Mandarin. I thought that my third language would be either Thai or Arabic at first, because I liked the looks of the scripts. Chinese and the other character-based languages scared me.
To make things tougher (not the best idea?) I decided to learn Chinese through my second language, of French. Two weeks ago I bought a slew of the best books I could find, in French, from France, and finally I got my first shipment in today. But, I got impatient. All this time reading about learning Chinese, but I was just idling instead of learning. So, I began using the English materials I had available to begin. My English materials: Reading & Writing Chinese (Simplified Character Edition) by William McNaughton FSI Chinese modular course My French materials (that have arrived): Chinois pour débutants par Marie-Noëlle Bernès-Heuga Chinois Débutant, 1 leçon par jour pendant 3 mois, par Leilei Li I'm glad I decided to go ahead and start with English materials. I think I recognize about ~50 characters at the moment, which I am practicing by writing them and also by using Anki on my phone and computers. I have Chinese webcasts that I listen to occasionally, even though I understand none of it. I concentrate on the sounds and try to identify tones. I also downloaded a bunch of "News in Slow Chinese" episodes to listen to, where I can identify a few of the sounds, chiefly 你好吗. My spoken ability right now is questionable, of course. The FSI course appears to be excellent in identifying the differences among the several tones (which don't appear to be that difficult, contrary to my initial beliefs), and also among the different consonant sounds. I had a good amount of difficulty with the constants today, because the ch/zh and j/q sounds sound a little bit bizarre to me and I'm probably going to redo the lesson at least one more time. I do not want to get too hung up on trying to perfect the lesson though, because I will never progress that way. So far though, Mandarin is fun! I like that I can identify the different characters that a couple weeks ago I would have just skimmed over as indecipherable. An interesting note on learning in French: I seem to have a strong enough basis in French (although I am not fluent) that, because I am copying down definitions in French and not English when possible, often the French definition comes first. This actually aids me in imaging the difference between the singular and plural forms of him/her, or you. For example: 你 and 你们 would have the same definition in English, with the implicit understanding that 你们 is plural. However, in French, I know that 你 corresponds roughly with tu or toi and 你们 corresponds closer to vous. This helps me keep the difference a little bit more clear in my mind. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6694 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 5 06 July 2011 at 8:36am | IP Logged |
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I don't quite understand why you want to make things tougher for yourself BUT... personally I like attacking languages through several base languages, and in my experience this does not make things more difficult (whereas learning new language strictly through your next best languages would have that effect).
Your example with the pronouns shows why: sometimes another language is more 'in sync' with your target language than your native language English is. Knowing other languages even at a low level will have the same effect - although with a language like Chinese the combined effect of knowing a lot of Indoeuropean languages may be limited. Good luck Edited by Iversen on 06 July 2011 at 10:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5299 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 3 of 5 06 July 2011 at 10:25am | IP Logged |
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Looks like you haven't learned the word "您" yet?
你 = tu 你们 = vous 您 = vous 您们 = vous or, really, 你 = tu singular 你们 = tu plural 您 = vous singular 您们 = vous plural but with a different distinction between tu and vous. In Chinese, you can call anyone tu; any stranger, any boss, any president, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| gfree Newbie United States Joined 4902 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 4 of 5 06 July 2011 at 2:24pm | IP Logged |
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Ah, smallwhite, thanks for correcting me. I knew I was missing something. I realized that 你们 was vous in the plural sense but not in the sense of being polite. From my understanding, isn't 您 mainly used with addressing elders, like if you met someone's grandparents?
Iverson, I agree that making things more difficult is a bad idea, but I agree with you that using more than one language to learn another can help (at least, so far it does). My French reading materials so far seem just as usable to me as my English materials, with the caveat that sometimes I have to look up a word here and there. What I'm worried about is when I use my French Assimil for Chinese. If I get too bogged down because of the French, I'll probably have to switch gears into more English listening material instead. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| gfree Newbie United States Joined 4902 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 5 of 5 07 July 2011 at 10:38pm | IP Logged |
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Today I received:
Le Chinois sans peine by Assimil Chinois Les Dicos D'Assimil I was impressed with the quality of the Cd/book combination in Le Chinois sans peine. It's different than the set by a different company that I used to learn French. I had thought that it would have CDs that would be easily usable in the car, but it appears that there is in fact not a single word of spoken French on the CD set. It sounds like they only included the spoke Chinese with time to repeat. This is a double-edged sword for me: - I won't have to worry about my listening comprehension in French for this set. I have little to no problem understanding the lessons in written French. So, this won't really give me French practice other than the written portion. I did find a French-Chinese podcast though, so I'll probably burn those for my car so that I can practice to and from work. - The lessons are easier to follow along to in the exercises because of their compactness and lack of verbosity. I did fairly well with my French set, which was by Living Language, and included a 9 cd set, 3 grammar books and a empty ruled notebook. Most of my learning of the sounds was down while driving. I'll need to adapt to this different method. With this Asssimil course and the two Chinois pour Debutants books that I now have, along with FSI and all the podcasts, my only obstacle is now myself. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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