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Mandarin journey (FSI, Pimsleur, NPCR) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| keith1569 Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5646 days ago 61 posts - 64 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Sign Language, Spanish | Message 105 of 181 14 June 2009 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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you have such a great log. the progress you have made is definitely
encouraging...anyway i think that would be great if you post your decks and routines! i am currently going through and collecting a ton of stuff for my mandarin studies that will probably start in a year or so.. Keith 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6042 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 106 of 181 18 June 2009 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for your kind words! However, I say just jump in now :) You'll kill yourself a year from now if you don't. I am starting to doubt the usefulness of the 5000 most frequent word dictionary I bought. There are more than a few words in here that I know from multiple natives are formal and uncommon. And their corpus...why the hell did they sample only 3 mil from spoken dialogs, and 16, 15 and 15 mil respectively for news, fiction and non-fiction? How about at least giving spoken an equal treatment. A lot of the words below 2000 freq are words like "to constitute" "comprehensive" "to commit a crime"..obviously from newscasts. Still, it is a decent supplement with many useful words. Just a fair warning to people look at this particular book. Skipping MOD 9's Units 1 and 2 for now, because they are all about "street committees" in China, which I suppose is not the big of an issue these days for travelers. I'll start going through the rest of FSI's optional MODs now, starting with HOTEL and RESTAURANT. I should know everything in here, but just for completeness's sake. Edited by irrationale on 18 June 2009 at 12:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5951 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 107 of 181 19 June 2009 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sometimes the images in TV and movies are distracting. Or in other words, my listening comprehension is better when there are no visual images for my brain to simultaneously process. Maybe this is some of what's happening for you as well.
I was in Shanghai, Hangzhou and some other places inbetween with a group where pretty much everyone else was a Hong Kong resident. Here are several practical items; 1...Bring a supply of tissues and carry some with you at all times. 2...Most of the local restaurants use tap water to wash their dishes. The tap water is filtered to a different standard than in the US. So at these restaurants, the server will initially place on the table a large soup bowl/tureen and one or more tea pots with really weak tea. The tea is made with boiled water and will probably be in a coffee pot (glass Bunn type). Use that tea to rinse your eating utensils, plates, cups, etc. Pour the rinsing tea in the soup tureen. After the wait staff takes those tea pots and the filled soup tureen away, a different pot of tea for drinking will be put on the table. 3...Related to #2, use bottled water to brush your teeth. Your hotel will probably have complimentary bottles in your room for that purpose. 4...The fashion here in the US is to wear pants which fall at our heels, or jeans that drag a little on the floor. That is a bit impractical there. Wear pants which are a little shorter. 5...Related to #4, use slippers or shoes in your hotel room. Do not walk on the floor in your stocking or bare feet. The hotel will probably have complimentary slippers in the room for that purpose. Be safe though and bring your own slippers. 6...Pedestrians there do not have the right of way. When there is traffic present, scurry/run accross the street. Hope some of this helps. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6042 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 108 of 181 25 June 2009 at 3:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for the headsup Snowflake! I'll keep these things in mind.
MOD 9 is mainly just a supplement for me now. While the subject matter is quite specific at times, I does contain some good phrases, so I'll stick with it until the end. I need to memorize all the main food items and drinks in China before I go. Perhaps out of the REST mods. HOTEL mod is pretty easy, just 3 hotel room items I didn't know. Good review in any case. I went to Seattle's chinatown (international district) and bought a Chinese book, 恋风恋歌。 It is a love story adapted from a Korean drama (don't laugh). It has a TON of real-style dialog (what do you expect from a romance? Hmm..this is a new tactic of mine in language learning now!), which is great. If it weren't for the pain of using the Chinese dictionary it would be going quite fast. I recently also purchased "StreetWise Mandarin". I flipped through it, and it looks like a very good resource according to what I've heard and seen from natives and other lessons. It isn't "how to cuss" ; it actually has many more casual language terms and grammar than rough slang. I recommend it. Still slogging through the 5000 freq dict, the TV show, and radio listening. I really need more conversation at this point, but I am doing what I can. There simply is not a lot of chances to interact. There are many willing chinese strangers online, of course, but there are quite a few problems with this...it is a topic I will bring up in detail in the near future. Edited by irrationale on 25 June 2009 at 3:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6042 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 109 of 181 06 July 2009 at 8:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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Ok, this is it. I leave for China on tuesday. I have finished up to FSI MOD 9 Unit 7. This means basically every FSI Chinese besides the last Unit 8 (I'll do this on the plane or in China..who cares), the CAR module, BIRTH DEATH module.
After about 9 months of studying, this is where I stand. -4500 (approx) words, 2000 (approx) characters. -Right now, I would put myself at a solid B2 level in conversation, listening and writing (I can write chinese relatively fluently). -6 months ago, I started listening to mandarin radio knowing absolutely nothing about what they were saying, and understanding nothing, not even the seperate sounds. Now I know what the show is about, and can understand about 50% of the caller's points and get the general topic. -Using a dictionary, can read a novel and have look up around every 1/12 words. -Can understand the gist and the general plot of chinese TV. I am just going to relax for 2 nights before I go, watch and read some chinese, and take a break before I jump in headfirst! Edited by irrationale on 06 July 2009 at 9:19am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6042 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 110 of 181 06 July 2009 at 9:18am | IP Logged | |||||
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Finally, I want to outline my method for anyone willing to put themselves through this. You could, of course, go at a slower pace, as I think that this method is extremely efficient.
MY METHOD 0 months 1)STEP 1 Pimsleur for 1.5 months -I went through Pimsleur a day like normal. -From the beginning, I memorized every word I learned in Pimsleur and their characters using a 3 field ANKI card deck, using no method besides strokes from "how to write Chinese characters". All were reproduction and production. -I never studied tones, pinyin or grammar. I used pinyin in the cards, but that was all. A short time later, you will spontaneously associate the pinyin and read it with no issue. 1.5 months 1)STEP 2 FSI for 1.5 months，continuing Pimsleur This is about the time when Pimsleur's effectiveness starts declining, so I started FSI here. I could have started it a little earlier perhaps. -I started FSI from MOD 1, skipping the introduction. I did one unit a day. Memorized every word using ANKI. 3-4 months 1)STEP 3Finished Pimsleur and FSI mods 1 to 6, start FSI MOD 7 and NPCR, start conversing with natives, start listening to talk radio. Around this time, I hit MOD 7 of FSI, which is substantially harder, and has very different content. I also started book 2 of NPCR with audio. In this stage I changed my tactic and did the following; 1) I used Audacity to import all the reference sentences from FSI into anki. I typed them out into 2 field cards, both production and recognition, with English writing/audio on one side, and chinese writing/audio on the other. 2) I put every single example sentence in FSI booklet into ANKI with chinese characters, but only recognition, 10K sentences style. (this is how I avoided FSI's downfall of not having characters) 3) browse the booklet for that section, listen to tape 2 at your leisure. I did about one unit every week. with NPCR 1) rip the words' audio from the CD into ANKI and put it with the corresponding word. I memorized every word in NPCR, all with their audio. 2) memorize the key sentences in ANKI with their audio (recognition only) 3) read all the passages. I did approximately 1 lesson every 2 or 3 days. I stopped caring about listening to NPCR's audio of the passages because it is too slow and classroom style, basically a waste of time in my opinion. Native speaker I searched conversation exchange . com and found 2 natives. I had about 2 convos a week from then on. I learned a substantial amount of usages, phrases, and words from this that I use now...this is critical. Later, I also mixed it up with a tutoring program from a local community college. Talk radio I recommend talk radio, not music. There are no tones in music, and lots of rare words, as well as other obvious factors. Talk radio will contain core vocab, unprepared speech, and very fast talking. This will allow you to learn the pause fillers, interjections, and the general speech manner. The radio distortion helps simulate real life distortion and noise. 8-9 months 1)STEP 4 Finished NPCR, start reading novels, watching TV, and 5000 word freq dictionary, change ANKI routine. This is where I am now. I watch 我的青春，谁做主 on tudou. I am reading 2 novels at the moment, both casual style. I am about done going through the 5000 most common word freq dictionary (search amazon), basically just filling out the core vocab and getting any straggling words that were somehow missed in all my lessons (there were quite a few). ANKI routine change; Word usage has become such an issue that I changed all my cards in the word deck to 5 fields; chinese, English, pinyin, chinese example sentence, English example sentence. In this way, I can memorize two very similar, but different words by including example sentences to distinguish them, in either English or chinese or both. If the word does not exist in English, and/or is not in my active English vocab, it goes to recognition with example sentence. Ok this is all. Getting to the C1 level I believe will be quite a challenge. Words and their usages is a huge issue at this level, and you definitely see the plateau. I suppose I could turn the the HSK list, but I haven't trusted that from the beginning. Many strange word choices are on the HSK for beginners, but I suppose now at this level I could use it to help round out my vocab to the 10,000 level. I think that this method worked quite well, and I recommend it. There are some things I would tweak, but all in all, it worked out to my satisfaction, and in time for China. I plan to make both my sentence and vocab deck public. If anyone has any questions about what I did feel free to ask, as well as give advice about moving to advanced level. Thanks for reading ;) Edited by irrationale on 06 July 2009 at 9:27am 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| BertR Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5608 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, French Studies: Mandarin | Message 111 of 181 11 July 2009 at 7:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm really amazed by where you got in such a limited time. Especially since you are also having a job. I've been studying Chinese for almost 4 years now (next to a rather demanding job, a girlfriend, ... :-)). I've been using New Practical Chinese Reader and Integrated Chinese. I finished the first 2 books of NPCR and almost finished the second IC book. I've also been using Livemocha recently, but the quality of the course seems to be inferior. I don't like it. It is of course a good way to find chat partners. Recently I also used QQ to chat with Chinese people. With a dictionary or google translate I can chat pretty quickly, but I'm not sure whether I'm improving my Chinese.
I've been reading your log, and have some questions. First of all, you mentioned you used language partners. How do you do these discussions in practice? Do you prepare something about a certain subject? Do you follow a book together? Or do you follow your inspiration? Do you take notes? I haven't used Pimsleur nor FSI. Would you still advice using it for somebody who is no longer a beginner? Probably I already know a lot of what is discussed in Pimsleur and hence it will be rather boring. You mentioned you are entering a lot of sentences in Anki using audio. I'm not using Anki. When I started learning Chinese I couldn't find anything that suited my needs at that time, so I developed something myself. It however can't deal with audio. I have been mostly adding words, not sentences. However working with sentence patterns is probably more efficient to become fluent than working with individual words. I was wondering how you learn these sentences. Do you reproduce them, translate them from English, or just try to recognize them while practicing? Do you play the sound and then try to write the characters or just try to recognize the sound? (probably writing everything takes to much time, that's what's taking most time for me). I was wondering whether I could get you Anki database. I believe that creating such a database from scratch will take a huge amount of time (which I don't seem to have). You also mentioned that you added sentences from NPCR. Do you only add the sentences from the key sentences, or also sentences from the text? Do you also add sentences from chat conversations? I'm often not sure whether the quality of these sentences are that good. I hope you find the time to reply me. How is the language learning process going in China? Thanks, Bert 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6042 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 112 of 181 24 July 2009 at 4:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hey, I wouldn't recommend Pimsleur for a non-beginner, just go to FSI. FSI will basically take you to somewhere around B1 by itself, so if you are more advanced than this there is a chance you won't need it, but it is still very good regardless. My sentences fall into 3 types; recognition with audio, recognition with no audio, and production with audio. As I said, I took all the FSI reference sentences and put them into ANKI, both production and recognition all with FSI audio in both English and chinese. This is because this is how FSI was meant to be used. It may seem production is a waste of effort (as AJATT claims), but it really drills the patterns into your head and increases your speaking ability quite rapidly, regardless of what you produce, as long as it is real chinese. How I use the recognition sentences without audio is I just read the sentence, and determine the meaning intuitively. A "success" is a relatively fluid correct reading and an understood meaning. The faster I understand the meaning and read the easier the card. This is basically AJATT style except I don't write the characters down, I only do this for my word deck. As for recognition with audio, when the audio starts I look away from the screen and try to recognize the meaning. If I do, it is a success. Then I read the sentence. The NPCR key sentences are practiced this way. Btw, from NPCR, I only put in the key sentences. (Except for NPCR 5, where it gets complicated). Production with audio is with FSI reference sentences, so the English audio will start, and I just try to translate out loud as fast as I can. If I catch myself thinking to conciously or thinking too much, or fail to translate, I fail the card. A success is an unconcious fluid translation, the faster, the easier. As for conversation with natives, it is basically totally freeform. I take notes of any words I learn along the way, and when I think of a word I want to know in the conversation, I immediately ask and then write down the word. I try to use the words I learn later in the convo. Later, when I get home I put the words into ANKI. I hope this helps and wasn't too confusing. Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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