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My tips on speaking Mandarin fluently | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Fiveonefive Diglot Groupie Japan Joined 5693 days ago 69 posts - 88 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Swedish | Message 9 of 19 11 July 2011 at 6:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Nice words on learning Chinese and I really agree with what you say about Japanese being easy to step into but hard to progress to fluency. Short reply here. Just wanted to mention that my favorite 青年漫画 is City Hunter and its spinoff Angel Heart. Edited by Fiveonefive on 11 July 2011 at 6:41am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6584 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 10 of 19 11 July 2011 at 6:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Thank you for the tip. Looks like it is called 城市獵人 in Mandarin, I will check it out. I was thinking of starting watching Japanese anime with English subtitles, but I'm afraid this would only be a loss of time since my Japanese is almost nonexistent. I would love to listen to something more simple, something I could listen to over and over again, but something that has content and isn't too boring. Did you happen to use any similar resource that you could recommend? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Fiveonefive Diglot Groupie Japan Joined 5693 days ago 69 posts - 88 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Swedish | Message 11 of 19 11 July 2011 at 8:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I don't have much to recommend to beginners. Most of my Japanese studies at the beginning revolved around the 'genki' textbooks from the Japan Times. I had all the dialogs on my ipod and listened to them constantly. I didn't think they were particuarly interesting though. Just doing the grunt work until my skills were good enough to actually find interesting stuff :/ 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6914 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 12 of 19 16 July 2011 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I've only read manga in Japanese but since there seem to be a lot of Japanese manga translated into Chinese I'll chime in with my recommendations. My absolute favourite manga series is MONSTER. It's a 青年漫画 and the drawing style is very realistic, every person has a different, unique face. The story is about a Japanese surgeon called Tenma in Germany who operates on a young boy and saves his life against the Hospital Director's order. He is demoted for this and several days later the Hospital Director and some other doctors are murdered and the boy mysteriously disappears. Tenma is the number suspect and has to go on the run. Anyway, the series is 18 volumes long and the plot is pretty complicated with lots of interesting characters. The storyline is quite dark though, dealing with murder and serial killers, so maybe that wouldn't be your cup of tea. Another 青年漫画 recommendation is 20世紀少年 which is by the same author and very famous (more so than MONSTER). I've just started reading it and am really enjoying it. It's about a group of childhood friends who play together and make up a story about being heroes and saving the world. 20 years later when they are all grown-up the events they wrote down start to come true and they realise that someone in their group has taken the role of villain and is making all this happen. There are 22 volumes in the series and the storyline is also quite complicated, spanning several decades and flicking from the 60s to the 90s etc. The tone is slightly less dark than MONSTER but still involves events like murder, brainwashing and the end of the world. I don't really have anything to recommend for Japanese if your Japanese is almost nonexistent. I think you need to get some basic grammar and vocabulary skills before you start. Anime is quite fast and they sometimes use particular speech styles that you only really encounter in anime. There are anime series aimed at children like Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan but they use casual Japanese that most beginners don't learn straight away (most people start with the polite mas-forms). I would recommend getting some kind of textbook to start off with. I used Japanese for Everyone which I really recommend. It covers a lot of grammar, there are lots of varied exercises, teaches all the politeness levels (casual, polite masu forms and humble and honorific keigo) introduces kana quickly (you should learn the kana before starting) and even includes common kanji. The audio is available online in torrents. One thing to be aware of is that it is quite an intense course, some people find it too intense. I loved it though, I guess it depends on what kind of learner you are. Another good textbook is Genki. I've never used it but I've always heard good things about it. One thing to be aware of is that it takes 2 volumes for Genki to cover roughly the same amount of grammar as JFE does in one volume. I would also recommend Pimsleur Japanese. I went through all 3 volumes and found it good for basic conversation skills. However it does focus on the polite mas-forms, doesn't really cover casual Japanese and introduces a bit of keigo (super polite Japanese). Edited by unzum on 16 July 2011 at 4:35pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6584 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 13 of 19 16 July 2011 at 5:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Uzum,
thank you very much for the long and detailed post. I will try to look for the Monster comic book series you mentioned. I really like realistic and detailed drawings in manga and I am a fan of detective stories and all that noir atmosphere, so this comic book might be fun. A while ago, maybe 6 years ago I went through the first 5 lessons of Genki, but didn't manage to do any more than that. I completely forgot about Pimsleur Japanese. Thank's for mentioning. I was looking for something easy, structured and at least somewhat sequenced to listen to so I tried Japanesepod101, but there was too much English in there and even though the host seems very nice, he is still a non-native speaker. Pimsleur might work a bit better. After my experience with Mandarin, after I realized that I was just learning it all wrong and only after I droped all that grammar, tones and pronunciation jazz, it all started to work, I was wondering whether it would work for all distant languages and see how far this "naturalistic" approach would take me with Japanese, but since pronunciation is much less of an obstacle in Japanese than in Mandarin, maybe learning the traditional way wouldn't hurt. I was trying to find something I could listen to for the next million hours to get through to the language like I did with Mandarin before finding an exchange partner or making the move to Japan, because I suspect that as hard as I may try, I'd still have to go to Japan for a long time to have a somewhat reasonable command of the language. For quite some time, I've been honestly interested in the culture, history and language of Japan, so it is definitely not that I want to "put another language on my list" type of approach or anything like that. I know that either way I look at it I will have to put in a lot of time and I am looking forward to it. Edited by Vlad on 22 July 2011 at 4:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6914 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 14 of 19 19 July 2011 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Pimsleur is a good, low-pressure course to get some basic conversation skills.
I use Japanesepod101 as well but I find it works better as a supplement to practise listening, rather than as a main course. The audio blogs from japanesepod101 and any other series include transcripts for the dialogs so you could use these for listening. If, as you say, you want to learn a language in a naturalistic way you might like the Assimil series. I haven't used it before, but the series is very well-regarded by many people on this forum. It's supposed to be good for improving your passive skills, and using it with Pimsleur for active speaking skills could be a good combination. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 15 of 19 12 August 2011 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Excellent advice all around. I learn in pretty much the same way you do. Of course it works for Japanese, as for any other language.
There are many adepts of SRS on this forum, but I agree with you: the best way to learn vocabulary is to ensure the words you need come out in real life, even if you only go through a small number of words in a day. After all, this is how humans have always learned vocab, starting way before writing even existed. I'd even venture that if you aren't in an immersion situation, 5 a day is pretty high. Over 3 years learning Japanese, I've probably averaged 3 or 4 words a day. However, that doesn't take into account word combinations and expressions. People who study in order to read material would obviously disagree, though.
I disagree on this, though. On the contrary, I think that trying to get the right phrase is an important process that makes the actual answer -- when you didn't get it right -- much easier to remember. Just as you were saying with vocab you couldn't recall. The error process is crucial to memorizing the right answer. If you pay attention to it, of course.
I was surprised to read this, because I've never been much of a reader in Japanese either, but after becoming "conversationally fluent", I too started considering reading as a way to improve my vocabulary and seek more educated ways of expressing myself. Many people on this forum swear that reading right from the start is key, though.
Here, I personally push the "naturalistic approach" further by doing nothing special to recall or note vocab. Again, the important ones stick. The rest is useless. For now, at least.
I agree that experimenting with new sounds is crucial because you can’t recall the position of a sound until you have made it and felt it yourself. One could start by gaining awareness of how they pronounce the sounds of their own language, perhaps trying to feel how they change their mouth position to make other accent, and then slightly and progressively deviate from it to see what happens. How do you force your tongue into a position for days? The only way of “memorizing” I know of is repetition, outloud, in self talk.
Yes. Whatever you can say, you can also understand in both written and spoken form. That's why I always concentrate on oral first.
I would be careful if you are going to mention "naturalistic" or "not consciously working on it" when talking about learning pronunciation. Most people would take that as meaning that they should just talk and things will fix themselves. They don't. One needs to be very critical of their pronunciation and go all out when trying to imitate. And this isn't natural for most people.
Do you think it's possible that the fact you look at people's mouths and that you learn mostly by speaking are related? Is it possible the two point to similar instinctive skills?
It's probably a good exercise, but I've never done it. Too time-consuming and I don't think it's necessary. I prefer to do it live, listening to what I'm saying and fixing it on the spot. In self-talk, I can repeat as many times as I want until I get it right. Maybe you can't concentrate on as many details at once, but the amount of detail you can focus on will increase over time anyway. One note on Japanese pronunciation: while it’s impossible to learn Mandarin without fussing with the tones, many people learn Japanese completely ignoring the fact that it has pitch accent – every syllable is either high or low and it's an intricate system. If you have any intention of studying the language seriously, I highly recommend to pay attention to it right from the start. I really enjoyed japanesepod101. I know there is too much English and yes, the English-speaking host is a bit of an annoyance, but if you consider those portions to be thinking or breathing space, you could probably look past it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6584 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 16 of 19 12 August 2011 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Arekkusu,
thank you for the nice and detailed analysis of my post. I agree with almost everything you say and with the points that I don't, my English is to blame. This is where it has its limits and unfortunately I am unable to elaborate my thoughts as well as I would in my native language, so I just wanted to clear up the small misunderstandings:
I over exaggerated a little here. I do try to improvise very much and I learn a lot from the mistakes I do. What I probably wanted to say was that whenever I had the feeling my sentences were off, after saying them, I asked for what should be said instead of the translation and in the beginning/intermediate stages this was happening so often that I eventually started asking for these set-phrases right up front. When it comes to reading and reviewing words in the books I read, I kept the amount of these words to a minimum and used to review only those words/expressions that I liked or those that I couldn't move on without. I too am convinced that if these are important they will stick and the ones I reviewed probably would stick anyway, it's just that by reviewing them once or twice I had them still ringing in my head and it was easier for me to try to use them during the day. I "hate" homework so I really keep the reviewing to a minimum.
I didn't go into detail on this one, and I realize now that this point was not explained so well. What I wanted to say was, that I stopped consciously concentrating specifically on tones (tonal curves, progress, height and so on) and tried to remember the sound that I heard - without thinking about the fact that there are any tones in Chinese and tried to remember and reproduce the sound the best I could - according to what I heard. I was definitely not just trying to babble and hope for the best:) When it comes to recording myself, I recorded myself maybe once every 3 months or so to compare the differences with previous recordings and tried to see whether there were any new/old obvious mistakes that would pop out that I would normally not notice. I started listening to Pimsleur Japanese I. So far not bad, but I only went through the first couple of lessons so it's too early to judge. So far really not bad. Edited by Vlad on 12 August 2011 at 4:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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