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TAC’11 Team 唐: A journey of a thousand li | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Whitefish Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5243 days ago 49 posts - 72 votes  Speaks: English*, French | Message 1 of 25 23 December 2010 at 12:12am | IP Logged | ||
The Immortal Ge Chaggeng Sitting on His Three-legged Toad, 唐寅(Tang Yin) The road that I came by mounts eight thousand feet; the river that I crossed hangs a hundred fathoms. The brambles so thick that in summer one cannot pass; the snow so high that in winter one cannot climb. With branches that interlace Lung Valley is dark; against cliffs that tower one's voice beats and echoes. - 徐陵 (Xu Ling) ((taken and condensed from http://www.springsgreetingcards.com/catalogs/store.as p? pid=206956&catid=22647, which seems rather sketchy now that I look at it again.) Other than being a beautiful poem (of whose translation’s accuracy I am very skeptical), this little quote provides an excellent way to start off what I hope will be an excellent year studying Mandarin Chinese (with a smattering of French along the way). Mandarin is widely acknowledged to be one of the more difficult languages to learn. The tones, the phonological differences and the massive range of characters to learn certainly seems like the Lung Valley of Mr. Xu’s poem. In the short time I’ve been studying Mandarin (something over a month now), I’ve certainly become acquainted with the difficulties. In spoken Chinese, I can seldom identify the tone of the speaker, let alone produce these tones myself. In written Chinese, things have gone a bit better - still, I have only acquired a knowledge of a little under 600 characters, where the average educated Chinese adult will know around 6000 - never mind the fact that a large proportion of Chinese words are actually formed from two or more characters. So in terms of crossing “Lung Valley”, I’m barely off the well-manicured footpath. Surely such a monumental task seems daunting. It does to me, at least. But, at the risk of stretching an analogy too far, one of my fondest childhood memories was exploring the forests near my cottage in northern Ontario, taking the canoe out for long rides in the winding rivers and making my way through the dried out milkweed in early fall. I plan to take the same approach in studying Chinese: the task of learning characters is not a vertical rock face with no footholds, or a raging set of rapids, but rather a soft slope that can be surmounted with the passing of time. Learning Chinese will certainly take a good chunk of effort, but it is not impossible. And, after all, isn’t half the fun the journey the walk itself?  Again, as ripping Chinese culture off of the Internet seems to be my forte, I’ve chosen the (in)famous concept of the yin and the yang to best express my learning strategy. I aim for a holistic approach: fun and hard work, memorization and immersion. I want to balance the sometimes tedious nature of memorizing characters or learning grammar with the fun, dynamic process of language immersion. Although I aim to learn a set number of new characters per day, I also want to do things that interest me: translating song lyrics, reading native Chinese literature in the original, listening to Chinese music and watching Chinese TV shows. The idea here is that putting the hours in is the most important part. Sure, it may be more efficient to sit at the table with a grammar book and memorize the rules of every grammatical rule in the universe, but by the third day I’d be pretty bored; after a week, I’d never want to look at this beautiful and interesting language ever again. Maybe sitting in bed watching a Taiwanese drama is less effective, but I’d find it a hell of a lot more entertaining. And constant exposure to native Chinese material is very effective in building up a great passive knowledge, the more important of the two for me. Having said that, I am something of the impatient type and I will not be satisfied in wandering aimlessly into Mandarin fluency. There’s time to stop and smell the roses, but I still want to get there before the sun sets, if you know what I mean. So my daily study will consist of two components: The Core - this is the unchanging, solid part of my daily routine. So far it has entailed memorizing 25 Hanzi each day from the book “Reading & Writing Chinese: Traditional Character Edition” with one “vacation” day every week for retention. I’m also adding SRS-sentencing (I don’t think that’s a real word) from the book “Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar: A Practical Guide” to help internalize Mandarin Grammar. Not sure how many I’ll have time for each day with school and all - I’ll have to set a definite number when school starts again. The Enrichment - this section is basically the “field trip” of my day. It means that I get to do whatever I find interesting. Maybe one day I’ll try reading a short news story, adding interesting sentences and hanzi to my SRS. I already have an online translation of the Diamond sutra with commentary, which I plan to pick apart. On the typical lazy day, I’ll probably just watch a TV show or dissect a song, adding the challenging parts to my SRS. 
And that’s it for now. To my teammates Li Fei and heechul, who are studying Mandarin, and jimbo, who is studying Cantonese, I wish nothing but success and I’ll be following your logs. To the rest of you losers, failure and frustration! (Kidding, kidding. I wish you success as well... *cough* dontscrewup*cough*.) 
千里之行始於足下 － 老子 Note to my team: I won't have Internet access on the 27th (my reason for posting this early). I probably won't have any until the Christmas break is over, but I'm sure to be studying hard in the mean time. Edited by Whitefish on 29 December 2010 at 3:02pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6285 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 2 of 25 23 December 2010 at 2:31am | IP Logged | ||
Keep that up for a year and you won't need to take Chinese when you go to University. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Li Fei Pro Member United States Joined 5114 days ago 147 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 25 23 December 2010 at 3:07am | IP Logged | ||
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Yay Whitefish! I really like your combined plan of diligent study and fun, rewarding stuff--that makes a lot of sense
to me. I'm impressed with how rapidly you are learning the Hanzi. Between you and jimbo, I may start to step up my own learning in that area. Are you writing them, or doing recognition only? I anticipate good things for you and for Team 唐！ 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Whitefish Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5243 days ago 49 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 4 of 25 23 December 2010 at 4:30am | IP Logged | ||
Thanks Jimbo ;)
The key (for me) to memorizing 漢字 is to break up my daily 25 into smaller, 5-character blocks. So I'll memorize 5 as soon as I wake up, then 5 at lunch, 5 after school, after swimming, before bed. Put them in the SRS, review, then wake up the next day and start all over. For my SRSing, I use both character recognition and production to make sure that I really know the character. I take a break every Friday to catch up on my reviews and dust up any characters that I've consistently been failing. Barring my two-week exam meltdown, the system has worked pretty well; I don't find it overly strenuous or even time-consuming. The main reason I'm going so quickly is that I find reading to be the best way to grow my language skills; therefore I want to be able to read ASAP, and I'm pretty impatient sometimes. Anyways, thank you for the comments. I'm glad to have both of you on my team and I'm sure that we'll do well. I should be back sometime around early January, but until then, good luck in your preparations. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6285 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 5 of 25 23 December 2010 at 5:15am | IP Logged | ||
Ooh, I like it. You've given me an idea on how we can proceed next year. Let me give it a bit more thought and get back to you by the new year. Time for Christmas joy! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Whitefish Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5243 days ago 49 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 6 of 25 30 December 2010 at 12:10am | IP Logged | ||
 Firstly, 大家好! As I start TAC 2011, I want to give a little summary of the skills that I've acquired so far in my Mandarin studies (not many, I'm afraid), so that the readers know exactly where I am. I have memorized something like 750 Hanzi. Which sometimes seems like a ridiculous amount, but sometimes seems like next to nothing. I've read that the educated Chinese person can have a knowledge of upwards of 6000 characters - never mind the fact that many words are not isolated characters. The sheer amount can sometimes make it seem like I've gotten nowhere. On the other hand, I know enough Hanzi that I can usually make out the "backbone" of a text, the general gist of it, but the specifics elude me. This is because my text (Reading and Writing Chinese) is now focusing on high-frequency characters that are found often, but the less common ones have not been covered yet - something that will only get better as I progress. At a steady rate of 25 characters per day, I plan to get a knowledge of the basic 3,000 characters needed for basic literacy by March (at the latest). Meanwhile, everything else is still at the bare-bones basic. I can barely say "My name is David" or "I am hungry" without sounding like a total idiot. My active knowledge (speaking, writing) is still at the level of someone who has never learned any Chinese. My aural knowledge is quite dreadful as well - Mandarin speech still sounds like a mass of unfamiliar syllables, with the occasional word or so popping up. The plan, as you may have guessed , is to build my reading knowledge up to a level where I can really read Chinese stories. All this time, I'm *supposed* to be in an immersion environment, submerging myself in Chinese - which brings me to my next point. My immersion environment is fairly dreadful. Like I've said, I only know 750 characters, which makes reading without a dictionary impossible. Also, I can't understand spoken Mandarin, so I listen to podcasts without understanding any of the speech. All of this can seem pointless after a while - it was even worse when I only knew some 100-200 characters. So my attempts to create a "Mandarin-only" zone have been an epic failure. This needs to change. I've taken the first step by returning any English books out from the library that I still had; it doesn't stop me from wasting my time on English webpages, but it's a start. I've upped the Mandarin podcasts. I'm going to check more Chinese books out from the library as well. My first step is to create a daily reading-quota; the only thing is that the reading is always slow and can be quite disappointing if I find that I don't know several of the Hanzi. Hopefully this quota will increase as I learn more and more characters. In short point, here are my goals for the week: 1) Keep up the Hanzi (should be around 900 by next week) 2) Establish an immersion environment by increasing the amount of Mandarin in your life. The log is kind of short this week because I'm still looking for ways to make it both effective and entertaining. Bear with me - I hope to a have more focused log entry next week on my thoughts on learning the language. Edited by Whitefish on 30 December 2010 at 12:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Li Fei Pro Member United States Joined 5114 days ago 147 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 25 30 December 2010 at 9:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, that's fascinating that you are creating a Mandarin-only environment. I will be eager to hear how it turns out.
You should check out a book series called "Chinese Breeze"; they are graded readers, but for teenagers and adults rather than for children. You could easily read the ones I have, which have 300 characters. You get a CD with them, so you can listen and follow along in the text. Just make sure you get the full-sized CD rather than the mini disc. Good luck! I admire your rapid learning of the Hanzi. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6285 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 8 of 25 31 December 2010 at 2:11am | IP Logged | ||
See if you can find any of the old "Mirror Series" books published by Yale University. They have some short stories re-written to use the 600 most commonly used characters. The one I used was "Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio". It helped get me into the reading zone. The stories were all written twice. Once in traditional characters, once in simplified. If you already know 750 characters, you will benefit from some reading to consolidate your knowledge. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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