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| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6970 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 9 of 14 16 July 2007 at 2:36am | IP Logged |
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I just finished up with Lesson 34 of Assimil's Chinese with Ease, and I must say, the course is progressing along quite nicely. The speakers still speak too slowly and they have a tendency to over-enunciate, but the course is a real fountain of great vocabulary words and phrases that don't show up elsewhere. I've been following along with the Chinese characters, which is great supplementary practice to the Chinese flashcards that I'm using. The recordings are great--all the speakers sound native, unlike Ultimate Mandarin, which uses one slightly non-standard speaker and another speaker whose accent is embarassingly foreign and barely comprehensible. The text tends to use too many exclamation marks, but the dialogs sound quite usable and, for the most part, worth memorizing.
I've also gone about a third of the way through FSI Mandarin, Module 3. As much as I hated using the drills in FSI German (which seemed both endless and boring), the drills in FSI Mandarin are actually kind of fun. Numbers are definitely my weakest point in Chinese, but I will try to get through this unit and then concentrate on other aspects of the language before I come back to the area. I'm kind of sad to report that I've reached a plateau in my character learning. The problem is two-fold: (1) I think I've temporarily been saturated with learning characters and need to take a short break to really commit to long-term memory the ~550 hanzi I've learned so far, and (2) I've learned almost all the characters for the words that I know in Chinese, which makes it harder to learn new words if I've never used them before. I've decided to address this problem by taking a bit of a break from character learning for the next few weeks, so that I can review the ones I've learned already and also learn more words (through FSI, Assimil, and LL) before I learn to read them. By the end of July, I hope to: (1) reach Lesson 50 of Assimil, (2) complete FSI Mandarin, Module 3, and (3) get through Lesson 20 of LL Ultimate Mandarin. Edited by mike245 on 16 July 2007 at 2:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6970 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 10 of 14 02 August 2007 at 2:06pm | IP Logged |
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I just got back from two weeks of traveling and grad school prep, so I haven't had much time to learn Chinese recently. Basically, I've made it through my core goals: I'm up to Lesson 21 of Ultimate Chinese, Lesson 53 of Assimil Chinese, and I've just finished FSI Module 3. But the downside is that I've been neglecting the "supplemental" studying: I haven't really learned any new characters, made flashcards, or listened to Chinese Pod.
Overall, though, I'm pretty happy with my progress. Just yesterday, at the post office, I was able to "eavesdrop" on a clerk, who was telling a Taiwanese customer (in Chinese) that, in order to mail something overseas, he needed to affix registered mail stickers on the box. A week ago, I was able to understand when a Chinese friend of mine gave directions to her mother (I.e., take 19th Street and then turn left at the stoplight, etc). Right now, I'm struggling to add vocabulary and hammer out some difficult grammar points. I'm currently trying to fully understand the differences between "you" and "zai" to mean "again," and the differences between "keyi," "neng," and "xing" to mean "can or possible" if everyday, rapid-fire speech. I think once these constructions show up in FSI Chinese, I will be able to learn them through drill, but cursory book explanations aren't sufficient. I've got three weeks before school begins, so I think it's time for the big push for "textbook learning". The supplemental stuff can be juggled with schoolwork (i.e., Chinesepod at the gym, flashcards whenever I have hidden moments), but I won't have much time for Chinese book learning once school starts. My immediate goals are to do the following by August 15: (1) get to Lesson 70 of Assimil, (2) work up to Lesson 26 of Ultimate Chinese, (3) finish FSI Module 4, (4) go through at least three more Chinesepod intermediate lessons, and (5) learn at least another 25 characters in the next two weeks. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6970 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 11 of 14 16 August 2007 at 1:59pm | IP Logged |
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I have been hesitant to post because I haven't met the goals that I set for myself two weeks ago. I have been getting ready to move and have been busy prepping for the start of classes (next week!!!), so my book study time has already dropped significantly. I have made it to Ultimate Mandarin, Lesson 25, Assimil Lesson 65, and Unit 4 of FSI Mandarin.
FSI Module 4 is a lot more difficult than I expected. Directions, like numbers, seem to require a much stronger cognitive visualization in order to master than other types of speech, and I find myself struggling to use north/south/east/west, etc. It doesn't help that every program I use has a slightly different approach to directions (FSI uses N/S/E/W, Living Language/Assimil/Pimsleur all use different words to mean "turn", etc.) I've been have some difficulty with the FSI drills, but I'm going to get through this unit keeping in mind that I can always revise sometime in the future. I am also up to about 800 characters with my Chinese in a Flash learning. It's been going slow because I am limiting myself only to the words that I have encountered in other sources, so that i can really see them and use them in context. I would estimate my total vocabulary is around 1200-1400 words (including compounds). Chinesepod has really been helping with listening comprehension, but I have a long way to go before I am comfortable with the lessons. It's tremendously valuable that they speak so quickly, but I wish they did the dialogs in a "slow version" too so that it would be easier to analyze tones, etc. On a happy note, I was listening to the radio yesterday; the announcer was talking about immigration consulting (yimin guwen) and I was able to understand quite a bit! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6970 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 12 of 14 02 February 2009 at 1:42am | IP Logged |
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I can hardly believe that it's already been a year and a half since my last post! Since my last posting, I've quit my job and matriculated in law school. I've traveled to Asia four times in the past two years, including a week in Taiwan and two weeks in China (to see the Olympics last year!). Now that I'm halfway done with graduate school, I've decided to stop wasting time and get back into learning Mandarin.
Suprisingly, even though I took so much time off from my studies, I haven't forgotten *that* much. I still remember about 400 of the hanzi that I memorized, and the rest are coming back pretty quickly. My vocabulary is smaller than when I left off, but I think having some time to decompress all of it in my head (and also use it briefly during my time in China and Taiwan) has been helpful. I just went through the first unit of FSI Mandarin, Module 4, and found that it was much easier to get through now than it was back when I first started. Chinese in a Flash is also very helpful, since I can separate out the cards I know from the cards I used to know but have since forgotten. Hopefully, it'll all come back quickly. I've downloaded a lot of Chinesepod episodes and two FSI modules onto my iPod Touch, and hope to get through them within the next month or so. I also found a cool, barebones Chinese flashcard program for my iPod, and plan on using it when the paper flashcards are too unwieldy to carry around (the iPod version makes me look a lot less dorky!). As I get familiar again with the programs, I'll slowly start to incorporate LL Ultimate Mandarin back into the mix to supplement vocabulary. Immediate goals: Get through Modules 4 and 5 of FSI, and relearn all the Chinese in a Flash words that I used to know (probably have another 300 characters to go). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| keith1569 Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5652 days ago 61 posts - 64 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Sign Language, Spanish | Message 13 of 14 11 June 2009 at 8:21pm | IP Logged |
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any updates?
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| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6970 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 14 of 14 03 August 2009 at 6:18am | IP Logged |
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I apologize for not posting sooner, but unfortunately, I don't have much to report on the Mandarin language-learning front. After my last post in February, I got busy with school, travel, and then two summer internships. Now, I'm winding down, so I finally have some time to get back to language learning. School starts up for me at the end of September, so I'll have a few weeks to get back to the routine of studying Mandarin. In the past few days, I've reviewed over LL Ultimate Mandarin and Assimil, and it's slowly coming back to me, but I'm taking a brief break from Chinese to prepare for a trip to Europe!
In mid-August, I'll be traveling to Rome and Paris with my family. We'll be sightseeing for a week and a half, and it'll be my first time in either city (and my first time in a place where I didn't speak at least some of the language ahead of time!). To prepare for the trip, I've been listening to Pimsleur French I, Assimil New French with Ease, and Michel Thomas Italian. Luckily, I had purchased the Assimil and MT courses on a whim a few years ago when they were on sale at Amazon, so I already had them lying around. I was able to download Pimsleur French from www.netlibrary.com for free. I've been doing the Pimsleur lessons at a rate of about 1 per day, and I just started the Assimil and MT courses yesterday. Italian so far has been fairly easy because of my knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese, but French pronunciation has been extremely difficult! I've been able to mimic some of the sounds of French by using the German "r" and some of the nasal sounds of Portuguese, but French vowels are still extremely difficult for me. I've still got 7 lessons left in Pimsleur Comprehensive French I, and then I'll move on to Pimsleur Comprehensive Italian I. French and Italian certainly are on my list of languages to learn someday in the future, but for now, I'm trying to put together a basic tourist vocabulary so that I won't be completely lost in those two cities. On another note, this is the first time I've started a language (or two) entirely from scratch through self-study! All the other languages I've studied over the years started off in the classroom, even if I continued to study and improve my knowledge through books and CDs. This time, I guess I'll really be able to see firsthand whether Pimsleur, Assimil, and/or Michel Thomas are sufficient to gain survival skills in a language. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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