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One-week challenge: Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| albnarinos Tetraglot Groupie Spain Joined 6161 days ago 47 posts - 49 votes Speaks: Catalan, Spanish*, English, French Studies: German, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 1 of 6 27 January 2008 at 2:25pm | IP Logged |
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I've decided to join the one-week challenge as a way to get me motivated to start serious study of Mandarin. I've been reading and getting a feel for the language.
I'll start tommorow, because I need my week to start on a Monday in order to make sense (I guess that's part of being a teacher). My materials: - Asimmil's Chinois sans peine. - Asimmil's L'ecriture chinoise. - Pimsleur's Learn Mandarin Chinese. (I don't particularly love Pimsleur, but I'll use it for exposure to the language). I'm at a loss at what else I could use (advise?, please) My goals: Basically to learn as much as possible (all things considered), and get a basic understanding of the writing system, because I think it is as important to be able to read and write as it is to be able to listen and speak. Possible problems: No idea how good the material I've got actually is. And I think the tones will be somewhat hard to get. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rob Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6157 days ago 287 posts - 288 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 2 of 6 27 January 2008 at 2:57pm | IP Logged |
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Good luck with it! I'll be particularly interested in hearing what you think of L'ecriture Chinoise, as I would have thought that Chinois sans peine would have given a good grounding in how to write anyway (though not directly...).
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6462 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 3 of 6 27 January 2008 at 3:10pm | IP Logged |
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Send me your e-mail address in a private message and I'll send you a Powerpoint presentation teaching you the basics of the Chinese writing system and how to tackle learning the characters. I do not think Assimil is doing a good job at it at all. For learning to read and write Chinese, I would recommend the book "Learning Chinese characters" or "Reading and writing Chinese characters".
"Learning Chinese characters" is better for absolute beginners, because they provide a lot of explanation on stroke order, construction of characters, parts of characters and the like and even some explanations about Chinese pronunciation. They also provide ready-made mnemonics for meaning and pronunciation and they are much focussed on teaching you the 900 characters you'll need for the lowest level of the HSK (a standard exam), while maintaining a bottom-up approach. Most textbooks also focus on those characters, so this book is perfect if you want to learn the characters more or less at the same time as you see them in your textbook. "Reading and writing Chinese characters" is geared more towards people who already know everything about Chinese characters and just need a good order to learn them. And they teach maybe 3000 characters, but the 900 most important characters don't necessarily come first, so you will have more trouble matching them to your textbook. Also this book doesn't provide mnemonics for you. Then you might want to dispense with books and just get the Wenlin software. That software can be used to read Chinese texts (showing translations of each word or expression as you hover over them) and it also gives you a wealth of information on each character, including its make-up, and you can search characters by make-up. This may also allow you to learn the characters in an intelligent order, not by rote. When using Pimsleur, pay particular attention to q/j/x versus ch/zh/sh. Some of these may sound extremely similar to you (the only difference is the position of the tongue) and Pimsleur doesn't tell you which is which when they speak. They do tell you about the tones though. Finally some free websites to help you: http://www.newconceptmandarin.com/support/Intro_Pinyin.asp - good for practising Pinyin & your pronunciation http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Palace/1757/scrittura/scrittu ra.htm - learning stroke order http://www.chinesepod.com - great podcast Chinese lessons http://www.hanyu.com.cn/en/htm_song/song.asp - learn Chinese through songs (probably better for intermediates) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| albnarinos Tetraglot Groupie Spain Joined 6161 days ago 47 posts - 49 votes Speaks: Catalan, Spanish*, English, French Studies: German, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 4 of 6 29 January 2008 at 4:11am | IP Logged |
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Ok, so...
Day 1: Didin't have a lot of time, but managed to do Assimil lesson 1, 2, 3 and almost all of 4, both from the with ease and the writing book. The With ease book, is kind of Ok, I guess, nothing super espectacular about it. The Writing book, teaches you how to make each character step by step. Again, it's Ok. My method so far is to listen to the dialogue reading only the pidgin, then read all the grammar points covered, then re-listen the dialogue but this time only reading the characters. Then I go to the Writing book, I copy in a piece of paper the pidgin, the character and the meaning, after that investigate a little bit about the origins of the character so that it not just a bunch of crazy scribbles (Thanks Sprachprofi!), but something that makes sense, and then copy it a bunch of times. After that I listen to the dialogues again but this time using it as a kind of dictation to write it down. At this stage I still forget some. And finally I do a dictation with the sentences from the excersises of the book. So far, I'm not going as fast as I had wished, especially because each lesson takes about an hour. And also, I remember the connection between sound-pidgin-character, but it's a bit hard to really understand the sentences. I suppose it's the grammar difference, I'll just have to get used to it. On the happy side, tones haven't been so much of a problem, I seem to get then quite easily (I'm attributing this to having learned some Norwegian). We'll see how day 2 goes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| albnarinos Tetraglot Groupie Spain Joined 6161 days ago 47 posts - 49 votes Speaks: Catalan, Spanish*, English, French Studies: German, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 5 of 6 30 January 2008 at 3:11am | IP Logged |
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Day 2: I finished lesson 4, 5, 6 and 7. Followed the same method, it's working so far.
Apparently I can only go through 3 1/2 lessons before everything stops making sense. Lesson 7 was a nice round-up summmary of the previous ones, with some information addded. I'm understanding more now, but some characters (called "sufffixes" by Assimil) keep popping up all over the place. I haven't gone deeply into these, but I think they are more "grammatical particles" than just mere suffixes. I knew a lot of languages had these, I just hadn't encountered them before. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| albnarinos Tetraglot Groupie Spain Joined 6161 days ago 47 posts - 49 votes Speaks: Catalan, Spanish*, English, French Studies: German, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 6 of 6 02 February 2008 at 4:21am | IP Logged |
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So, my one-week journey has been slightly interrupted due to sickness. I haven't been able to study almost at all (during what should have been days 3, 4 and 5). I only managaged to finish leasson 8.
Today I'm feeling a lot better, though I still have a slight headache, so I'll try to go on, and get at least 2 lessons finished . Edited by albnarinos on 02 February 2008 at 4:25am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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