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Mandarin(ASL,SEE,Japanese,Arabic) Journey | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| senor_smile Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6329 days ago 110 posts - 115 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Russian | Message 1 of 52 16 August 2007 at 12:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have decided to use this forum a little more actively. I filled out all the information for languages I speak(or have studied). I think it will be quite motivational to see my progress written down somewhere. That way, I can go back and see how I'm doing.
Right now I've decided to be "all mandarin all the time," an idea I got from www.alljapaneseallthetime.com. I'm not actually as dedicated as that guy was in his studies, I simply don't have the time. Although, I plan on having a lot more time very soon. Here's a little bit about where I am right now: I am currently in my second year of community college. I take my last final (oxymoron??) tomorrow, and will be done with this cursed summer quarter. I take night classes, PE and physics, with geography online. I work as a system admin/programmar for an air conditioning company 40 hours a week. To add to my lack of time I have an 8 month old daughter with my enstranged ex-girlfriend. I go to see my daughter every chance I get(i.e. between work and school for an hour, after school briefly until everyone is going to bed, on the weekends as much as possible). All that to say, I really don't have a lot of time. I first came in contact with Mandarin when I traveled to hong kong in 1999. My team made a brief excursion into China and taught English, kind of, for a week. After having been immersing myself in Cantonese, I remember thinking that Mandarin sounded like a "French pronunciation of Cantonese." After that I did a couple lessons of pimsleur's mandarin, but never really got serious with it. Then, I saw Jet Li's Fearless. It was some time this year, in 2007, that I saw it, although I can't recall exactly what month. After that, I decided, I need to stop dabbling in a billion languages and start taking my studies seriously. I started doing my pimsleur mandarin as well as reading "teach yourself chinese." I got about half way through mandarin 2 of pimsleur and kind of tapered off again. Then, came my summer quarter. It started June 25. I walked into physics class and thought to myself "another boring class about something that mildly interests me." Then, another kid walks in and sits at my table. I introduce myself and ask where he is from. He says Hong Kong. "Hey, I've been to Hong Kong before." Then, another kid walks in and I introduce myself. He is from Beijing(originally from hunan). This is awesome! They both speak mandarin. I determined that day that I was going to learn Mandarin, and stick with it until fluency. I started making some flash cards for my teach yourself book. I used jmemorize at first, but some simplified characters wouldn't come through. I also had some paper flash cards I made to take with me. Altogether, my vocab process was highly inefficient. Then, I did a trial of supermemo for the Pocket PC. I figured I might as well try it. As much as I hate commercial programs(i.e. vs. open source) I LOVE supermemo for the pocket pc. It has revolutionized my vocab training. I have learned so many words from hanging with my new chinese friends a few hours a week. To this day (i got supermemo around the second week of july) I have currently loaded 692 words/phrases into supermemo, and have memorized 608. I have 84 to go, and I hope to get those done soon. I also got Colloquial mandarin. I have always loved the format of the colloquial series, although there have been a few that I've browsed through in the bookstore that I don't like (e.g. colloquial cantonese). I'm now up to lesson 9 in colloquial mandarin, and have loaded every word I didn't know from this book up to this point. I also ripped the tracks and edited out everything but the actual conversations, and in each unit listen to the conversations until I am very familiar with what they're saying, and feel like I can understand them without a problem. This method is working quite well for me so far. I'm not sure where I'll go after this book; I also recently purchased 新汉语教程 from the Beijing University Press. The entire book is in chinese, with english translations underneath. It's obviously meant for a teacher from china to teach chinese to an english speaker. I know all the hanzi up to the middle of chapter 5. My goal for now is to keep listening to the audio on my breaks and in my spare time, and doing vocab every chance I get. Loading the words seems to be the tiresome part, but learning them is the real challenge. Edited by senor_smile on 21 November 2007 at 6:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| egg_uk Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6361 days ago 203 posts - 204 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 52 16 August 2007 at 1:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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good luck, id like to learn mandarin one day, so ill will definitely keep a check on how you are doing
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| manny Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6301 days ago 248 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Tagalog Studies: French, German | Message 3 of 52 16 August 2007 at 1:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I too have much more motivation to study languages that I can practice regularly with friends-family.
Why don't you speak Mandarin to your daughter? Do things like practice telling her to eat and play. Her English should be OK from her mom. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| senor_smile Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6329 days ago 110 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Russian | Message 4 of 52 16 August 2007 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | ||
You know, I have actually caught myself just recently doing just that. When she was first born I tried speaking to her in only latin, but quickly realized that I didn't know enough modern simple words, and that I wasn't really actively improving my latin. That's a splendid idea. I have definitely wanted my daughter to at least grow up bilingual. I also want to start learning ASL(american sign language) as I read that this is the perfect age to start using that with kids. I have found lifeprint.com as a pretty good resource. I have no idea how I would load ASL vocab into an srs(spaced repetition system). I guess I could download pictures for each word and put them into mnemosyne, although that might be kind of burdensome. Anyone know of a good SRS for learning ASL? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| senor_smile Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6329 days ago 110 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Russian | Message 5 of 52 20 August 2007 at 4:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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This weekend I was sick and did not accomplish nearly as much as I would have liked to, on account of wanting to sleep because of it.
I got my hands on the assimil audio, although I have no visual to go off of. I listened to the first 10 or so, and was surprised at how much I can already understand. I'm hoping to be able to pick out the words I don't know well enough to put the pinyin into www.mdbg.net and figure out the meaning. I inserted about 100 new words into supermemo, yet didn't actually learn any new material over the weekend. My goal is to get through all the items needing review and repeats in mandarin, and hopefully add at least another 20 items for today. Statistics: Mandarin 807 Items Memorized: 618 Pending: 189 To repeat: 11+41 I also listened to the the book of Genesis in Mandarin, for about an hour. Not sure how far I got. For the most part, I didn't understand anything, although there were a few times they would say something along the lines of 我告诉他... I shall put more goals into here later, once I've made more realistic expectations. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| senor_smile Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6329 days ago 110 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Russian | Message 6 of 52 20 August 2007 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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有没有个人可以给我帮？
有人“加油”说的时候， 用英文怎么说？ 在词典，它告诉我“make the extra effort", 可是我觉得有最好的意思。 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Asiafeverr Diglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6285 days ago 346 posts - 431 votes 1 sounds Speaks: French*, English Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, German | Message 7 of 52 20 August 2007 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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On google this is the first image you get for it and I think it describes the word pretty well: http://hmilu520.blogdriver.com/hmilu520/inc/11.jpg
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| maxb Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 7126 days ago 536 posts - 589 votes 7 sounds Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 8 of 52 21 August 2007 at 4:02am | IP Logged | ||
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加油 is a word used to cheer people on, for instance when watching a soccer game the chinese supporters would probably say 中国队加油!.
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