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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 17 of 52 19 September 2007 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
I am actually trying to learn as many words as possible. That word was one of many from one of the main books I'm going through. All of the words I've learned so far occur in audio included with my "teach yourself chinese" and "colloquial chinese," so, they're not purely random words. However, there are some lists of vocabulary, especially in the teach yourself chinese book, that don't occur in the audio portions. In fact, xi3 wan3 chi2 was one of them! Maybe not having heard it in a conversation in context indeed affected my ability to really internalize that word. I have random words that bubble up inside me, kind of like you get songs stuck in your head. Lately though, I don't always remember what the words mean. HA. When increasing your vocab(even in mandarin) do you always take words in context? 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 18 of 52 19 September 2007 at 12:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's a fabulous idea, although I'm not sure what I'll record them with. I think my pocket pc has a record/playback feature. I'm still a huge fan of the SRS(spaced repetition system) such as supermemo and mnemosyne, and so learning anything by rote memorization seems so backwards to me, especially if I can't mix up the order and repeat known ideas(concepts, words) less often. I start my class next wednesday. It's only a full quarter, but I hope to know enough basic vocabulary(100-200 words???) by then to start really probing for help with things like deaf culture and native-like grammar. Too bad there isn't some online sign language/flashcard/SRS based thing, kind of like I found for japanese at: http://www.peraperaonline.com/ 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 19 of 52 20 September 2007 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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On august 20:
Statistics: Mandarin 807 Items Memorized: 618 Pending: 189 To repeat: 11+41 Today: 1018 Items Memorized: 992 Pending: 26 to repeat: 35 According to this, I've learned 374 words in one month. Mind you, I haven't completely memorized them all at best level yet, but I am at least semi-familiar with this many new words. My ultimate goal is to be able to carry a conversation by the end of the year. I have officially finished the Colloquial chinese book, and on a whim found there is a sequel: Colloquial Chinese 2 by kan qian. It was $50.00 with cd's, but I just had to buy it. I looked through it and there are a lot of genuine chinese conversations and letters to newspapers, bosses and such. I have a lot of ripping/editing to do before these conversations are usable like the last ones. In the front it says that there are 1100 NEW vocabulary items in the book. 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 20 of 52 02 October 2007 at 1:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Does anyone know how to change the name of the thread? I started officially learning japanese with the start of my japanese class last week.
Firstly, let's do stats: Japanese 253 items memorized: 167 pending: 86 to repeat: 30(and going down as you read this) chinese 1148 items memorized: 1093 pending: 55 to repeat: 156 With the addition of school again, and my daughter being cuter than a button, it's just hard to study. Focus is something that seems like a golden ticket, hiding somewhere in the candy bar. And, I'm never going to find it because I don't even eat candy bars. Maybe once or twice a year. I'm more of a fast food ice-cream type guy. Anyway... I haven't made as much progress as I'd like or I know I could. However, I really love finally doing something in school that I'm passionate about. Astronomy and Math and Physics are interesting, but not something that I'd like to devote my life to. Languages, on the other hand, definitely is. So, I started Japanese by putting every word we've encountered in my Japanese book into supermemo. I also have entered the vocab from the first 3 Lessons of Colloquial Japanese. I can definitely read hiragana, yet still need some work on katakana. Kanji is going to be interesting; having to learn new pronunciations for characters I've already seen. I'm especially interested in how many new kanji I will learn that I don't know yet. I wonder how that will help me with 中文字(or hurt me)? I have made practically no progress in chinese. I have listened to audio as much as possible, and I've started pimsleur chinese III in my car, yet I still feel that I could be making so much more progress. I guess it's just a huge mountain that's going to go slow all the way up until I pass it. My sign language class is not ASL, as I had expected it to be, but SEE(signing exact english). I'm a little skeptical on the real value of learning SEE. Every deaf person I've ever met communicated in ASL. I know that interpretations are sometimes done in SEE, but what other benefit does it have? Maybe it's a good way to cross over into sign language without learning a new grammar? I think after this class I will definitely pursue ASL on my own. On a completely side note, I saw that people were organizing a language club for the san fran area. I wonder if there are talks of any other clubs around the world. Another polyglot friend of mine and I have considered trying to start something, but nothing as of yet has come to fruition. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6593 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 21 of 52 02 October 2007 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Why not begin a new thread and keep this one for posterity?
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| senor_smile Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6329 days ago 110 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Russian | Message 22 of 52 10 October 2007 at 5:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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History-
歴史-japanese kanji 歷史-traditional chinese 历史-simplified chinese If you take the first two and put them into a word processor and make them as large as they can be, you'll notice that the japanese word for history(first character pronounced here as 'reki') and the traditional way of writing this is slightly different. One thing that I've noticed over the past 3 weeks of learning japanese(although quite passively as I'm really just focused on mandarin) is that some kanji are just like simplified 汉字 that I know, some are like traditional versions that I can look up. It's weird how the only chose to keep some of the new simplified versions made by the chinese, while apparently making slight changes to others at some point in history. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| furyou_gaijin Senior Member Japan Joined 6329 days ago 540 posts - 631 votes Speaks: Latin* | Message 23 of 52 11 October 2007 at 4:35am | IP Logged | |||||
In fact, the two reforms are completely unrelated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai 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 24 of 52 11 October 2007 at 10:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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Then why do they use the same 国 in 中国?
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