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Mandarin Nightmare | ||
Tags: Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| 吕明扬 Newbie United States Joined 6058 days ago 30 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 34 02 December 2008 at 11:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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So I've been studying this language pretty intensly for the past 8 or so months. And it finally hit me, I feel like I'll never be able to understand it. As far as I can tell its just about impossible to learn words from context, because you would need to look up every character just to know whats being said. I'm just going crazy with it. Has anyone else been studying this language and know if theres a light at the end of the tunnel?
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| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7165 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 2 of 34 03 December 2008 at 12:24am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, it's tricky like that. It seems like the critical mass of vocab + familiarity with grammar + ability to distinguish sounds takes longer to acquire than most other languages (esp for people with non-tonal mother tongues).
Unfortunately, eight months probably isn't long enough for Mandarin to get to the point where you can guess too much from context. (Unless maybe you're studying it full time.) I still have to look things up fairly often in the "intermediate" material I started using recently... But there's definitely light at the end of the tunnel if you keep practicing (esp listening I think). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6150 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes | Message 3 of 34 03 December 2008 at 5:16am | IP Logged | ||
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I think this is a good reason why characters should be bulk-learnt early on. If you know at least the meaning of the characters, you can more or less extrapolate the meaning of a word from context. Take a look at my thread on furyou_gaijin on the Polyglots section of this forum. He recommends "Cracking Chinese Puzzles", which is rather expensive, but very informative; Volte has commented that beginners might find it daunting, but I think after 8 months you should be able to make use of it.
There are other alternatives to this - Heisig for example, but Heisig doesn't teach you the pronunciation based on the principle originally derived from Japanese that there are too many varying readings of a given character, but for Chinese, ignoring "Classical" readings which are not very well known even among native speakers, there should be no such problem. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Andy_Liu Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong leibby.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6788 days ago 255 posts - 257 votes Speaks: Mandarin, Cantonese*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 4 of 34 03 December 2008 at 8:02am | IP Logged | ||
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http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=12950
Along with my reply in the above link, I'd also say: I did browse Assimil Chinese with ease (3 books) and a bit of Remembering the Kanji (which I don't really need). My feeling is that, it sounds completely perplexing why you should use the latter in ... whatever fashion that is. I can't remember the latter's approach very well, but no matter it's in the order of frequency, or elements, and perhaps with readings, one or two, or whether it has keywords in English, but water for 水, ......... Regardless of my own linguistic background, I still find the latter a no-no. Why? I don't think it's worthwhile to learn characters completely out of context, or with pseudo-context, and to learn them even before getting to know, in that case, Japanese itself. The same will apply to Remembering the Hanzi if it's in the same format - here, my linguistic background shows that I never learned a character without a context and pronunciation. In some ways, I think the guys of chinesepod put this in very succinct messages already. I'd say that, yes, you still got to know the Chinese/Japanese script, but Assimil does a much better job, though it does have a few ugly typos for my language. I find it makes much more sense to learn characters - how to write, how to read, only when you need to. I guess that if you learn characters with Assimil, and its Hanzi/Kanji guides, and do it one by one for every lesson, that would be all the better. I don't care for those that only appear in classical texts. Chinese kids (and even adults, like me now) have to look up every strange character in a larger dictionary/specialized dictionary, or to rely on annotated texts for classical Chinese anyway. Ordinary natives won't even know their existence, so dictionary work is largely for really enthusiastic students (of classical Chinese). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 吕明扬 Newbie United States Joined 6058 days ago 30 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 34 03 December 2008 at 9:39am | IP Logged | ||
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I used to use ChinesePod before they started charging for anything above newbie level, I was working my way through intermediate when that happened. Since then I switched to cslpod.com I can understand about 90% of the 中 lessons and 30% of the 高. Mostly what sparked my outburst was, when I attempted to read Harry Potter. I spent about 10 minutes looking up these three characters that ended up just pronouncing Dursley.
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| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6150 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes | Message 6 of 34 03 December 2008 at 9:48am | IP Logged | ||
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You can register on ChinesePod for a free trial and download everything. It is very slow though.
You can also use bittorrent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6896 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 34 03 December 2008 at 11:30am | IP Logged | ||
I have been at it for three and a half years now, and there are some occasional little specks of light. I am not sure if they actually come from the end of the tunnel, supposing there even is an end to it in the first place, or if it's just my senses playing tricks with me :o). Then, at other times it can feel like the darkness is still deepening and there is another gong li or so of water over my head. But since you mention figuring out words from context, I actually managed to figure one out the other day on an on-line TV news program, almost by accident. They were talking about the recent problems in Thailand and the announcer said ... 我们最重要的旅游目的地。 "our most important travel destination". I was immediately able to identify 旅游目的地 as meaning "travel destination", since I was familiar with the component parts: 旅游 - travel, 目的 - goal, 地 - area. I think it is important to find material at the right difficulty level for your current skills. It should be challenging, to help drive you on towards improvement, but not too much so. It is ok to flirt around with regular native materials such as normal novels and news broadcasts a little, but devoting serious time and energy to them can be very inefficient and unproductive (EDIT: not to mention discouraging) if you are not at that level yet. For easy reading, I can recommend the "Chinese Breeze" series. There are a number of short/medium-length stories written with a reduced vocabulary and reduced number of characters. It's a great feeling to pick one of those things up and find you can actually read and follow a text more or less completely, as opposed to a little snippet here and there. These books can be ordered over the net and have been mentioned elsewhere in this forum. Searching the forum or asking auntie google should help point you in the right direction. Edited by Hencke on 04 December 2008 at 11:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 吕明扬 Newbie United States Joined 6058 days ago 30 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 8 of 34 03 December 2008 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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The Chinese Breeze series looks pretty good, i just got a quick look at it. 质量很好的话，我就去买了。
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