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Putong-What? - A Mandarin Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Whitefish Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5063 days ago 49 posts - 72 votes  Speaks: English*, French | Message 1 of 41 13 November 2010 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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OK let's get real. I started this log because I was afraid that someone would steal my
"Putong-What" title xD Hi! I'm Whitefish, a sixteen year old student from Canada. I'm in my final year of high school right now and I'm trying to figure out what to do with my life. It will probably be somewhere in academia somewhere, but, if you aren't aware, tenure-track positions in the humanities aren't exactly a hot commodity right now, so I really don't now. Either way, learning a language is something I've been trying to do for a while now. I think the odyssey began nearly a year ago. My frequent trips to the library led to myself passing the language section of the library several times a week. It was always interesting, but I never did anything about it because I never actually pictured myself being able to teach myself another language. One day, i saw a course called "Colloquial Croatian. My friend is a Croat, and I told her about it; she said I should pick it up so that we could speak Croatian together. That was fun, but I never got past the second chapter or so; I figured that if I was going to spend a lot of time learning a language, it wouldn't be Croatian. From there, language was on the back-burner for a while,(except for a brief interest in Hindi) until this past summer. My somewhat eclectic reading diet had led to myself becoming interested in Buddhism. I thought that I would spend the summer teaching myself Sanskrit and Pali. I went out and bought Michael Coulson's "Teach Yourself Sanskrit", did five chapters and promptly broke down crying. OK, I didn't actually cry, but it went way over my head. I still have the book, and I want to pick up Sanskrit eventually, but not now. And now here we are. I have attempted to study the following in my spare time: Croatian, Sanskrit, Arabic, Hindi and Cree. All of them have been massive, colossal, uterrly complete failures. If you had told me a few weeks ago that I would have picked Mandarin, I might have laughed at you. Mandarin? Are you kidding me? It's so cliche. It's so, "I want to get ahead in life". I just picture Young Republicans entering business school and learning Mandarin only because they want to make more money in the future. No, I would have probably said I'd be studying, like, Coptic or Armenian or Vietnamese or some small, quirky language. So what gives? Coincidence, really. I was at the library again and I saw a copy of "Elementary Chinese". When someone puts my in the library, I become a kind of compulsive borrower. Everything and everything that interests me goes into the bag (which is why I have more than 30 books checked out now >.>. Most of them are for school, but still.)A lot of my friends are Chinese (they speak mostly Canto though!), so I'd sort of practice with them. Little by little, I became more interested. At the time, I had been trying to study Latin and German, but Chinese began to take up more and more of my time. Today I went and bought two books: "Reading & Writing Chinese: Traditional Character Edition" and "Oxford Beginner's Chinese Dictionary." I have officially committed myself to learning this language. I'm so excited! To celebrate, I've also checked out a bunch of children's books in Chinese from the library as well ("No David" in Chinese, a book with a festive-looking penguin on the front, one about a grandmother and her child, and a short novel with a bunch of plucky-looking young girls jumping out of a castle. Oh, an a nature documentary on the migration of the red crab and Dora the Explorer in Mandarin.) My goals:
Some might look at my past failures and think "Pfft! There's no way." Go on. Say that. I dare you. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Whitefish Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5063 days ago 49 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 2 of 41 13 November 2010 at 10:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Haha. Wow. That was a bit of a mess - I can't help it. I'm excited to start learning.
I just need to be careful not to work too hard at the beginning and then get bored. Slow and steady wins the race. I easily got to #50 in my hanzi book today, mostly because the first bunch are either radicals or super easy words I already knew (我, 也, 好, etc.) I learned a few new ones too. Vocabulary is probably roughly ~75 characters, including the ones I've already learned. Easily got 6+ hours today, and I'm watching Dora the Explorer in Mandarin right now. It's really great because it's subtitled in Mandarin, so it allows me to sort of bridge my written knowledge with the audio input. Plus, it's hilarious. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6361 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 3 of 41 14 November 2010 at 2:25am | IP Logged | ||
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Catchy title. Good to see someone with so much energy. I predict you will succeed.
Welcome to the forum. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Whitefish Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5063 days ago 49 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 4 of 41 14 November 2010 at 9:31pm | IP Logged | ||
Thank you so much for your kind words! As fascinating as it may seen, I'm not going to update this page daily just saying "finished my characters/listening/sentences for the day". So I'm thinking I'll just record thoughts on what's going on with my progress, successes, failures etc. Right now, I'm really impressed with how much vocabulary I can identify already. Just scanning the pages of the books I have/reading the subtitled text in my "Dora" movie (which has a few nasty scratches unfortunately, so it freezes at some part), I can make out a fair amount of the characters. It's easy to exaggerate the amount of the conversation I understand (it's really a tiny, tiny sliver) - but when I think of French, of which I have taken 10 years of lessons, it was much more difficult. Hell, I still can't make out most of the news I hear. So it's encouraging. I'm tempted to get to 100 characters in my book today, just because I have the time. The important thing is really that I set up a stable schedule for review though. I learn five when I wake up and review yesterday's characters. Then I learn five at lunch, five when I get home from school, five before I leave to go swimming, and five before I go to bed; then the whole cycle is repeated. I'm impatient to get started with the sentences. Maybe I will go for 100 today. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6395 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 5 of 41 14 November 2010 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Good luck! The longer you manage to keep this kind of motivation, the better.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Tropi Diglot Groupie Austria Joined 5242 days ago 67 posts - 87 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 41 14 November 2010 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just a hint: Don't overdo it. If you get frustrated at some point you might want to take a break. That's fatal. You lose them very easily, so be careful. ;)
BTW. You're in your final year and still have time to listen 6 hours a day to Chinese? Either you don't sleep or you have an awesome timetable. ;) I would also appreciate which audio material you listen to. Also, how much of it do you understand? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Élan Senior Member United States Joined 5255 days ago 165 posts - 211 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Persian | Message 7 of 41 15 November 2010 at 1:58am | IP Logged | ||
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I have some of the same questions as Tropi. What kind of audio material are you using? Also, if you're looking for music in Mandarin other than pop, I posted some of my favorites
here. Such a cute title! Good luck and enjoy the awesome motivation while it lasts! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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