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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 9 of 41 15 November 2010 at 4:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Thank you!
This is good advice, I know. I did go for 100 characters today, but right now I'm just trying to set up stable work habits so that I can get ~25 characters a day. I find that if I break it up into 5-character blocks, it's easier to memorize and much more manageable.
School is *kind* of a joke. The university I'm applying to I'm almost guaranteed to get into, but I need to get an average of 95%+ in order to get a scholarship - something that is *not* happening. (I don't know why I'm using the asterisks...) So ya, I'm kind of coasting this year. That sounds awful. I just really don't need to do that much work to get good marks, and everything else seems like overkill. I'm just listening to Mandarin news podcasts. Voices of America, Radio Free Asia, the BBC Mandarin podcasts, etc. I understand roughly -5% of what's going on. I put -5 because I'm sure that I'm guessing wrong half of the time. The reason why I'm inundating myself in all things Mandarin is because I'm trying to follow the AJATT method, which suggests total immersion - he says 24 hours a day, which would kill me. I need my sleep! So although I'm somewhat doubtful of its efficacy, I have - so to speak - put my trust in him and drank the Kool-Aid. I figure that it won't distract too much from my math homework, and a little Mandarin is better than no Mandarin.
Thank you for the music! I was going to put off making this log for a while, until I at least became proficient enough not to be an embarrassment, but the name just came to me and I was paranoid that it would be stolen.
Shotty! Thank you everyone for the comments I've received. It's only day two! I can really see how the hanzi-grind could begin to wear on you after a while. Especially because my book insists on teaching some of the lesser used characters first. I know it's to lay down solid foundations so that I can easily recognize radicals when I see them, but it really isn't the fastest thing in the world. On the plus side, I find that it's much more logical than the book I was using before hand 250 Essential Chinese Characters, and I find that this makes the characters easier to memorize. I think I'll spice up my character memorization sessions with Dora the Explorer episodes. Not to mention the fact that I have a documentary entitled The Global Family: The Migration of the Red Crab, which is sure to give me tonnes of fun, usable vocabulary. EDIT: I almost forgot! I have access to Pimsleur Mandarin I-III for complete, 100% free through my municipal library. Is it worth it, or should I just stick with my memorization skills? I'm semi-trying to follow the AJATT methods, and I'm not sure if it's worth my time to be doing Pimsleur on the side as well. Edited by Whitefish on 15 November 2010 at 4:15am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5953 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 10 of 41 15 November 2010 at 5:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Good luck with your goals. I'm in my second-to-last year of high school, so we're probably similar ages.
I did a similar regimen for learning kanji for my Japanese from this past January to June, but only ten characters per day. I started off knowing 300 in January and ended with about 2000 by the end of June. Even this smaller amount was really tiring and I got completely burned out by June and then ended up abandoning my reviews, which are essential, for about four months. Even now I'm in the process of relearning and recovering them all. In short, make sure that you're comfortable with your speed. It's not that hard in the beginning, but once you have about 1000 characters you might begin to wonder if this will ever end as you have more and more seemingly endless characters jammed into your brain. If this happens, I would recommend slowing down your pace and making sure you know all of the previously learned ones first before moving ahead. I made the mistake of assuming that it would all sort itself out and kept trudging along, and ended up burning out and forgetting much of what I knew as a result--NOT FUN AT ALL. Anyways, good luck. :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6281 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 11 of 41 15 November 2010 at 11:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I'd say the main difficulty of Mandarin is not the grammar, nor the vocabulary, nor
even the characters. It's that it takes forever till you reach a base, e. g. till you can engage in meaningful conversations, understand movies without subtitles, read the news, read a novel or the like. Working with textbooks for so long is tiring. With Arabic it's the same issue. With European languages you can enjoy native materials much sooner. Even Latin. Latin is certainly among the harder European languages, but I created a course that enables you to start reading the Roman classics after just 35 hours of study (including review & Anki time). Volte did an abbreviated version in 3 days. And for languages like Spanish, Italian and the like, you could conceivably read novels on your own after just 3 weeks of L-R. Granted this is not speaking, but for me, this kind of achievement holds me over until the rest of my language abilities have caught up. Going for Mandarin as a first foreign language is like trying to run a marathon before you've run even 5 km. Anyway I wish you success and I'll be following this log! Edited by Sprachprofi on 15 November 2010 at 11:16am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Whitefish Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5063 days ago 49 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 12 of 41 16 November 2010 at 1:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I guess I'll have to be careful, you're right. 25-a-day doesn't sound like much right now, but I guess I'm just anxious to get going. If it becomes unpleasant or painful, I'll be sure to ease up a bit. I'm also contemplating taking every Friday off and just using it as a kind of "review" day, where I spend the day SRS-ing old characters and don't learn any new ones, because I think retention is important. PS: you're in your second-last year of high school and already know sevenlanguages? I am in awe!
Thanks for the advice as well. Another 25 characters today, and I'm proud today say that I've added the phrases 小便 and 大便 to my vocabulary! Could any Mandarin speakers verify that the translations for "piss" and "shit" are indeed "little convenience" and "big convenience" respectively? Edited by Whitefish on 16 November 2010 at 1:25pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6361 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 13 of 41 16 November 2010 at 1:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5953 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 14 of 41 16 November 2010 at 4:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Uh... Yeah, more or less. But German is the only one that I've learned that I haven't had a significant advantage of some sort. English is my native language, Greek is a language of my family, and I went to a bilingual English-Spanish elementary school (I consider both Greek and Spanish secondary native languages). From there, French, Portuguese, and Italian are so close to Spanish that it really was not much effort, or at least not as much as it would have been coming from a more distant language to any one of those. Edited by ellasevia on 16 November 2010 at 4:36am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 5861 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 15 of 41 16 November 2010 at 7:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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My two cents; characters aren't that important; the words they make are.
加油！ 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5119 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 16 of 41 16 November 2010 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
小便 and 大便 are correct. They're both both nouns (the product) and verbs (the process). 小 and 大 do refer to small and big, but I don't think that 便 is related to convenience. Good luck :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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