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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 25 of 41 02 December 2010 at 3:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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Wed. Dec. 1, 2010
My Anki deck tells me that it has been eighteen days since I have created my Chinese deck. It feels like it’s been so much longer, really. I’m already past number 400 in my book – I’m on track (or not, I’ll talk about that later) to reach character number 450 today. In some ways, it’s barely a step on the path to reaching a basic Mandarin vocabulary, especially because these are just characters in isolation and not words; however, in another way, it’s remarkable. I’ve barely been studying for two weeks and I have a working knowledge of nearly 400 characters! Congrats to me. Lately I’ve become fixated on the idea of reaching 2,000 characters to obtain basic literacy. Zhongwen.com says that that was the amount expected for industrial workers to be considered literate during the Cultural Revolution. At the rate I’m going, I should reach 1,000 characters by the end of the month and get to 2,000 characters sometime in February. That should finish off my book Reading and Writing Chinese: Traditional Character Edition, which I have grown to love. I’m really getting into the meat of the characters now, useful characters that I see when I skim through the Chinese books that I own or Chinese websites on the Internet. No more learning the character for hazel tree (which is no longer in common use)! Having led you on with all of the good news first, there is some bad news as well. School has been horrendously busy: my exams start in less than a week now and teachers have been frantically attempting to cram any possible last minute marking in while they can. It’s been nuts. Fortunately, I’ve managed to remain somewhat on task – I’ve only skipped one day, which I made up for this past weekend. I’m afraid that I may not have time to make the 25 for today and maybe tomorrow just because there are several big assignments due and I don’t want to compromise my marks for a few extra characters. Some days I’ll just throw 25 characters in Anki and tell myself that I’ll learn them on the weekend – probably not the best course of action, but it hasn’t been so disastrous so far. As well, my attempts to form an immersion environment have been somewhat dismal as of yet. I can’t properly read or understand anything that’s going on really, so listening to Mandarin podcasts has become quite boring and even distracting when I do schoolwork. I listen to one when I get up every morning to help wake me up as I’m lying in bed, but other than that there has not been much Mandarin listening. I occasionally pick up one of the children’s books I’ve checked out from the library and skimmed through it, but I can’t make out more than a few simple phrases. Every now and then I’ll watch ten minutes of a Tawainese drama, watch an episode from my Dora the Explorer or listen to a pop song in Mandarin but it’s a far cry from a total immersion environment. On that note, I’d like to make my goals for this next week: - Reach the 600 character mark by next Wednesday - Work on immersing myself in Mandarin material (podcasts, TV shows, books): specificially one hour of podcast per day (I’ll listen while studying), two parts of a drama episode (approximately 20 minutes per day) and a few pages of a children’s book (comprehension not paramount in any of them). It’s still nothing close to total immersion, but it will have to do for now. That's all for now. I've decided that I will be making a log post every Wednesday to keep me on top of things. Edited by Whitefish on 02 December 2010 at 3:39am 1 person has 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 26 of 41 02 December 2010 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Don't beat yourself up! You've made tremendous progress! Really, I don't know anyone who
progressed so fast in Chinese without living in China. I learned ca. 2500 characters in 2009, but before that I spent several years never exceeding 800. "Reading and Writing Chinese characters" helped me tremendously, and so did Anki. Make sure that your review count in Anki never goes up too high or you'll soon find yourself dreading this task. As long as the review count is low enough and you see how quickly you're making progress, studying characters can be immense fun. So don't worry if you aren't learning as many new characters as you were planning to - obtaining basic literacy in less than half a year is an amazing feat that will make most Chinese students green with envy. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Whitefish Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5063 days ago 49 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 27 of 41 02 December 2010 at 10:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
Wow Sprachprofi, that's very nice of you to say! I agree, learning characters is very exciting. Especially because walls of characters that had previously seemed like gibberish are slowly revealing their secrets to me. I think you're right about the Anki. I take a break every Friday just to make sure that I've got all of the characters down, so that things don't get out of control. 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 28 of 41 03 December 2010 at 12:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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Whitefish, I don't remember if you've mentioned this already (too lazy to go back and check), but are you also learning the pronunciation for each character? I've read that in Chinese this is easier because there is usually only one pronunciation for each character, whereas in Japanese there are usually at least two (hence why I skipped it). Truly, learning this many characters so quickly is amazing!
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| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4984 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 29 of 41 03 December 2010 at 2:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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Wow,看见你那么认真的学习华语真是令我觉得 分惭愧。真后悔我当初没像你那么勤劳。
If you're looking for fun characters to write, I've got recommendations for you. My two favorite characters in Mandarin are 凹(ao1) and 凸(tu1). (凹凸 = uneven.) Have you seen these characters yet? I like them cause you'll get a rectangle if you flip tu1 and place it over ao1. (I know it's probably just me being silly.) Another word I liked when I was a kid was 照. Basically, the story behind this word was that 一个日本人 (a Japanese man), 拿着一把刀 （held a knife), 站在大门口 (stood at the door), 杀了四个人 (and killed 4 people, i.e. the 4 little strokes at the bottom). The story is not PC but whatev. Anyways,加油。 Edited by strikingstar on 03 December 2010 at 4:11am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Whitefish Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5063 days ago 49 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 30 of 41 04 December 2010 at 12:38am | IP Logged | |||||
I learn the pronunciation as well, tone included. It can be a little difficult when I miss the tone on Anki and make myself repeat the card, but it's well worth it.
Man, wish I could read that first part. I typed it into Google Translation and got the general gist of it thouch :). Thanks a lot! I hadn't seen those two character before. Your story is great for remembering 照. I didn't understand how it worked at first, and I was like "damn, that is the shortest story I've ever heard". On an unrelated note, I've been accepted as one of two students into a mentorship program in my city's university, which is exciting, but it could put some further stress on my Mandarin studying time. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Whitefish Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5063 days ago 49 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 31 of 41 15 December 2010 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Oh man. It's been a while.
I find it ironic on how I'd been congratulating myself just before I slipped over the edge. School work's been piling up like crazy. It's exam times. In my free time I just want to curl up an a ball and sleep, not focus on memorizing characters. Nevertheless, I've climbed back up on the boat; it's been roughly a week and a half, which is not good. I managed to catch up on my Anki reviews, and I'm working up to #525 in my book today. I'm very far behind where I wanted to be, but I'm just going to roll with it and not worry about catching up, which at this point would be impossible. I need to go at a comfortable pace. But Whitefish is now officially back in action! I still have two exams to go (two of my hardest - biology and calculus - wish me luck!), but I have enough time to get my 25 done in several chunks throughout the day. The Christmas holidays shouldn't be too hard, but I have two rather large papers to write for class and I'll be visiting relatives; it should be interesting! When I get back to school, I'm going to re-evaluate if my plan of 15 characters a day is feasible with my work schedule. I might bump it down to 20 or maybe only 15 a day, but I'm still anxious to be able to get reading. Speaking of reading, I've mentioned this before, but the best thing about learning characters is how amazed you are at how many you know. I was watching one of my favourite Mandarin music videos the other day, reading the subtitles at the bottom of the screen, and I kept on recognizing characters that I had just learned that day! Now that I've passed the first bit of the learning, the characters are more useful. Still not at the stage where I can pick apart sentences yet, and I won't be for a while, but I'm satisfied with the speed with which I've been progressing. I'm thinking of joining TAC 2011. Just read the thread and it seems like a good way to keep motivated and on top of things. It would probably behoove of me to join. Alright, off to studying already. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Polyglot_gr Super Polyglot Newbie Greece Joined 4906 days ago 29 posts - 64 votes Speaks: Greek*, FrenchC2, EnglishC2, GermanC2, Italian, SpanishC2, DutchC1, Swedish, PortugueseC1, Romanian, Polish, Catalan, Russian, Hungarian | Message 32 of 41 15 December 2010 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It is really surprising for me to read the above posts, where non-natives talk about learning Chinese characters.
Wake-up guys. We live in 2010. You can copy any Chinese text, paste it in those specialized web pages and turn in into pinyin within seconds. Why spend half your life studying something with little practical use, while you could learn 5-10 languages in the same period? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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