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Mandarin: Year 3.7 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 4953 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 73 of 111 25 November 2013 at 1:33am | IP Logged |
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Aaaand this week has been a complete disaster. Just a massive pile of stuff took up a ton of time. I didn't even get reviews done on Tuesday, which cascaded for a couple days until things were back under control around Friday. RTH at a mere 2878 (not done today yet, though).
Oh well... I did, though, make a useful discovery. I have one of the older large Kindles, a Kindle DX with no Chinese font support. But, I realized, since it will display pdfs, maybe I can convert a Chinese ebook into a pdf to read it on that. And, after some fussing with Calibri, it does indeed work. SimHei font only, but that's fine. So that's cool. I bought The Monkey's Paw and have been making my way through that one chapter at a time. Vocab is super easy, and since I know the story already I can puzzle out the grammar pretty well. I also downloaded the sample of The Hunger Games to try after that to see if it's too hard or not. Something that amuses me about the Hunger Games is I refused to read the book when it came out because it's in present tense and that just drives me up the wall for no real reason. And I know why it's written like that - so there's no guarantee the narrator survives - but it still bugs me so much that I wouldn't read it. But in Chinese, with it's... uh.... nebulous... tenses - that won't be a problem! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 4953 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 74 of 111 03 December 2013 at 12:13am | IP Logged |
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I'm not sure how to characterize Thanksgiving this year. It was both better and worse than I had hoped. I understood everything essential, but not nearly as well as I would like. I am only noticing now how FAST my wife's family talks. It's not something you can see when you only grab a word here and there but when you are trying to unravel a whole sentence... man....
The production also just wasn't there for me, though we never really got any big blocks of 'alone' time away from one of the non-Chinese-speaking relatives and I didn't really want to monopolize that time and shut him out. There were a few funny moments where someone would be stumped for a word when translating for Grandma and I, of all people, would pipe in with it. I guess I can slow down the vocabulary accumulation, ha. I did have some time to talk with Grandma just before we left, with some necessary assistance from my wife, and she is really looking forward to speaking with me in the future. She was pretty much as excited as a 97-year old lady can get, even with as little/slow progress so far. We really, really need to speak Chinese more at home to get this speaking thing rolling. Knowing the words is one thing, pronouncing them another, reciting sentences another - and I can do those things now, at least - but I'm just not able to assemble coherent sentences on demand yet and I don't see any other way to do that other than just resolving to talk like 5-year olds at home for as long as it takes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 4953 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 75 of 111 12 December 2013 at 8:01pm | IP Logged |
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2944 in RTH. Coming down the home stretch...
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| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 4953 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 76 of 111 29 December 2013 at 7:19am | IP Logged |
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Sick again. I went more than a year without getting sick at all and then get two colds in two months, blech. Anyway, this one is not as debilitating since it didn't come with the week-long sore throat that was keeping me awake all night last time. (How can two colds be so different? Kinda weird when you think about it.)
So, since I'm not quite as knocked out/zombified as last time, I have been not only keeping up but accelerating the Chinesepod lessons, back up to one Intermediate a day, have been catching up on the audio for my sentences, and have reached the first appendix of RTH 2, at #2984. The end of that is in sight. We are about halfway through the second season of Princess Returning Pearl, an episode or two per night usually. It's getting pretty goofy but, eh, it's listening practice anyway. I also got 500 Chinese Idioms for Christmas, and it will come in handy at some point I'm sure. I don't expect to ever be spouting these things off but recognizing them for reading is pretty important. I was kinda taken aback at how many were in the first few pages of Game of Thrones. And it's odd that the few I know aren't in this book. Oh well, just more to learn I guess! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 4953 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 77 of 111 31 December 2013 at 9:03pm | IP Logged |
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Made it to the second appendix of RTH 2, a collection of surnames. Almost almost done!
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| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 4953 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 78 of 111 03 January 2014 at 11:05pm | IP Logged |
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Time for some useless but morale-lifting numbers:
Chinesepod lessons entered in Anki: 319. I have not listened to the complete lesson for all of these but I have actually listened to most of them, and almost all of the Intermediate ones during various car trips. This makes up precisely 3200 words and 2342 sentences (which I am still plodding away on adding audio to) in Anki. Other random words in Anki (reading, visual dictionary, MMO): 1693. I haven't added anything from visual dictionary or MMO in a few months. I've still been slowly adding the new words from the first (few) pages of Game of Thrones. Traditional characters unusually different from simplified: at 279 of 532. And finally Remembering the Hanzi characters: 3015. The last three will be added tomorrow. Hallelujah. So if I'm just blabbering out stats, it's almost 4900 words known and 3000 characters. Sounds impressive, I guess. I'd be more impressed with myself if I didn't keep finding 40 new words on each page of Game of Thrones. But it's a good base to start off the new year with. The hours of listening to radio isn't really quantifiable, especially since it is often just background noise. But I guess I can count episodes of the shows we watched: 58 so far of the two seasons of Huan Zhu Ge Ge and 35 Bu Bu Jing Xin, so 93 TV shows. I guess those stats right there explain why my listening is lagging behind reading. 365 days of about 40 minutes of Anki in a year is 240 hours of reading-type stuff, and these shows all added up are about 60 hours. That ratio is not as bad as I feared, but does show that I need more media stuff in my daily routine if I want my abilities to even out in the long run. Edited by proudft on 03 January 2014 at 11:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 4953 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 79 of 111 05 January 2014 at 1:41am | IP Logged |
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Finally made it, 3018 characters, yeesh. That only took forever.
Hopefully it won't take too long for the reviews to settle down to my RTH 1 levels of 20-30 day from the current 120. But I'm glad I'm finally over the big hurdle there. Hooray! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 4953 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 80 of 111 09 January 2014 at 11:04pm | IP Logged |
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Log name updated to include the TAC team name. Go team Magpies!
Team Post Been pretty busy with work (and this will continue until the end of January) but reviews are gettin' done and Chinesepod lessons are being added. I am at 116 Intermediate lessons now and allegedly you can move to Upper Intermediate at 120 but I'm not going to really rush that. I am clearly not anything you would call 'Intermediate' yet. Also, in retrospect I think I moved onto the Intermediate CPs a little too soon and there are plenty of lessons left at that level to go over for a good long while. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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