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Next adventure: Mandarin - 鹊 TAC’14 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5663 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 1 of 128 03 March 2013 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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What's an adventure? Well, the word comes from Latin and simply means "what lies ahead". That's exactly what Mandarin is for me now: my next language, the next one that I want to learn to a reasonable level, after which I could improve mostly through the use of the language, that means, B2.
This is not my first attempt at Mandarin. About 15 years ago I've completed Pimsleur I and half of Pimsleur II. I was listening to the tapes, and giving the answers aloud, of course, during my walking time, back and forth to the USA University in which I was working at that time. A wonderful walk through a nice public golf field among squirrels. Then the winter came, as feared by "Game of Thrones" fans, no more walking, no more Mandarin. I'd thought that I would get back to it in the spring, but I didn't, new stuff took all of my interest and free time, even the walkings. It's clear that there's no need to explain why one wants to learn Mandarin. I just would like to say that having a young son adds an extra motivation, the idea that this may help him to get interested in this language in the future, which could be useful for him in many ways. During the last year, I've finally managed to learn German to a good level (reading and listening C1, writing and speaking B2) and my log here on HTLAL has been very useful for me. Native speakers help, exchange of information with other German students, encouragement and nice words, all have been important. Because of that, it seems a good idea to start a new log about this new project. I'll be a member of Team 鹊 in TAC 2014. This is our Team Log. I'll keep the rest of this message to record milestones and will describe how I'm planning to study Mandarin in the next one. Milestones
Edited by Flarioca on 22 January 2014 at 3:01pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5663 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 2 of 128 03 March 2013 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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At this point, my plan, which, of course, is bounded to change during its execution, is divided in two phases: The Twofold Beginning and The Sevenfold Approach. I would like to thank every Mandarin learner here in HTLAL whose ideas and experiences about learning this language have inspired my plan, although maybe none of them would agree with me about it.
The Twofold Beginning will start at any time during the next week with Michel Thomas Mandarin. I've already the Total and the Perfect courses at my shelf. Some few years ago, I've finished MT Russian and really enjoyed the overview way and other features of this course. I've read some bad comments about the Mandarin one, but I'm sure that it's going to be helpful for me. At some point during MT Mandarin, I'll also start to study "The Sounds of Chinese" by Yen-Hwei Lin. I'm sure that learning the phonetics of Mandarin right from the start is very important, and my previous experience with this language, although very short, makes it even more clear to me. The Sevenfold Approach starts when MT finishes, and begins with Listening. The book that I've chosen is "Basic Spoken Chinese" by Cornelius C. Kubler. The next step is Characters, which I'll start approaching with "Learning Chinese Characters" by Alison Matthews. By the end of the Twofold Beginning it'll start the Reading step with "Beginner's Chinese" by Yong Ho. This is not only a book for reading, as its name makes clear, this is a course for beginners, but this is also when I'll start reading. I'm planing to wait at least one week to start each new step during this Sevenfold Approach, and although Grammar is already a subject of the last book, it'll 'officialy' start with "Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar" by Qin Xue Herzberg and Larry Herzberg. It's also very clear that to understand the related Culture (or cultures) is essential to learn a new language. At this point, besides what the previous books may already bring, this is a good opportunity to pratice other languages, which means that I'll try to read as much as possible about China and Mandarin in German. Right now I'm not at all worried about Speaking, but it seems that Kubler's book will stimulate me in that way. I'm even less worried about Writing, but Ho's book may as well force me in this direction. As an old time fan of SRS, I wouldn't abandon it now, of course. However, Mandarin learners have much more than a very good friend for SRS, they have Pleco. This could almost make it The Eightfold Way, but I prefer to view Pleco as an overall friend that sooner or later will be helpful for all seven branches. Pleco has already lots of HTLAL fans, as any search for this word here would prove it. Having described what I mean by The Sevenfold Approach, of course, I've already other ideas for each of these branches, they are cleraly connected and many of these books, as already said, will be helpful in more than one way. However, two further ideas should be mentioned. The first one is about Podcasts. Maybe I'll try more than one, but I'm inclined to CSLPod. Something that I also hope to start doing very soon is to read graded readers and I've already bought some of them. I must say that so far the only language that I've approached with 'graded readers' has been Esperanto, with "Gerda Malaperis!". Anyway, I'm sure that this is going to be a great way to keep me motivated and with lots of different Mandarin activities throughout the day. There are also some books that could very soon be used in many ways: "Yufa! A Practical Guide to Mandarin Chinese Grammar" by Wen-Hua Teng, and Boya Chinese: Elementary Starter I by Li Xiaoqi being my bets. Let's see how much the other options please me. I'll try to study at various moments during the day and that might give me a lot more time than the two hours that I can set in advance for this project. As already said, this is how I see it now, but tomorrow is another day. Major change of plans (26/04/2013) Instead of "Beginner's Chinese" by Yong Ho, I'm going to use "Méthode 90". The reason for that and some further details about the plan mentioned on this message see here. (04/08/2013) Instead of Cslpod, which I didn't like (mainly because of low customizability), I'll try Chinesepod. Edited by Flarioca on 05 August 2013 at 2:17am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5663 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 3 of 128 03 March 2013 at 10:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Useful Links
General Chinese-foruns.com PlecoForuns MandarinPortal On-line Chinese Tools ChinaLinks Online Dictionaries MDBG Ting Nciku Online Radios, TVs etc. iTings FM Growing up with Chinese Reading Mandaread Chinese Reading Practice Characters Zhongwen.com Estroke Character Stroke Order Basic Rules Täglich Chinesisch Chinese-characters.org Chinese Etymology Chinese Characters Network Learning Order List Arch Chinese Grammar Chinese Grammar Wiki Zhuyin Zhuyin Online Input Keyboard Stickers Pinyin Pīnyīn editor ChinesePod Pinyin Chart Phonetic Conversion Tool Pinyin and Pronunciation Effects on Pronunciation Tones Tone Trainer HTLAL Podcasts Music in Mandarin Miscellanea China Maps Edited by Flarioca on 03 August 2013 at 4:17am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5663 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 4 of 128 03 March 2013 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5663 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 5 of 128 07 March 2013 at 2:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, I'm learning Mandarin!
I was waiting for "the perfect day" to start it, a day without much pressure from work and other duties, but this day is not likely to come very soon, so today I've listened to some of the first lessons from Michel Thomas Mandarin, Total course. It seems that I'll enjoy it, at least, as much as I enjoyed the Russian one. Of course, this is NOT going to make me even know the language at the "intermediate" level. No problem, I believe ... no ... I'm SURE that a solid foundation is important regardless of what you want to learn or do. My Tone Colors in Pleco has already been set to the MT pattern, 1st green, 2nd blue, 3rd red, 4th black. Many people complains about MT not teaching the 5th tone and this may be really a problem of this course, but I cannot say much about that, of course. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5663 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 6 of 128 08 March 2013 at 2:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Tones aren't new for me, but I really like the way that the MT course teaches it. The idea of connecting tones to colors AND gestures seems to be in accordance to the best of our knowledge in neurosciences as the best way to quickly fix it in the brains of non native learners. Native ones, of course, have lots of time to do this pressureless, while learning a bunch of other stuff.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5663 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 7 of 128 09 March 2013 at 3:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are tons of threads here on HTLAL discussing different methods, their strong points and their weakness.
However, I believe that the most valuable discussions have been those that connected the way we learn with each of these methods. It's already and once more very clear that the Michel Thomas course is much closer to the way I like to learn things, through explanations whenever possible. For instance, instead of learning "ni hao ma", I prefer to learn about the verb "shì" (to be) and about the absence of conjugations in Mandarin. Well, I already knew that, but as far as I remember it took some time to have this clear through Pimsleur. It's also never too much to repeat that learning about tones should preceed everything else. If I still had a daily 30+ minutes commute time, I would continue to use Pimsleur during this period, maybe after MT, just to increase vocabulary and do something useful during an otherwise wasted period of your day. It's also true that after a while you'll need to start learning more about the language without thinking about each word, each rule, otherwise there's no way to have 10.000+ words and related rules somehow saved in your brain. That's why to learn a language more deeply, Assimil could be a good option, because they drive this process of assimilation in a very nice way. On the other hand, as the Assimil Experiment suggests, in most cases, Assimil alone won't bring you past the B1- level. I believe that the "Perfectionnement" could help you to achive the B2- level. However, this beginning phase is important and I'm sure that having things explained at this point will be much more effective than just assimilating things. It's nice to see that there are MT courses for other languages that I'd like to learn in the future. Edited by Flarioca on 09 March 2013 at 3:20pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5663 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 8 of 128 10 March 2013 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | ||
The neutral tone (5th tone, closed fist gesture, grey color in Pleco, which I'll keep) is taught in CD 1, lesson 12. However, reading again the reviews about MT here on HTLAL, it seems that people complain indeed about MT not teaching change of tones when they come in a row. Well, this would be a big problem, but I've already seen that there's an entire chapter in "The Sounds of Chinese" about this. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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