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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 5676 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 65 of 128 03 July 2013 at 5:17am | IP Logged | ||
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Another major change of plans. I'm redesigning the whole mnemonics approach and will describe it later.
I believe in methods. Indeed, I do not only believe, I'm sure that they work, although some people may say that they are "methodless". Anyway, they work very well for me, from sports to study, going through drawing etc. In the case of languages, SRS has already been essential for me to learn German and even English, back in the last century, while I was preparing myself to Ielts and Toefl, which I needed for work (non language related) reasons. Mnemonics has been a tool that helps me to learn things and even remember non essential stuff, but it also makes all of this much funnier. That said, the book "Learning Chinese Characters" is great, but I've decided to tweak my mnemonics approach in a way that seems better for me, taking into account ideas from books, LCC being the most important one, and some of my own. I've completed lesson 7 from "Méthode 90", but I'll continue with it only next week, when things will be set and done. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5676 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 66 of 128 09 July 2013 at 6:05am | IP Logged | ||
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While I'm still finishing what I'm doing now, let me explain what is it and why to do that.
From the first moment, I've enjoyed "Learning Chinese Characters" and I'm still enjoying it. However, some simple improvements are possible and that's what I'm doing. If you don't know this book, let me explain what it does. There are two stories for most of the characters. The first story gives you a clue for the composition of the character and is about the same strategy that is used in Heisig's book. Indeed, as I'll explain, there is no problem to adapt Heisig hints into my new system as well. The second story gives you a keyword for the pronunciation of the character. Since Mandarin has only a very limited number of possible sounds, the keyword method seems even more efficient to learn Mandarin. The tones are associated to five different fixed archetypes. Besides, some drawings are presented for a number of stories. Nothing really new, all these ideas appear in other places, but they seem to have never been used in a single place for Mandarin like Matthews and Mathews did. Now, here comes the problems, as far as I see it. Those characters that haven't two stories are either the fundamental characters (no problem here) or characters whose pronunciations aren't given. The last situation arises for three reasons: 1) It doesn't exist or matter. 2) The character isn't part of the 800 basic characters. 3) It's in the Do It Yourself class. This was already a problem, because I've decided to study all of them. Besides, the DIY comes exactly with those sounds that are the most complex and unusual sounds for me. Another problem is that some keywords are very unusual English words, hard to memorize and create good easy to remember stories. The last problem is that characters with pictures are much much easier for me to memorize. So: 1) I want a picture for every character. 2) I want to use Heisig after the end of these 800 basic characters. 3) I want an easier system for keywords, for every possible sound, even more because they come in a really tiny number. My solution: 1) DIY the pictures. No problem, very easy, internet gives you a mol of pictures. Besides, I'm also drawing some of them when it seems better to do this way. Just a 2 minute sketch, of course, no artistic goals here. 2) Heisig and Matthews use different basic concepts for the basic charcaters. However, since I'm drawing all of them, it doesn't matter, it's just the connections among the characters that I need. Heisig hints will help me very well. 3) Here come a real change. All Mandarin sounds come from combinations of a very limited number of initials followed by a very limited (although higher) number of finals. I'm quite sure that our fellow language nerds already know it. Those who don't could see it here. Instead of using a keyword for each compound sound, I'm using a keyword for each initial, always a thing like "dice" for the "d" pinyin sound, funnel for "f" and so on, and a keyword for each final, always something related to a living being (at some point in time, real or imaginary) like "Mao" for "ao", "King Kong" for "ong" and so on. In most of the cases, I've used Portuguese words, but English helped me to distinguish "sh" form "ch", for instance, even if not perfectly. There are so far two keywords for each initial/final, just to allow the creation of different stories with the same sound. I'll try to increase that to at least four keywords for each sound. In the future, these "foreign" words could be replaced by Mandarin ones, which may be helpful in many ways. At least, it'll make the method soundwise precise. I'm creating pictures with both the character hints (by association) and the keyword pictures. In the background, comes the meaning of the character. The character, the meaning (in Portuguese) and some extra information are also included. The whole idea is to create a story connecting all of that. It doesn't take much time to create each picture and it seems that I'm thinking about the connections during the process, which could be qualified as "Mandarin Characters study time". The pictures go into Anki, which means that if needed I can always take a look at the picture, even more when some connection character-meaning-pronunciation+tone has been failed. In a next post, I'll explain some more details and conclusions so far. I'll also choose some pictures and show them here. Edited by Flarioca on 09 July 2013 at 3:08pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5676 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 67 of 128 13 July 2013 at 3:57am | IP Logged | ||
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Finally finished to create the pictures for all the 259 characters + "radicals" from LCC that I've studied so far.
At this point, it's not possible to prove that my retention rate has improved thanks to this new way of doing things, because relearning the characters should have this effect anyway. However, I'm feeling much more confident and my answers are coming faster and much more precise when I need to write a given character. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6453 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 68 of 128 13 July 2013 at 1:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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It sounds like you're almost creating some kind of POA memory system for the sounds. Really cool!
http://mnemotechnics.org/wiki/Person-Action-Object_(PAO)_Sys tem 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5676 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 69 of 128 17 July 2013 at 1:56am | IP Logged | ||
Although I couldn't mention the source for this method, it certainly has a source (or many), but not this site, not with this name. Thanks for the information. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5676 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 70 of 128 18 July 2013 at 5:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Lesson 9 of Méthode 90 talks about the difference between 要 (yào: to be going to, to want) and 想 (xiǎng: would like, to think, to miss) and, once more, I've found clear and good extra information in Yufa, but not on the other few Mandarin grammar books on my shelf so far.
I'm sure that this cannot continue to happen, sooner or later things will be better explained elsewhere. Anyway, this book really seems to be well suited for beginners. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5676 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 71 of 128 21 July 2013 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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My first non-LCC character: 蔬 (shu1: veggies).
As already expected, this was in Heisig, actually vol. 2, character 1922, and the way the character is described and explained has been very helpful. This is a more complex character, which required about five others to be "built". I'll possibly start to read "Susan you mafan" this week, at most by the next one. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5676 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 72 of 128 24 July 2013 at 4:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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A very "empfehlenswert" book [recommendable, but it sounds much better in German :-))] is China: Empire of Living Symbols by Cecilia Lindqvist.
It doesn't contain many characters, they are mostly among the easiest ones, but I'm sure that this will deepen my experience of learning Chinese characters. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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