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Some notes on non-intensive Mandarin LR | ||
Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6445 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 1 of 3 11 April 2013 at 10:29pm | IP Logged |
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3 days ago, Sprachprofi finally convinced me to pick up some basic Mandarin. I spent a few hours on wordbook, which is a fantastic site for learning pronunciation, including tones. Initially, I was lucky to get rated at 30% and I usually repeated tones wrong; by the end of the few hours, I could often get 100%, but had only gotten up to words starting with c, and hadn't actually noticed any words starting with b beyond the first page - still, it was practice with all the tones.
Yesterday, I watched 5 15-minute episodes of a TV series for beginners, but found the plot too soap-opera-like, and wasn't picking up even the simple phrases that were emphasized in the main part of the episodes and reviewed after. Following that, I did perhaps a couple of hours of LR with "The Little Prince." Today, I continued LR. Starting Mandarin LR was a bit daunting. I didn't recognize any words at first, and finally understood why atamagaii mentioned restarting audio a lot at the beginning. In the first hour, I didn't get very far, and often had to rely on cues like the length of sound files to try to even guess what line I was on; I also relied on intonation to try to keep track of where I was, but that went poorly at first . It was the most difficult start to LR I'd ever had. I spent a half hour trying firefox plugins for pinyin, but after 2 minutes of actually using each of them, gave them up as too distracting to be worthwhile. Eventually, I got to the point where I recognized one cognate (there aren't many). Chapters 3 and 4 were easier, and I managed to recover and find where I was again quite a few times, though I had to concentrate hard enough on matching the Chinese audio to the text that I usually couldn't find time to read the French or look away for a split second. By the time I started chapter 10, I sometimes knew which sentence I was on, and sometimes didn't. My knowledge of some kanji felt quite useless throughout the day, perhaps aside from making characters not all look the same to begin with. Today, it took a bit under 10 minutes to get back to the level I reached at the end of yesterday; before that, I was quite lost. About 2 hours later, I've finished chapter 25. My passive vocabulary is a few dozen words, and I recognize more sound/hanzi correspondences than that, without yet associating them with meanings. Sentences like '他累了' and '“再见了。”小王子说' are clear when I'm reading them, though I'd only recognize 累 and 再见了 with the help of a parallel text still. My knowledge of Kanji is finally helping a bit, but not much; I recognize the pronunciation of words like 'water' and 'person', and knowing the kanji for them allows me to recognize the hanzi and pick the words out of complicated phrases that are way above my current level but where I can map each syllable onto a character if I'm concentrating intently. For about 4 hours of study (5 if you count the TV series), plus pronunciation study, and extremely minimal previous knowledge of Mandarin (a couple of forgotten phrases, a mispronounced 'ni hao', having tried a couple of hours of MT Mandarin around when it was released, and having done a bit over a thousand Japanese Kanji with Heisig over the years, most of which I don't remember), it's not going too badly. 10 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4853 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 2 of 3 12 April 2013 at 6:11am | IP Logged |
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The courage you have, Volte! Wow.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6445 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 3 of 3 12 April 2013 at 9:06pm | IP Logged |
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I've done 9+ hours of pronunciation work today with wordbook, getting 100% on all the first tone syllables at least once. I spent a couple of hours on the ones ending with -u, but seem to have finally (semi-)conquered that vowel, after years of trying in various languages. I love wordbook.
I'm getting the first tone right 95%+ of the time, although in a few syllables it's a bit tricky still sometimes; in others, I almost always get it right. I've done most of the initials and finals by now, though not quite all - wordbook doesn't have first tone examples for all of them. I took a long nap in the middle of the -u work. It seems to have helped. Despite it, I'm exhausted again. Kujichagulia: it doesn't exactly take courage to do LR with an ideographic script as an absolute beginner; it just takes patience, a high tolerance for being lost for a couple of hours, and to keep going at it until things start to make sense. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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