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Ziel HSK 3 - Target Mandarin

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Iolanthe
Diglot
Senior Member
Netherlands
Joined 5429 days ago

410 posts - 482 votes 
Speaks: English*, DutchC1
Studies: Turkish, French

 
 Message 73 of 84
10 June 2014 at 12:19pm | IP Logged 
Sunja wrote:
I've got a lot of things going on at the moment. Last month was hectic and
obviously I was a bit stressed and frustrated about my health. It weighs really heavily
on me sometimes but I'll try to keep my problems out of my log. I'm not a big fan of
self-indulgence on the Internet but sometimes it's hard to resist the urge to "write it
out"


Don't feel bad about venting on your log. We're all humans after all, not language
learning robots. I hope you're feeling as well as you can under the circumstances.
1 person has voted this message useful



Sunja
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5873 days ago

2020 posts - 2295 votes 
1 sounds
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: French, Mandarin

 
 Message 74 of 84
10 June 2014 at 7:38pm | IP Logged 
Thank you for the encouragement Iolanthe!

Actually I'm feelin pretty positive lately :) Language learning is such an inspiring task that I'm more motivated than ever to keep going no matter what!
1 person has voted this message useful



Sunja
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5873 days ago

2020 posts - 2295 votes 
1 sounds
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: French, Mandarin

 
 Message 75 of 84
14 June 2014 at 1:47pm | IP Logged 
I changed browsers recently and I had a really hard time logging in just now. I had to
change my password. Yikes.

The past two days I've been very busy with Mandarin. I tried opening a Premium account
with Lang-8 just so I can add Mandarin to my languages, but Paypal doesn't seem to want
to cooperate with my request. I'm still stuck with the "just two languages" problem. I
decided to give up my beloved French for Mandarin. My two languages at lang-8 are now
German and Mandarin.

I've already written two journal entries. Now, I knew the Mandarin-English community at
lang-8 was huge, but I didn't realize how huge until I wrote my first post. I didn't
expect getting such a deluge of corrections for just one simple introduction. I
have more corrections than I can process. It's GREAT! Maybe that means my posts are so
easy to correct? ;) or maybe there's just more Mandarin speakers learning English as
there are the opposite. Obviously ^^

I've decided to try and write every day. I have to use Google to help me make it sound
more interesting than just the basic HSK 2 sentence patterns and yes, --I'm indeed
aware--that it really messes up the sentence structure when I do that. I've already
been told to watch the syntax. Despite the problems with the translations, I'm
convinced that doing all of this will greatly benefit my reading
comprehension. Not only to I "search and seize" the Internet for what I want to say, I
have to be able to read and understand the corrections afterwards.

I have a language exchange partner in the works. I wasn't really looking to do a
language exchange at such an early learning juncture, but someone sent me a message
this morning and I can't resist the opportunity.

I wish this forum weren't so hard to access, but I'll have to limit my time here in
order to make more time for my new friends at lang-8..

Edited by Sunja on 14 June 2014 at 1:50pm

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SomeGuy
Groupie
Germany
Joined 4888 days ago

56 posts - 75 votes 
Speaks: German*
Studies: Arabic (Written), Turkish, Mandarin

 
 Message 76 of 84
14 June 2014 at 3:34pm | IP Logged 
Oh yes,
the community of Chinese speakers on lang-8 is huge, every time i log on lang-8 i have around ten new friend requests.And many of them searching a Tandem Partner, its awesome!
1 person has voted this message useful



Sunja
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5873 days ago

2020 posts - 2295 votes 
1 sounds
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: French, Mandarin

 
 Message 77 of 84
14 June 2014 at 4:28pm | IP Logged 
Yeah, I love it, but I'm not used to it. I have to figure out how to handle this barrage
of lang-8 messages now. If I'm not mindful I'll be at lang-8 all day!

What a fabulous dilemma! :D

1 person has voted this message useful



Sunja
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5873 days ago

2020 posts - 2295 votes 
1 sounds
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: French, Mandarin

 
 Message 78 of 84
23 June 2014 at 9:29pm | IP Logged 
Well, the language exchange didn't quite work out. I think we scared each other :)

My speaking skills aren't exactly at a comfortable level anyway. I'm actually relieved. I have too much on my plate right now, work-wise.

I've written a number (6? not sure) of entries at lang-8, all of them are quite short in order to give me time to process the corrections. That's the hardest part. There are usually more than one or two words that the native speakers throw in to my writings for the purpose of making it more palatable. I'm eager to get new words, but if there's too many at once, it doesn't help much.

I do my best to keep the lang-8 entries at just the right level -- between HSK2 and HSK3. That's where I am, currently.

I've figured out how to turn off the notifications from lang-8 because every day I have about 12 in my in-box, especially if I write something. I will be leaving my computer for about two weeks, and I think if I don't dam the flood I could have a mess when I get back.

I'm even getting corrections for stuff that I wrote last week. Yes, my stuff is so simple that it's probably not natural, but it's helping me to learn the vocabulary in a context. I've moved back to Ankidroid (I've accepted the fact that I go back and forth) and I've started a "corrections" deck, with all the sentences I've written.


PS: thanks for waiting for this page to load. I've been having a lot of trouble lately, which is why I've stopped updating our team thread.


1 person has voted this message useful



Sunja
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5873 days ago

2020 posts - 2295 votes 
1 sounds
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: French, Mandarin

 
 Message 79 of 84
21 July 2014 at 6:05pm | IP Logged 
I haven't written at lang-8 since the end of June. I was in the hospital for about 5 days. I didn't look at any of the stuff I brought with me, like my corrections from lang-8 ;) I came home, and just one week later my husband had to leave for the US because my father-in-law died. So *whew*. I stayed here in Germany to tend to the whole family and work. I had no idea how hard it would be to take care of this family without my better half. I'm so glad he's coming back tomorrow!

I haven't really had any time for Chinese. It's not that I don't think I could squeeze in 10 min. here or there -- I'm just having a hard time finding a place to jump back in, without that feeling of trying to push a boulder up a hill.

The good news is that I've been devoting myself whole-heartedly to my German SGD course, and I like it so much I think I'll continue even after the course is completed. I really like what I'm doing. The Sozialkunde and the BWL-related stuff is actually useful for my tiny little tutoring business. That's going pretty well, too. I have 2 new clients lined up for the summer. This time I'm teaching DAF to beginners.

I have a super-great exercise that I'm currently doing for German and I hope I can apply it to Mandarin as well!! Here it is

Start with reading aloud from a book and try to look away from what you're reading. (The goal is to focus on intonation and to not read monotone).

The second phase is to take a newspaper article and give an account of its content (Inhaltswiedergabe). It's important to try and reformulate the entire article and to use synonyms. That way, you're forced to rummage around for your own words.

This exercise is pretty advanced so for Mandarin I would definitely use one of my Chinese Breeze books. I probably won't be able to rephrase much, since my vocabulary is still very small, but I can at least pretend that I'm telling someone what the story is about. That I think I can do.
1 person has voted this message useful



Silbermond
Diglot
Groupie
United Kingdom
xuexisprachen.wordprRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4144 days ago

64 posts - 79 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Mandarin, Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 80 of 84
21 July 2014 at 6:28pm | IP Logged 
Sunja wrote:

I have a super-great exercise that I'm currently doing for German and I hope I can
apply it to Mandarin as well!! Here it is

Start with reading aloud from a book and try to look away from what you're reading.
(The goal is to focus on intonation and to not read monotone).

The second phase is to take a newspaper article and give an account of its content
(Inhaltswiedergabe). It's important to try and reformulate the entire article and to
use synonyms. That way, you're forced to rummage around for your own words.


These are both such useful exercises - I'm definitely going to start using the first
one to make myself sound a little more natural, haha! And well done with your tutoring
business; that's so cool :D


1 person has voted this message useful



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