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Mandarin L-R: Four Questions | ||
Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Ascendant Newbie United States Joined 3659 days ago 2 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 4 22 April 2014 at 6:37pm | IP Logged |
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Hi all,
I've been studying Mandarin for a few months and am considering a full-scale LR assault in a couple of months when I anticipate having 2-3 weeks off. My current status is that I've learned approximately 2000 words in Mandarin (using the SRS MCD method with a number of sources), have learned about 1700 characters using Heisig's method, and have obtained 50 hours of speaking practice via iTalki. By the time I engage in LR, I will have learned 2000+ more words (for a total of 4000+), all of the characters in Heisig (3000), and will have gotten 100 more hours of speaking practice (total 150). My reading comprehension and basic conversational capability is not bad, but I have quite low listening comprehension otherwise. Question 1: Given that information, is it conceivable that 140-200 hours of LR, for 10+ hours a day, will enhance my listening comprehension to the extent that I can understand TV shows and radio broadcasts and the like? The ability to read novels and other books would be a huge bonus, but I'm primarily going for listening comprehension here. I have the time, I have the focus; I just need to make sure I'm not wasting that time. Question 2: Has anyone done LR for Mandarin or Cantonese, and have you gotten anywhere with it? Question 3:I've read aYa's detailed page (http://learnlangs.com/Listening-Reading_important_passages. htm) on the LR methodology and have been left somewhat confused. I understand the basic steps (1. Read L1; 2. Read L2, listen L2; 3. Read L1, listen L2. I also get that I should have 40-70 hours of material and that it should be repeated 2-3 times. I even understand that it's better to progress from simple to complex texts. What I don't get is why there seem to be completely different versions, including: v1: Read sentence/paragraph in L1, listen L2+read L2 sentence/paragraph, listen L2+read L1 sentence/paragraph; repeat steps 2 and 3 2-3 times. aYa apparently used this process for Japanese. v2: Same as above, except with additional listen L2+read L2 step at the end. v3: Read whole book in L1, listen+read to whole book in L2, listen L2+read L1 to whole book; repeat 3 times. Which of these have you all had more success with? Seems like v1 would be most effective, since you could more effectively remember the L1 meaning and apply it to L2; but I've seen a number of people advocate v3. I don't see how v3 could be effective at all, since unless you have a photographic memory you won't remember the exact content of the book enough to associate it to the recording. The audio would then seem like meaningless babble in step 2. Last Question: I've read a lot about how the closeness of the translation is quite important. How, exactly, can this be evaluated before one is capable of fluent reading and translation? Edited by Ascendant on 22 April 2014 at 7:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6699 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 4 22 April 2014 at 8:45pm | IP Logged |
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v1 seems too time-consuming, and not too different from putting all the sentences into an SRS system (I have vague memories of such a post).
v2 - see above. v3 is closest to how I interpreted the method, and definitely the version more focused on getting the big picture and letting the fog clear with each additional step. In the original thread, I think it was Iversen who asked how one could/should be able to remember what happened on page X in Anna Karenina. Of course, tiny details from a large tome would be impossible to bring back to life. What I've tried is closest to v3, i.e. I skipped the first "read the whole book in L1", and immediately listened to L2 and read L1, and finally L2-L2 (once). I've done this with two books, in a language I already knew. The more you know of the story beforehand, the language and the writing system, the more beneficial it will be. I know that I did a couple of L-R rounds with The Little Prince in Mandarin, and it just didn't work, despite being a lot shorter than the Dan Brown novels. Hopefully other forum members e.g. Volte will chime in. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| hobom Triglot Newbie Joined 4007 days ago 33 posts - 61 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 4 05 May 2014 at 1:17pm | IP Logged |
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First question: Before you even ask this, you need to determine if it is even conceivable that you are able to focus 10 hours a day on L-R. That is the hard part. Precisely because apparently most people are not able to accomplish this (including me) you will probably not get an answer (at least when it comes to Mandarin)
Second question: I did it a while back. At that time I was nowhere near your current level, so my experience my not apply to you. What I did was to skip step 1 and step 2 of V3 and start with step 3 right away. I only had a hard copy of an original Chinese book in translation and started just listening to the recording in Chinese. That was basically a waste of time. I was not able to match a lot of words in the translation to the recording, except the names. Afterwards I inserted the Mandarin text in an annotation tool to give me the pronunciation. I tried to work with that, but I found that having to constantly shift my attention from my translation to my computer screen trying to find the matching parts while listening to the recording was extremely energy consuming. In my experience L-R can be an extremely powerful method if you are able to focus on the recording and recognize matching phrases. Your best bet is a parallel text. 3: There is no need for you to do step 1 and 2 in my opinion. You are already familiar with the sounds of Chinese, furthermore I find that having read the book beforehand in your L1 makes it somewhat boring. Aya used this method in the beginning for Japanese if I recall correctly. 4: This is extremely easy. Just take a few sample sentences, get a pop up dictionary like Perapera and compare the sentences. Due to Mandarin's comparatively simple grammar you dont need to know a lot about possible sentence structures. As with everything, you should not think about the optimal method or approach too much and just dive into L-R. You will quickly find out what works for you and what does not. To give you an example: I have found that it is extremely hard to remember Mandarin words just from hearing them once or twice. In a quick recording I am unable to recognize their tone, plus Mandarin words sound extremely similar to each other. When you hear a word like shi ten times with five different meanings, it is hard to remember all of them. Therefore what I do now is I use a pop-up dictionary which allows you to save words right away to a wordlist which I review while taking breaks from Listening-Reading. That works very well for me. Just as that, make your own adjustments to this method. And above all, find a parallel text. Closeness of translation in my opinion is extremely important, but there are other views on this. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6229 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 4 24 May 2014 at 1:17am | IP Logged |
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I tried Mandarin LR as a proof of concept a while ago. I used "The Little Prince", and did a few hours. The first couple of hours were exhausting and I was usually lost; by the end, I was associating quite a few characters with their sounds, occasionally understanding sentences in real time as I read along (knowing what parts corresponded) of up to 7 characters or so, etc. Again, this was a small handful of hours, as an effectively zero-beginner; I know some Kanji, but my active Mandarin vocabulary was probably in the single digits... I think this was after I'd studied tones/Mandarin phonology relatively intensively, but I don't recall for certain.
I did enough Mandarin to be convinced that it would proceed pretty much within the parameters of other languages I'd used LR on that aren't close to any I speak; I didn't pursue it further. I used an English-Mandarin parallel text, with characters; I spent some time trying to get pinyin, but found the attempts were distracting, annoying, and ineffective. I would have used pinyin if I'd had it, but mouse-over popups broke my concentration too much. Question 1: Possibly some of the clearer broadcasts. Listening to colloquial speech as people whisper, shout, use slang, talk over each other and blaring background noise, possibly at telephone quality, is a surprisingly difficult skill, and merely having a large vocabulary and solid grasp of grammar does not automatically give it to you. It needs to be built up. Question 2: See above. On the whole, it wasn't as painful to start as Russian - the writing system is significantly less transparent, and there are way less cognates, but not having very simple, common words unrecognisably changed by irregular declensions helps a lot during the first couple dozen hours. Question 3: I go for the whole book. Sentence-by-sentence is a possibility, but I prefer going for a broad overview; the details are good at sorting themselves out, especially if you have some relevant declarative knowledge (of grammar in general, from skimming a grammar book about your target language, from already speaking some of your target language, etc). You don't remember the exact content of the book. I found by my second pass through a long Russian book, I'd be able to associate most of the Russian words with the relevant parts of the English translation, and have an idea of the structure (not a nuanced one, but some sense of how the words related/modified each other/etc). One detail: you generally don't L2-L2 the whole book; that gets incredibly tedious. You do it for long enough that you can associate the L2 speech and text; you get a feeling for the intonation of the language, where words and phrases end, etc. It makes the start of step 3 significantly more pleasant. The original advice was to do it for a couple of hours or until you felt like it was time to move to the next step. Last question: do you have a parallel text? If so, are huge chunks missing from either language? That'll be a bad translation to use from LR. I find translators who tend to take a lot of liberty with content often take some with structure as well. Avoiding abridged texts is also a major thing. Aside from that, you start to get a sense of how closely the texts match with practice, even if the language pair isn't that familiar - it's not perfect, but lots of little heuristics working together can do a lot. Finally, a warning: if you do intensive learning (LR or other), be prepared to keep using what you've learned for a while, or you will risk losing a distressingly large percent of it. And a note: it's a system guided by joy. If you're not enjoying it (it's hard work, but enjoyable), something needs to change in your approach, or you should consider doing something else. Good luck, and have fun. ps: Consider trying to listen to more Mandarin in the meanwhile. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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