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Smb’s Spanish & Mandarin Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| smb Newbie United States Joined 3394 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 1 of 7 17 January 2015 at 6:18am | IP Logged |
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Hello! I'm a long time lurker on the forum and decided now would be a good time to start a log. One of my goals
for this year is to improve upon one of my languages (Spanish) and learn a new one (Mandarin). I studied Spanish in high school, college, and spent a few weeks in Spain during one summer. But since I graduated from college a few years ago it has fallen to the wayside. I'm currently teaching in a high school school with a Hispanic population of around 35% and so I hear Spanish all the time. This gives me good reason to improve my speaking and get back to a reasonable level. As for Mandarin, I've always been fascinated by chinese characters and I want a language that is going to challenge me. I don't have many goals right now for Mandarin except learn the basics and see where that leads me. I hope that this log forces me to keep up with my studying and gives me some sort of organized way of tracking my progress. Wish me luck! Edited by smb on 17 January 2015 at 6:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| smb Newbie United States Joined 3394 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 2 of 7 17 January 2015 at 6:23am | IP Logged |
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I have many resources for both languages and I would like to keep them all in one place. As I get more
books or find links online, I hope to put them here for my reference. Spanish Practice Makes Perfect: Complete Spanish Grammar Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Vocabulary The Big Red Book of Spanish Vocabulary Cassell's Colloquial Spanish Manual de gramática A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish Using Spanish: A Guide to Contemporary Usage Using Spanish: Vocabulary Mandarin FSI Chinese Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar: A Practical Guide & Workbook New Practical Chinese Reader: Textbooks 1-4 & CDs The Chinese Language: Its History and Current Usage Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters Reading & Writing Chinese Simplified Character Edition Edited by smb on 20 January 2015 at 12:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| smb Newbie United States Joined 3394 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 3 of 7 18 January 2015 at 10:33pm | IP Logged |
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So not too much to report at this time. I need to think about how to work my study routine in to my daily life. But
I'm not too concerned with how many hours I log or how many pages I read. I'll just go about what I feel is good enough for me. I was watching some YouTube videos on Mandarin pronunciation and boy are those tones gonna be interesting. I was practicing with the University of Texas site and got a bunch wrong. But that's to be expected early on. It'll get better! I'm also gonna work on listing my resources. Eventually I want to put a bunch of links too. How do I put the hyperlinks here? Edited by smb on 18 January 2015 at 11:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5655 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 4 of 7 19 January 2015 at 9:30am | IP Logged |
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You'll have to wait until you've got a few more posts before the forum will let you use the URL tags, but for now i think you can type them in without the URL tags (the word URL between brackets: [ ]).
For tones, i highly recommend you go through the first units of FSI. That will help you a ton with your pronunciation and your tones. For example, a lot of the foreigners here don't distinguish between the x and sh sounds (the FSI course gives a pretty good description of how each one should be pronounced). If you overdo it a lot in the beginning, i think your pronunciation will sound much more natural later on. I'm starting to get lazy again and could probably use the practice again. Anyway, good luck! If you have any questions i'll be happy to answer, Spanish and Mandarin are my two main languages. I highly recommend getting started on learning to read characters now or as soon as possible, even if it's only learning 4 or 5 every day. That's probably going to be the longest part of your journey. Learning to write the characters isn't as useful early on in my opinion, it's much easier when you have a good grasp of the characters and radicals anyway. If you're interested in that, however, by all means go for it! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| smb Newbie United States Joined 3394 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 5 of 7 22 January 2015 at 4:38am | IP Logged |
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Thanks Crush! I will eagerly be following your progress this year and won't hesitate to ask questions. I have
downloaded the entire FSI course so I will begin that soon. There are so many resources out there for listening to and practicing times that I won't be lacking for that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5655 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 6 of 7 22 January 2015 at 4:50am | IP Logged |
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FSI for Spanish (or more specifically, Platiquemos) in my opinion is one of the best/most comprehensive courses ever made and i highly recommend it. That course alone (if you do it intensively) will get you speaking and communicating in Spanish. Your vocab will still be a little lacking, but your grammar will be spot on.
FSI for Mandarin is another story. It's still a good course and will teach you a lot, but it can be awfully (painfully) boring at times, teach you outdated words, etc. Also, the nature of Chinese means you'll likely be spending the majority of your time studying vocabulary as the grammar, especially for an English speaker, is relatively straightforward. It's kinda interesting really how similar the two are in word order and even phrasal verbs， eg. to write down = 写下 (lit. write+down), to go up = 上去 (lit. up+go), to take away = 拿走 （lit. take+(go) away), etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| smb Newbie United States Joined 3394 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 7 of 7 23 January 2015 at 1:20am | IP Logged |
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I'm planning on using NPCR as my main resource for Mandarin but I want to on use FSI too, especially with
the tones. As for Spanish, my biggest thing is picking up vocab. I'm pretty good with the grammar, although I need to buckle down on some of the trickier aspects, and I want to read more native materials to help with that. Edited by smb on 23 January 2015 at 1:21am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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