劳伦的博客 - Epistolia Laurentii

[lorinth]

ZH

Interesting video in Chinese about shadowing on Youtube. You coul nitpick and say it's not actually "shadowing" in the proper sense of the term (see Shadowing in Wikia), but it's interesting anyway.

If you don't understand Chinese, jump to 5'05'' to see how the guy goes about it:
1. Listen sentence by sentence and repeat sentence by sentence, all while reading the transcript
2. Say the text at the same time as it is spoken, while reading the transcript
3. Listen sentence by sentence and repeat sentence by sentence, without the transcript
4. Say the text at the same time as it is spoken, without the transcript

BTW, I *don't* understand much of that video, though of course the gist is clear - so I've started transcribing it to see where I can bring my comprehension level.

In other news, I'm totally fascinated by De Francis' book. I believe it's one of the best text books I've ever seen. I'm still reading about 1 lesson/day, though that pace will be hard to sustain as lessons grow longer and longer and, obviously, harder and harder.

I'm still listening to the podcasts corresponding to each lesson. AFAICT the Chinese is not dumbed down at all, though there are pauses when the student is supposed to take over. More and more often, I find myself not just listening passively, but also repeating, shadowing, etc.

Had I more time in my busy days, I'd certainly start using the book more thoroughly, also for writing.

Ah, I've installed HelloTalk and I've had more interactions in Chinese in the past 4 days than in the past 6 months. Or 2 years. The "talking" part is not as useful as it could be. I used it alright, but the sound quality is so so - might be a problem with my phone rather than with HelloTalk. On the other hand, I found more language partners than I could ever chat with, and I had a number of interesting exchanges. We'll see if the interest can be sustained in the long run.

[rdearman]

In other news, I'm totally fascinated by De Francis' book.

What is this book? Do you have an ISBN number or something? Sounds like you're doing well. I found HelloChat was brilliant for Chinese speakers, not so much for everyone else, and all my dialogues were short. Although that might be because me level is low.

[lorinth]

Hello rdearman,

There's a Wikipedia article about DeFrancis.

In the 1960s, he wrote a Chinese textbook series divided in 3 levels: beginner (composed of a textbook with pinyin [? I don't own it], a textbook in characters and two readers), intermediate (same 4 books), advanced (3 books because there's only one reader). The entire series includes about 4000 pages, of which at least 80-85% is pure Chinese dialogues and narratives. There are lots and lots of repetitions of every word and characters in meaningful combinations. A kind of natural but carefully thought-out SRS.

There are long repetitive drills providing a thousand variations on a pattern sentence. Some may find that boring.

The language in the books is slightly out of fashion, but not too much as far as I can tell.

The books mainly use traditional characters. I use them as readers to familiarize myself with traditional characters. But they also introduce simplified characters.

I also like the look, the bare layout of these books: all black and white, very few pictures. Text. Text. TEXT. And guess what: everything is handwritten. Which is not only useful as an introduction to Chinese handwriting but also simply beautiful.

The corresponding audio files are available for free - great resource for extensive listening.

The books are still available (Yale University Press has the beginner level; it seems Amazon has everything) but, unfortunately, quite expensive, let alone if you want the whole shebang.

I happen to own 2 of the 11 books. They were given to me by someone who'd stopped studying Chinese.

[rdearman]

Cheers! Thanks!

[Snow]

If possible, can you post a sample page or two?

[mminer]

I second the request for a couple pages. They sound like they would be my kind of thing. Are they similar at all to how Orberg deals with Latin, sort of building up as the books progress in a very natural fashion?

[lorinth]

I'll do it as soon as I understand how to upload pdf files. I always get a message saying that my pdf attachments have a "bad extension"

[lorinth]

Hi snow and mminer, as requested here are a few scans.

The first one is the standard first page for each lesson: characters first! Then words. Then words in action. Just like the French texbook I used back when I started Chinese (Joël Bellassen's so-called "Little yellow book").

The second scan is the beginning of the dialogue. The third presents pattern drills.

If there wasn't a limit of 3 attachments, I'd have added a fourth scan showing the multimedia part (just joking - it's a nice black and white drawing as an illustration) and a fifth showing even more tightly packed text in the review part.

There are two more things I'd like to add about those books.

I said that the language may be a bit out-of-date, though I don't know enough Chinese to judge. It's not only the language, it's the general cultural background of the dialogues, e.g. people often seem to be overly polite, or women are considered as you might expect they were back in the days (good cooks, with assorted compliments about their good looks).

Second, in my comments I laid a heavy emphasis on the fact that there's a lot of text to read, hundreds of pages of it. But don't forget that there's over 20 hours of purely Chinese audio only for "Character text for beginning Chinese", and over 15 hours for "Beginning Chinese Reader", which is quite a lot of free basic Chinese. I haven't checked yet, but I hope there's the same quantity of audio for both the intermediate and the advanced levels.

[winterpromise31]

I'm using the Beginning Chinese and Beginning Chinese Reader texts. So far I love them! I have gotten a few lang-8 corrections showing more modern use of terms, but overall I think it's a fantastic resource. The repetition is really helping me. So here's another vote for DeFrancis' materials!

[Snow]

Thanks, lorinth. I hope it wasn't too much trouble for you.

Are you a complete beginner, winterpromise31?