Being taught Chinese for my job. How to make the most of it?

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Axon
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Re: Being taught Chinese for my job. How to make the most of it?

Postby Axon » Mon Jul 26, 2021 5:24 pm

It's wonderful to read your updates! You're putting in lots of hard work and it's clearly paying off fast. Keep it up!
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Re: Being taught Chinese for my job. How to make the most of it?

Postby adabaf » Fri Apr 15, 2022 5:05 am

Well, it's somehow already been over a year (15 months!) since I started learning Mandarin. I missed my last three-monthly check-in by a wide margin. Oops. Happy belated new year, everyone. I have about five months to go.

Stressing that I haven't taken any of the exams officially, I would self-assess as around HSK 5.5, 左右, but with a slightly warped vocabulary. For example, I got 多元化,措施 and 核电站, but missed 地毯. I also feel I avoid using more complex sentence structures/grammar, partially because of a lack of comfort/automatisation and partially becase these complex sentence structures/grammar are themselves more formal, so saying them out of context makes you look like a bit of a weirdo.

We're not exclusively going through HSK material anymore, but every couple of days my teacher will print out one of the HSK5 textbook articles and we'll read through it - it's usually a few of the more literary words that I struggle with, but I'm satisfied with my comprehension.

There's some old adage that you first have to forget something seven times before remembering it on the eighth. That's probably true. I find remembering the low-frequency words pretty troublesome, as I feel I'm at the stage where I can say most things in a simple way, and have to put in more effort to say something in a more formal/complex way. As my teachers say, though, it's true that most normal conversation, in the street or in the office, is done in relatively basic Mandarin. It's when you need to listen to a relevant news report or read a technical document that it gets frustrating.

My natural tendencies are towards laziness. I occasionally consume Chinese-language content outside of class (other than the obvious daily things - navigation, food & drink, chatter with strangers now and then), but the last thing I want to do after five hours of Chinese is sit down and read/listen to more content.

I've stopped doing Anki entirely. I think the 'uhg' factor just got too high as the volume of characters kept on linearly increasing. I'd miss a day, then two, then three - and I also realised at some point I didn't stricly *need* it - even if it's helpful, I was still able to learn new words and incorporate them into my vocabulary without Anki.

As for living here, I'm still enjoying it. People are friendly, and I like cooking local food and exploring the veg markets. I'm thinking of trying to find someone willing to teach me the true wok technique. The international community in the Tier 1.5 city I'm in is very small, especially with COVID, so I've struggled somewhat to make good friends. There's actually a decent number of internationally-minded locals, but it's a hard balance to strike when it comes to making friends. Some just want the novelty of smashing beers with the laowai, which is fine, but not necessarily a fulfilling relationship. For others, it's not really worth the hassle of being friends with a foreigner... Which is partially because of growing suspicion towards those from 国外, but partially because the 意识形态 is just totally different. For example, my teachers - highly-educated, smart people - all genuinely believe the Russia-Ukraine situation was directly caused by NATO and the US, and they doubt the massacre in Bucha was committed by the Russian military. When pressed, "就是系统和立场不一样“ - you can say that again. They draw equivalence between Chinese media reporting standards and those of foreign media, and often interpret any criticism of the government as a personal insult (which is unsurprising; the Party works quite hard to present 'China' as one solid, unbreakable entity, rather than 1. a people, themselves quite diverse 2. a government and 3. a physcial country/land).

On the other hand, many people I've met are also quite critical of domestic trends like 内卷, 收入不平等 and 996 work, or of nationalist trolls online calling the women's rights movement a 'foreign plot'. I also think it's interesting how even little aspects of language like "辱华“,”我国“,”伤害中国人民的感情“ play into a broader narrative of nationalism, honour and humiliation. Anyway, I know none of this is worth getting worked up over - you're not going to be able to change any minds - but it's a little depressing to see the effectiveness of the domestic media landscape, and to know there is often this quite fundamental barrier to forming deep friendships with locals. The long-term trend for foreigners in China is uncertain - from this perspective, I can't see it getting much better for several years. The near future (1-2 years) is probably going to hold a *lot* of mafan in terms of COVID, as China goes through what the rest of the world is just now wrapping up.

That got a bit long. Some days it's easy to get a little pessimistic about the big picture, but on balance life here is still pretty good - certainly, I live in luxury compared to the average resident of my city, and the eventual work will be interesting.

I could probably hang out near the local university more, but the campus has been locked down to students-only since COVID. Maybe I'm reaching a tipping point where my Chinese is getting good enough that it's not too much of a hassle for locals to talk to me, so that fundamental barrier is lower. I think I need to find more people interested in camping, hiking, rock climbing - that sort of thing. It's easy to go too long without nature here.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.
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Re: Being taught Chinese for my job. How to make the most of it?

Postby wheresmycookie » Fri Apr 15, 2022 5:09 pm

adabaf wrote:Back again. Hard to believe it's already been five months since I last posted, and almost six months total Mandarin learning - making me about a third of the way through the entire training.

I'm pretty happy with my overall progress, but you really can't spend too much time looking at how far you have to go, else you'll just lose steam. I'm about halfway through HSK4, halfway through NPCR3 and about 100 recordings into Chinese Pod's Intermediate level. I would guesstimate my character recognition at about 1200-1500 and words at 1500-2000 (we spend about 30-40% of class time not doing any textbook/material, rather just speaking, discussing news etc so I probably know more words than is normal at this HSK level, for example).

I'm satisfied with my fluency, tones and pronunciation - but that's always been my strong suit when it comes to languages. I don't deal that well yet with particularly formal settings at this point - that is, we've been working on how to 'professionally' introduce oneself (个人陈述) with all these shortened, information-packed words and I'm still pretty slow/inept at that. But when chatting to Chinese people at parties, events etc I can usually converse pretty well, and they're usually surprised to hear I'm only six months in (that said, I'm cautious not to let the opinions of people I briefly speak to colour my own impression of my Chinese -- the bar here is fairly low; just a few words and "哦你中文说得非常好").

I feel like I've reached a plateau, or at least the stage where you stop making gains that are noticeable on a day-to-day basis. Mostly my daily frustrations are around Chinese 'logic' and grammar, which both still feel pretty alien. I appreciate that the grammar is actually quite clear, but even when I think I've said/written something with Chinese 'logic', it usually still turns out to be only partially right most of the time. I think I need to listen to/read more 'proper' Chinese speech (ie in books, TV shows and movies).

I hit a wall with Anki from too many reviews. I would just find ways to avoid doing it every day - which isn't how it should be. I'm building back up to it now, but I've taken about... six weeks 'off'. It's having a noticeable effect on my character recognition/ability to digest and rapidly learn new characters.

Character recognition is pretty good. But recall for words while speaking beyond what's comfortable is still lacking. i.e. I can recognise all these exciting adjectives, verbs and nouns that add colour and texture to your sentences, but actually using them is another thing entirely. I'm realising Chengyu are very valuable to learn; they really have an outsize impact and give you a window into many aspects of Chinese culture. People here also seem to find them very impressive (when deployed correctly).

Last month I did a short exam for my company to track my progress - the first of three. They were very satisfied with tones, accent and fluency but there were some gaps in official habits (i.e. too casual) and missing technical words. My company would usually train people in my home country, then send them to China - I'm doing it entirely in China, which I believe works out quite strongly in my favour. But still, things to watch out for.

Anyway, that's what's on my mind lately.


Cool to read about your progress. I've been taking private Mandarin lessons for about 9 months now, although definitely not nearly as immersive (2 hours per week for me). I also do find that words pop back into my head even after I've forgotten about them for awhile, which is cool. I'm trying to build my vocabulary at the moment, which mainly consists of writing about 10 new works on a notecard every day or two and leaving it on my desk while I work - but I feel like at this rate it'll take years to learn all of the words I need to be comfortable. Do you have any routines that you've developed for yourself on the vocabulary-building front that you've found to be effective?
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Axon
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Re: Being taught Chinese for my job. How to make the most of it?

Postby Axon » Fri Apr 15, 2022 11:58 pm

Another wonderful update. I burned out on Anki for Chinese long ago, but for the last few weeks I've been using the SRS in Pleco, which doesn't hit you with any big numbers about cards waiting for you. I like that a lot, and even if I skip a few days and do it halfheartedly, I can feel my vocabulary growing rapidly.

How do you feel about the effectiveness of your training in terms of learning to perform your job in Chinese?
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Re: Being taught Chinese for my job. How to make the most of it?

Postby wheresmycookie » Mon Apr 18, 2022 3:36 am

Axon wrote:Another wonderful update. I burned out on Anki for Chinese long ago, but for the last few weeks I've been using the SRS in Pleco, which doesn't hit you with any big numbers about cards waiting for you. I like that a lot, and even if I skip a few days and do it halfheartedly, I can feel my vocabulary growing rapidly.

How do you feel about the effectiveness of your training in terms of learning to perform your job in Chinese?


I've had Pleco on my phone for about 6 months now but haven't made much use of it, but admittedly haven't tried any of the add-ons yet. I should give SRS a try!
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Re: Being taught Chinese for my job. How to make the most of it?

Postby kelvin921019 » Wed Apr 27, 2022 2:52 am

adabaf wrote:On the other hand, many people I've met are also quite critical of domestic trends like 内卷, 收入不平等 and 996 work, or of nationalist trolls online calling the women's rights movement a 'foreign plot'. I also think it's interesting how even little aspects of language like "辱华“,”我国“,”伤害中国人民的感情“ play into a broader narrative of nationalism, honour and humiliation.


I can tell you have reached mastery of this language :lol: :lol:
Recommended reading for your level: Weibo comment section :lol:
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Re: Being taught Chinese for my job. How to make the most of it?

Postby Dr Mack Rettosy » Thu Apr 28, 2022 5:42 pm

Really inspiring stuff OP! Not going to lie, I envy your opportunity lol! But you have made really good use of it and appreciate you sharing your experiences. Having started my Mandarin studies around the same time, and seeing your incredible progress, I feel now is the time to start using the language beyond reading and listening media. I think you have given me the kick start I need to start talking to people.
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