smallwhite wrote:> Diglossia with the written language means there is very little audio w/accurate text available.
I'm just guessing here. You may have to learn to read Written Chinese sooner or later anyway so learn it now so you can use transcript that's in it?
My reading of SWC is OK. So I do use that to help me understand what is being said when I have no other source. But often the nuances of what is being said, particularly for the for more interesting Cantonese specific bits, aren't translated very well into SWC subtitles. Hence why I say "accurate text" above. When I'm trying to figure out what is REALLY being said word for word and there's a slur of 4-5 slangy syllables together, the often over simplified SWC subtitles may not help (at my level).
But honestly, that is just me being cranky. In those cases, I just skip that sentence and move on to something I can make out or have good enough text to figure out.
smallwhite wrote:> 25%... 99%...
That does not sound like a plateau to me at all.
How long are your audio clips, just the Cantonese parts, excluding music and the English parts?
The plateau is the part where each piece of new content seems to start at 25%-ish, the gain in skill is barely perceptible as a whole.
And yes, I get to 99% understanding of that one bit of content, but it feels like each new unfamiliar bit of content is still just over the horizon of understanding (and it is has felt that way for a hell of a long time.)
Most of my material has between 2 and 5 minute chapters. Right now I have roughly 4 hours of "intermediate" audio (trimmed of all music/english/vocabulary lists) from learning sources... which is pretty much most of what exists for Cantonese learning materials.
For variety I also struggle my way through YouTube vidoes with subtitles, RTHK podcasts (which have no corresponding text), and things like 鏗鏘集 which have SWC subs. This of course is a bit harder, but I like the variety.
I also started doing iTalki sessions, which is helping my conversations skills.
Honestly, I'm not really asking "what am I doing wrong, please help"... I realize the only honest answer to that is "keep going". I know that in language learning, time on task/raw volume of (mostly) comprehensible content is really the one and only "trick". My post was just a bit of venting and I was hoping to hear stories from other folks who have been in my shoes, that's all.