Inst HSK6 completion and beyond

[MorkTheFiddle]

But, there's a politician strolling down an aircraft carrier (航母) now.

I have no idea what this expression really means, but I like the image it gives.

[MorkTheFiddle]

What you are doing is very impressive. Keep up the good work.

[Inst]

What you are doing is very impressive. Keep up the good work.

Thanks, but this is untrue. I've heard of Germans passing HSK6 in 12 months of part-time study.

As for actual progress, I did a secondary review of HSK5 1-9, as well as vocabulary-only review of HSK6 1-10. I did a vocabulary-only review (I guess that counts more as preview) of HSK5 10-15 and 19-21, and I'm hoping to do a vocabulary-only review of HSK5 16-18 and 19-27.

One thing I've been thinking of is to do a full review of HSK5 and the first textbook of HSK6 in 2 weeks. Not sure if I can make the target, given that there's a lot of other stuff I want to do. And then there's the issue of ancillary review as well as beginning to dictionarize HSK1-4 with my spreadsheet.

And well, "中国乡土" has still not been read in the original.

[Inst]

Taking longer than expected. One reason I chose the 2 week point was because I anticipated this type of delay, wherein 1 week might not give me the originally desired HSK 5 full review.

The big problem that's shown up is that I don't have good recall on much of the HSK 5 material beyond the first half of HSK 5 上.

This means that by the end of the two weeks, I might only have a cursory review of HSK 5 without the review of 6 上. But as mentioned before, the "failure" is more graceful as I can at least get the HSK 5 material reviewed in these two weeks. In practice, the problem with the process means that the "copy words 4 times during vocabulary review and 2 times during full review" isn't working out and I'll have to do 4 times during full review AND do another set of reviews as the words aren't jamming themselves in.

HSK 5 vocabulary only review is done excepting chapters 28-30. I want to make sure I get the HSK 6 上 fully reviewed. I also did HSK 6 chapters 11-12 for a vocabulary only review; I'll try to get the remaining 360 words in HSK 6 上 finished soon, but I'd rather focus on making sure that I have finished full reviews of HSK 5 by the end of the specified span.

As far as self-assessment goes, I've failed to do the comprehensive and repeated reviews of HSK 1-4, but I think at the end of the day the sensation of being "stuck" is the biggest problem and I'd rather have "good" comprehension of HSK 6 material than "perfect" comprehension of HSK 1-4 material. It looks like work might take up to the end of August just to meet this minimum baseline, which is a deep annoyance.

[Inst]

https://www.amazon.com/HSK-Standard-Cou ... 7561937091

This is the standard Hanban (runs the HSK exams) series and the series I'm familiar with.

The biggest flaws with the series is that it's not usually complete with word lists (there's a substantial inventory missing in HSK 4, 5, and 6) and misses some crucial grammar points (how to diagram a sentence).

https://www.amazon.com/PRACTICAL-CHINES ... 7561921632

This is from roughly the same people (BCLU iirc), and covers the grammar more in detail.

I assume you're not a heritage learner, so you'll have more problems with pronunciation and listening. Tones is what usually trips up Chinese learners, but strict pronunciation is also a hassle. The Hanban HSK 1 books are kind enough to include mouth diagrams (shown from the inside) to help with Chinese pronunciation, especially since retroflex initials aren't common in other languages. u umlaut doesn't exist in English, but it does exist in French and German, so not sure how well you might do with that as you're a native Italian. c (ts), z, and s also vary from their English as these are pronounced at the teeth (between English th and s).

Tones is just, practice, practice, practice, use tapes and repeat what they've said and see if you can simulate their tones. Treating it as do re fa so la is another way to handle it, and ironically, my first tone maps to la (I have decent relative pitch and am training absolute pitch).

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Since Chinese will roughly take most learners 4k hours to hit C1 (HSK6), it might be correct to figure out when to put it back on your back burner. HSK1-3 is insufficient for oral speech, and mastering HSK 4 will get you to the oral speech level. At some point, you'll want to switch to learning characters in detail, although this is more useful past HSK 4.

This means you'll have to learn Kangxi and Xinhua radicals.

Kangxi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical

Xinhua:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_ ... Components

This comes to another flaw of the Hanban system. By treating words as the basis of instruction, you're ignoring characters, which function as morphemes. While character to word mapping is not absolute (偶象, ou1 xiang4 is not random, seldom image, it's idol), the morpheme composition often provides a vital clue and memorization aid to the word itself. I've heard once that for German, you only need 10,000 root words to get through the majority of any written text, and while Chinese isn't going to be that way, knowing characters helps a lot in other ways (knowing how to pronounce unfamiliar words).

A final aid in Chinese characters would be John DeFrancis' "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" which helps break down a lot of preconceptions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chine ... nd_Fantasy

The most useful takeaway is that Chinese characters are often phonetic-semantic compounds, i.e, part of the character indicates an approximate sound (sometimes giving you the pronunciation minus tone, often just giving you an initial or final), part of the character indicates the specific meaning.

[MorkTheFiddle]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chine ... nd_Fantasy

I don't think this link goes where you intended it to

[Inst]

So, it's Monday, and I have to report where things are behind. First, I'm still not done with the HSK 5 textbook, and the reviews are still rather cursory (needs repeats). But I am down to the last 3 chapters. Second, I just finished studying the vocabulary of HSK 6 chapter 13, but I think by the end of the week I should have all of HSK 6 vocabulary reviewed.

Today's goals are to finish reviewing the HSK 5 textbooks, then begin reviewing the HSK 6 textbooks in-depth.

[Inst]

Finished reviewing HSK 6 1-10, finished HSK 5 textbook, but needs further reviews. I don't think I can do the entirety of HSK 6 in 1 week, unfortunately. I'm going to use tomorrow as a rest day, and then go over reviewing the latter half of the HSK 5 textbook again.

[Inst]

Still alive, currently finishing a review of HSK 5 (upper level). Planning to get HSK 6 1-10 reviewed today as well.

Looks like I'm still behind schedule.

For entertainment purposes, it seems that everyone who learns Chinese to a reasonably high level wants to become a language teacher or at least provide a language course for Chinese. I'm still fundamentals-intensive and drew up a description (bad) of a proposed Chinese language course focusing on fundamentals.

The most important thing I think is being missed is that Chinese can't be learnt in "conventional" (osmotic) ways, i.e, it requires dedicated study to overcome the pronunciation / listening barrier (tones, pronunciation). Then effort has to be focused on grammar, and then orthography. This is far different than classic osmotic / praxis language learning where the goal is to synthesize fundamental and practical knowledge immediately.

I'm wondering if an 8 month course (1-2 months pronunciation / listening, 1-2 months grammar, 2-4 months characters as morphemes) using about 240-480 hours might be enough to get learners past the "hump" of Chinese and, as the mathematician joke goes (https://books.google.com/books?id=dzC17 ... ed&f=false ), reduce it to a previously solved problem (French, German, Cat 1 languages).