Inst HSK6 completion and beyond

[Inst]

In other news, dragged out my copy of Le Petit Robert. I may talk a big deal about the importance of focusing on languages, but it's not that I don't have interests in French, German, and Japanese. I just don't think it's profitable to be a dilettante in these languages (French goal, 10,000 words, German goal, 10,000 words, Japanese goal, 20,000 words). The same pronunciation/vocabulary bombing techniques will be seen as well in the target languages.

[Inst]

Doing English, surprisingly enough. I'm hand-compiling a Diceware 6^6 setup, and it's fun going through the dictionary to find out the words I know, the words I should know, and the words I don't know. Unfortunately, just to get 6^5, this is taking longer than a single day.

[Sparverius]

I like your ambition. I simply lost patience with drilling vocab just in terms of HSK, mostly because I didn't really have time to properly implement or contextualize the words I was being exposed to. My big pushes are now towards being able to read at any reasonable speed, with the hopes of thus improving my ability to find comprehensible input that's actually helpful, and getting a larger written vocabulary and learning highly relevant vocabulary that's been missing from my studies so far.

You mention not wanting to be a dilettante with regards to other languages, is that more in the short term or do you think it's unrealistic to look beyond Chinese at this point in time? What's the draw of language learning for you specifically?

[Inst]

It's less ambition and more necessity. The States just isn't working out for me, so in a very American way, I'm looking to emigrate.

In your case, once again, I strongly discourage people from picking up Chinese unless they have good reasons to. I mean, unless you have a Chinese spouse, you have professional need to learn Chinese (expat, sinologist), you're at an age where languages come easily (pre-pubescent), or you can put up with 10 years of minimal progress, it's not worth learning. But if you're A2+, you're HSK 3/4, and if you polish your comprehension at that level you're roughly at the possibly apocryphal level of an immigrant to France who can make do with 1200 or so French words.

As for language learning; my main goal is to broaden my horizons. I feel like I'm at the limit of the Anglosphere; information in English simply isn't interesting or novel anymore. I.e, I'd like to be able to get into Chinese intellectual life (that's what 读书 is for), as well as French intellectual life, German, etc. That's why being a dilettante isn't useful or desirable for me; if I can't say, read the philosophical works of the Kyoto School, why should I bother with Japanese when translations and Japanology is of sufficient quality?

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As for myself, the Diceware experiment feels like a failure. It turns out, if I use 6^4 3 letter words and acronyms, I can have a much easier time remembering a 13 word passphrase than go through the effort of collating 6^6 words for a 9 word passphrase. Moreover, the 13 word passphrase comes out to about 39 characters. The 9 word passphrase comes out to 63 characters. And going back to my old 3 die system for 95 radix pass generation only requires 20 letters to reach 128 bits of characters.

But it is an interesting experiment to go through the word lists in English, and I think it's a nice placeholder for what'll end up being an attempt to go through word lists in Chinese later on.

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And progress is slower than I'd like. I'm halfway through reviewing the words in the HSK 3 book; I plan to have the word review done by the end of the day, then go to the 上 section of the HSK 4 book. Then it's grammar review, secondary review, etc, with some review of the HSK 6 下 book jammed in.

Funny thing is, going through the HSK 6 下 book, it feels as though I already know the vocabulary associated with all of the HSK textbooks. I've just had the misfortune to forget a lot of the words as well as how to write it, so it's progress.

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In other intellectual pursuits, half-finished Mishima's "Sun and Steel" in translation. I'm thinking about making another attempt on Saussure's Course in General Linguistics when I have that done. There's still the King James Bible in original orthography on the desk and a copy of the Holy Quran in translation sitting in a box somewhere. And Eichmann in Jerusalem is collecting dust on my bed.

[Inst]

@Sparverius: I'll also admit something hideous. I agree that writing Chinese over and over again is a horrible practice, but you know what? A lot of Chinese learners actually begin to enjoy the repetition and the act of creating Chinese characters on paper. That's why I honestly spend so much time copying Chinese words over and over again on paper, because I enjoy it, even when it gets ridiculously taxing

[Sparverius]

I must admit that I'm a little surprised given what you've said that of all the places to emigrate you'd choose one with such a difficult language to master, but it makes enough sense especially since there are most likely other cultural circumstances leading you to choose Chinese.

I think my approach to languages is similar, in that I'll always feel frustrated if my languages aren't at a point at which I can really get the most out of them, but I must admit that I still get a lot of pleasure out of material in English, if less the language than the content. That said, I think I get more enjoyment out of the process of learning the language and discovering the different materials and further avenues that are available each time I make some step forward than I do out of the specific materials themselves-- for instance, I'd very much like to learn Russian at some point (very much not a priority), and largely because of the wealth of Russian literature, but I don't think I'd see it as a pointless endeavor if all of the relevant or interesting works were translated well into English. Just an approach difference.

With regards to my learning Chinese, I didn't really pick it up for a concrete reason. I thought it was an interesting language and there are people in my life with whom I might not be able to interact to any very meaningful degree without knowing Mandarin, but not enough to really make that enough motivation in and of itself. I think the language itself is fascinating, and there's a lot to learn from Chinese history, culture, and literature, and as of now that's been enough to keep me going. While I certainly wouldn't advise it as a first language for someone to pick up, I think learning it is made out to be much more daunting of a task than it really is in many cases (the biggest real stumbling block is characters, and you can get away without them if you just want to talk, not that I condone that). Though language learning in general is often trivialized insofar as the general perception is that you can just take a few classes in college and then magically speak a language without a lot of intense study on your own, Chinese certainly doesn't suffer from this in any unique way. If someone enjoyed the process of learning and had the dedication and motivation to stick through until it starts making sense and you can get more out of it, which can be done relatively quickly if you know what you're doing, I think it has enough to offer a lot of people whether they have a concrete reason to study the language or not.

And lastly, I think my personal issue was just lack of motivation to really drill HSK words properly out of context, whether that was going slowly enough to really commit them to memory in context or lack of time to expose myself to them both in a list of words and in native material. My current approach is more "throw enough language at my brain and it'll stick", though this is largely due to a lack of the discipline it would take to have a more structured method.

[Inst]

HSK 4 readers (not that I use them)

https://www.amazon.com/Graded-Chinese-R ... 1980723699

https://www.amazon.com/Graded-Chinese-R ... oks&sr=1-2

Problem is, if you really want to read, you need HSK 5 (high score) or HSK 6. I'm at the HSK 5-6 level right now, and I'm still reading laboriously. So it's possible just to skip the characters and focus on the 口语 oral language as opposed to the written language.

So, I went to dinner today and I got through HSK 3 12-16 and parts of HSK 4 1. Planning to finish HSK 3 17-20 and HSK 4 上 today or tomorrow.

The deadline for the HSK 4 workbook is Friday, when what I really want to do is to review HSK 6 下 words and characters.

But on the other hand, Chinese is a big mountain that exercises one's language learning abilities; the implication is that if I finish Chinese, I can cover (do a pass) on 10,000 French words in 2 weeks. Le Petit Robert is kind enough to have IPA pronunciation with everything, not that I'd expect fluency or anything resembling that with only a 2 weeks pass.

[Inst]

Ugh, I'm really moving too slowly for my satisfaction. I was supposed to have finished the HSK 4 lower level today, and I didn't. And the self-imposed deadline I set for myself was Friday, when the plan was to spend 4 days on the vocabulary of a target level, then some more time reviewing. I guess extending to 10 days instead of 7 days might work better given the grammar and usage notes I have to cover. So test date is going to be Monday instead.

[Inst]

Think I'm going to have to add another 4 days to this, i.e, Tuesday, so I can have more mastery of grammar points and more review of characters, as well as dipping into HSK 5 material review.

[Inst]

And, I'm delaying it to Thursday, although I'll also add in the first half of HSK 5 to this section.

Still, the estimate was 10 weeks from late April. That'd be what, the end of June? Sigh, things take way too long.