Mandarin: Year 4.5

[Aozu]

Finished the Monkey's Paw (猴爪). Kinda funny that I remembered the plot so well for a story I read uhhhh.... probably 30 years ago?

Anyway, I quite liked it. There were few sentences I didn't understand. It's funny to see the grammar stuff they have put in here. About the third time I saw 还给, I was all 'ok, I see they want me to notice that should be huan'.

Next one up for me in the series will be the Sixty Year Dream ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1941875041 ) - and I don't think I have ever read Rip Van Winkle so we'll see if I can follow a new story. The Chinese Breeze readers have thus far been rather confusing but I am hopeful, based on the previous two stories, that this will be all right.

[Aozu]

I should mention that it has been a while since I read a Chinese Breeze, I am sure they would be at least somewhat more comprehensible now.

Tomorrow will be my last full day of Glossika - exciting!

To assist in listening I have sort of begun a new routine with the readalong files for my Graded Chinese Readers. As I have discovered over these months (years?), I have an absolutely horrible audial memory (which irks me, as I consider myself a semi-competent musician). What I am doing now is opening up the .mp3 files that came with these books in Audacity instead of iTunes. Then, as I have been doing with the Glossika .mp3s (I really should have thought of this earlier), I play it in Audacity with my finger poised over the pause button. If, while listening along to the story, there is a sentence that didn't immediately make sense, I replay it. As many times as necessary. Which has been turning out to be a few times while looking at the pinyin, then I close my eyes and mentally picture all the words in the sentence written out while it plays a few more times. Then I move on to the next sentence.

It doesn't really take very long to reposition the cursor in Audacity and press Play, so I, again, am sort of irked I didn't think of this before. But I figure this way, especially with these 5 minute long stories (which transform into 20 minute ordeals, lawl), I will at least brute-force my ability to comprehend the speaker. I've done the first story like this three times now and by the second time I could already tell I was getting better. Third time I hardly had to stop at all.

Related, it is super annoying that I have a number of 'bad' pairs of sounds that I still can't reliably distinguish: jiang & zang, jiu & zhou, xiao & shao, rui & yue, xiang & shang, diar & dai are just some of them. And I KNOW they sound different - when I listen to them in isolation I can tell them apart very easily but for some reason when a whole sentence hits me it then I suddenly become unsure if I heard an i in there or whatever.

It just now occurs to me, thinking of my comprehension issues and speaking of music, that I've always been terrible at hearing and remembering lyrics. I have also always basically heard chords as just solid blocks of sound instead of individual notes (I have an Anki deck of recognizing chord types and the failures on that deck put my worst Chinese deck to shame). Maybe these things are all connected. Maybe somebody needs to do a study.

ANYWAY, I digress, and am really looking forward to whatever is after Glossika. Oh right, FSI.

On the HelloTalk front, I changed my icon to our cat's face instead of the awful fisheye pic I had of my smiling face. I figured a cute cat would get me even more requests. Wrong! They dropped in, like half. Maybe I'm more photogenic than I thought.

I have gotten numerous compliments on my pronunciation in the recorded self-introduction thing, I am preening a little about that. A lot of 太棒了s which I am taking as - since it is rather excessive - more complimentary than the usual slightly-over-complimentary compliments one gets speaking Chinese. I did, thinking back, speak pretty quickly during it, so I suppose it was bound to be either unintelligible or impressive. Any actual credit for my pronunciation is probably due to Glossika, as I have dutifully been endlessly reciting sentences for what seems like forever.

The conversations have been all over the place. Some people only type in English, some switch languages, some have audio, some don't, some launch right into all sorts of information about themselves, others say virtually nothing. It's a real grab bag. I did get one person who sent me this SUPER long text saying basically 'can you correct my essay for me'. I let it sit over the weekend and then sent back an audio of me reading a 'fixed' version of it. There's no way I am fiddling with my keyboard long enough to fix something that had that many mistakes, and due to the harsh regimen of Glossika I think taking down dictation would be good for this person.

[Aozu]

I need a bumper sticker, "I survived Glossika GMS". Because I'm done.

Started on July 17, added 50 sentences each day, finished on September 25 with a total of eight one-day sanity breaks.

Final thoughts on THE GLOSSIKA before I fix up my progress bars for FSI.

What Did it Do (Good Stuff)
- I am now a total champ at reading pinyin. I was already ok, but now I can read it fast and with few tone mistakes. This is not a super-valuable skill but it is a skill nonetheless.

- Drastically improved issues with 'tongue twisters'. One fairly common example that has been hard for me in the past is chū qù - or chū qù chī if you're just being downright mean. Now it is barely an issue. A sentence with an assortment of zao and zuo and zou is another thing I am much better at saying without tangling my tongue in knots.

- Speech speed in general, without getting too mushymouthed. All that talking certainly adds up - 3000 sentences with 3 days of saying each one - and by the end of the dang thing I now rarely have to slow down to match the Glossika lady, regardless of the sentence.

- Improved ability to tell when I am saying something wrong. I discovered this when I was making messages on HelloTalk. I knew when I said something wrong, and could immediately correct it. Far better to have a tongue that occasionally betrays you but an ear to let you know you need to fix it then to not. Probably due to all the talking and recording of oneself.

- I think it might have slightly improved my memory for remembering stuff but not by much.

- Probably increased listening comprehension of various syllables from all the dictation but this is a slow process in general and I am doing a lot of other stuff to try and help that so I'm not really sure.


What Did it Not Do (Disappointing Stuff)
- Did not help much with live listening grammar. I can puzzle out all of the sentences if I took dictation or am looking at the transcript but as far as knowing what someone says right away, still pretty bad at that.

- Did not give me a vast store of sentences to spew out at will. Perhaps if I had a better memory, or if I memorized them all, but I'm not really sure if this was the point of it anyway.


Criticisms (Bad Stuff)
- There are a few random errors here and there. I recall one sentence where the English is something like 'You want to go to the movies." and the Chinese is "We want to go to the movies."

- There are a few more 'glitches' than downright errors. There seems to be about one of these every 50 sentences on average. The most common is a dropped or added ge in the voice vs. the transcript. If you are not using the transcript this is probably never going to be an issue. I printed out everything so I just scribbled in corrections so they would match. If you are reading off the .pdfs on your screen, this might be irritating.

- Many of the sentences are waaaaay too long. This is my #1 criticism. One example: "In the aftermath of the tornado, they discovered a lot of uprooted trees and houses that had been blown down." Another: "I think we're lost. We need to get a map of this city. I'll search for an app." Another: "Should I tell them, or would you rather they didn't know? No, I'll tell them." (All these examples are from the 3rd set of sentences, but that's just the book I have handy - this issue starts early at about sentence 800 or so). Besides the fact that many of these sentences are really multiple sentences (which I can sort of excuse for Chinese since a big part of the language is dropping pronouns and objects once they have been established in a previous sentences), a lot of these are too long for me to remember in English without taking a minute or three to memorize it exactly, let alone another language. I'm left wondering if Glossika Guy has a photographic memory.

I would be a lot more likely to recommend Glossika to someone if the sentences were at least arranged in some kind of increasing length order. As it stands now, I'm not sure how they are arranged, but there are definitely some walls at about 800, 1500, and 2200 where the length on average seems to rise.

That said, I'm glad I did it, and certainly got my money's worth from the program. I'm more glad, though, that I'm done with it.

[Aozu]

Oh FSI how I have missed you... such leisurely pacing, such trebley sound.

I am sort of bemused that when I checked my dusty old FSI spreadsheet to remember where I left off, it said I had done Module 3, Unit 2, C1 P1 and C2, leaving P2 and D1 for me to pick back up at if I didn't want to start Unit 2 over. So I did, 12 or 18 months later, start up right in the middle of a lesson and, oddly, it seems as though I was just doing this yesterday. Perhaps a side effect of the years starting to fly by as you get older is being able to drop back into something you left half-done god knows how long ago.

Anyway, I've gone through 5 or 6 more tapes since, and the C1 and P1 ones are super easy now. The C2 and P2 get a little tricky, and the D (drill) tapes are a little bit harder still. I don't mind the easy ones, though - it's funny that before this whole Glossika thing that sitting down for a half hour FSI tape involved a lot of sighing and resignation, but now I'm like, what? Half an hour? Can I do three of em? They're oddly relaxing. So bizarre. I guess all that Glossika has increased my tolerance for Chinese. The C1 and P1, for Unit 4 at least, were easy enough I don't even need the text, which further increases their usefulness because I can listen to them in the car or while on a walk.

I'm on Chapter 4 of The Sixty-Year Dream. Going a little slower in that since it's a "new" story.

For those Chinese Graded Reader fans out there, the latest one came out, the 2500 word version ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/7513806772 ), which would be #5 of 6 in the series if you arrange them by words used instead of release sequence, and though I am sort of on book 1, 2 or 3 depending on how you count it, I got it anyway with my usual paranoia that it would vanish off the face of the earth while I was mulling.

I think I need a vacation with no computers so I can read all these books... but I am reading faster. I think the mandarincompanion books are really helping with that, somehow. Not sure why it is finally happening now... I think maybe when I was on the Chinese Breeze books I was still too slow with the grammar? In any case, I'll take it.

I have been very bad with HelloTalk, I haven't chatted at anyone in a week, just busy with other stuff. I set my match thing to 'male only' to try and even out the gender ratio a little, and I think I have about 4 or 5 guys waiting on me to respond to their first messages. Sorry, dudes. I'll get back to you at some point, I promise.

[Aozu]

Forgot to mention a neat little show I've been watching: Happy Chinese. 117 episodes of household-type Chinese conversation. I think the intent was to be for beginners, based on the little popup cartoon segments "NI HAO means HELLO" but the actual conversations are more like intermediate level, and I am relying on the subtitles. But the best part about it is each episode is only 15 minutes long, so easy to just watch one here and there between other daily tasks.

The "American" girl is sort of a doofus so far, though not really quite to caricature level. I also thought a few of her vowels sounded a little odd (her zhu and jiu were strangely similar), so I looked her up and she's apparently Romanian. Hee. Obviously revenge for all those US shows & movies where a Japanese actor plays a Chinese person and vice versa. Anyway, her tones are great, it was just a little thing I noticed and got curious about.

[Expugnator]

I watched all these (unfortunately too soon) as well as the other programs from CCTV with double subtitles, highly recommended!

[Aozu]

It's funny how much of this stuff is lurking around out there; this show has upload dates from 2011, which predates any of my miscellaneous searching.

I think my jury-rigged antenna recording device on my TV to fill up my spare hard drive with the local Chinese channel is getting more and more obsolete.

I can't even imagine how anyone would have learned this language before, say, 1995, without a bunch of native speakers willing to talk at you forever.

[Aozu]

Finished the Sixty-Year Dream (六十年的梦). As with the other two so far, I liked it quite a bit, though it got kinda depressing in the last part (this, though, is in keeping with all the actual Chinese stories I've read so far in the general aura of gloom and doom ).

I especially like something about this series that I've noticed, and that's a general pattern of varying easy and less-easy sentences. Every time I come across a slightly-confusing sentence, the next one pretty much clears everything up, so I never get totally derailed and lost like in some of the other stuff I've read. This, of course, might be partially due to my ever-slowly-increasing reading ability, but, eh, I'll give them the credit for doing it on purpose anyway.

I've got two more of these left, next up will be the Country of the Blind ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1941875033 ), another story that will be totally new to me. I may have never actually read anything by HG Wells, come to think of it, but so be it: to the Chinese version!

[Aozu]

I return from being out of town for nearly a week. While away, I kept up on Anki reviews - as I always do nowadays, easy with the phone app no matter where I am or if I can use a computer - read a little of Country of the Blind (about 3 chapters I think), and did a bunch of FSI lessons which I have been updating on my progress bar. In the home stretch of Module 3 for FSI. Well, technically I'm pretty much done with Module 3 but on some flowchart thing I copied down so many months ago for the lesson list, they include Restaurant 1 & 2 and Hotel 1 & 2 in the Module 3 group. Not really sure yet what format those tapes will take.

We didn't really have time to watch much TV, I watched about 2 HelloChinese episodes and we watched one Divorce Lawyers together.

The best part about the trip, though, was that it was near my in-laws so we had lunch with them for about 4 hours one day. They were pretty excited to read over some of my HelloTalk conversations and marveled at my progress. My listening comprehension is now at a rather amusing stage where each relative sits at a different place on the scale.

Grandma, from Harbin, speaks slowly and perfectly clearly and I can understand everything she says. I am sure this is helped by the fact that she speaks slowly and pays attention to her audience a little more.

Mom speaks much, much faster, and though on this trip - for the first time ever - I noticed a bit of a Taiwan accent now and then (a few zhongs turned into zongs and a couple of shis into sis), is generally pretty standard pronunciation and I only miss stuff because of the speed and because she gets excited and starts talking 'complicated'.

Dad is the Advanced Level - he used to speak Shanghainese to his parents and has (to my ears) a lot of that accent still hanging around, especially when he gets up to full speed, which is extremely fast, and additionally his voice is so low and rumbly that everything is kinda mushed up anyway no matter what language he's using. He also has like five advanced degrees and often forgets that his audience, uh, doesn't, so vocabulary can sometimes get way out of control.

Add to to this the general family dynamic that if one does not start speaking immediately when there is a pause in conversation, someone else will jump in, and it makes speaking pretty challenging. By the time I can arrange my sentence, the moment is gone, so most of my contributions were pretty Chinglishy. That said, I know the next time they are introducing me to some stranger they are gonna say 'and he speaks Chinese' proudly so now the pressure's on, lawl.

But, it was fun and good and we all had a nice lunch. It just kinda cracks me up how different trying to understand each of them is. I will see them again before the end of the year, and now that I seem to be (at last) picking up speed with this cursed language hopefully some good progress will be noticeable to all.

[Aozu]

If I did answer right away to someone and they answered right back we might have a live conversation but that is something still in the future for me. Need to shake off the jitters with these delayed chats first.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, 3 weeks after I posted this, that this actually happened while I was out of town. My wife needed a dress for this event we were going to so while she was looking over dresses, I was sitting on the Bored Husbands Bench at Macy's and doing quick HelloTalk responses to all my previous contacts that I had left hanging. This was like 7 am China time but it was a weekend so I figured everyone was asleep and there would be no immediate answering.

But, I was wrong! I present to you the half hour conversation (it was all text, no way I'm talking into my phone at Macy's... yet):


A CONVERSATION IN ONE ACT

Their previous message I had left unreplied to for a week and a half: 你好
Hello

My first message from Macy's: 很高兴认识你
Nice to meet you!


Them:
哈哈！ 我也是！
Ha ha! Likewise!
Presumably the laughing was due to my incredibly tardy response to 你好. The 我也是 kinda threw me for a moment, as I've never actually seen that as a response to 很高兴认识你 before but I suppose it makes sense and I filed it away for future use.


Me:
你现在庆祝节日？
Are you on holiday?
I translate this into British English since it's more direct than any US way I can think of. Anyway, I knew that China had just finished a week-long holiday, and I knew this question was 'wrong' since it was already over but I figured it was at least something to ask (and I had sent the same message to a bunch of people).


Them:
没有! 我在旅游
Nope! I am on a vacationy-trip.
Again I have to have a screwed-up translation but 旅游 seems to only apply to vacation-type trips, and... apparently.... the national holiday doesn't count as a 旅游 but NOW they're on one.


Me:
很酷 - 你那人？
Cool - where are you?
My translation is what I meant to say but I typoed 那人 instead of 哪儿 (ouch, a double typo - and double ouch, I only just now noticed). But, the other party apparently knows what I mean and doesn't even mention it.


Them:
现在在云南！ 准备去贵州
Right now in Yunnan - preparing to go to Guizhou.


Me:
你去过贵州？
Have you been to Guizhou before?
I have no idea what is in Guizhou, so more conversation fishing.


Them:
正准备去. 十点半的火车. 现在在火车站.
Right now preparing to go. 10:30 train. At the train station now.
So maybe my 去过 was not the right way to ask, as they repeat they are still just preparing to go. Who knows. What is the right thing to say next?


Me:
哇
Wow!

It works.


Them:
你呢? 回来过中国吗？去过哪些城市？
How about you? Have you ever come back to China? Which cities have you been to?


Me:
从来没有. 只英国
I've never been [to China]. Only [to] England.
I'm starting to drop parts of speech like a pro now. And I said 'only' England under the assumption that they had peeked at my profile and seen I was from the US at some point, that may or may not have been a safe assumption.


Them:
啊！你是华人马？
Oh! Are you Chinese?
华人 means Chinese but not from China, basically.... an ABC - so now I am getting flattered, and when I showed this conversation to my in-laws they laughed and laughed.


Me:
不是，可是我太太是
No, but my wife is.
I'm not really up for a bunch of lying at the moment.


Them:
那你应该和太太来中国
So you and your wife should come to China.


Me：
也许未来几年. 外婆是哈尔滨人 - 她说哈尔滨是非常冷. the ice & snow sculptures look fun though
Perhaps a few years from now. Grandma is from Harbin - she says it is very cold. And then I drop into English.
I had to look up 未来 as some way to say 'in the future'. It's the first thing I actually looked up in the dictionary for this conversation - it's kinda hard to do that live on the iPhone but it was going well so I took the risk. Then, out of anything to say about us going to China, and afraid to say that my wife's parents grew up in Taiwan cause god knows where THAT would lead, I tell them that 外婆 is from Harbin.


Them:
China is amazing 是的！哈尔滨非常冷 是东北
English, then: It is! Harbin is very cold! It's in the northeast.
Now I'm getting the sense they are just dumbing stuff down a little for me, but that's fine. They're bored in a train station and I'm bored in Macy's.


Me:
我们都喜欢滑雪. but never under about -5 C. 加州天气
We like to go skiing. but never under about -5 C. California weather.
What can I say about the cold? Oh yeah, skiing. -5 C is pulled out of my butt but it is really rarely lower than 20F when we go skiing and I was guessing at the units conversion.


Them:
Yes... I know NYC... So cold I want to go to 加州 纽约也很冷
Bunch of English then: New York is also cold.


Me:
一路平安　
Have a good trip!
At this point the conversation is sort of running down, and I also see that my phone battery is perilously low, so I throw out a saying I hear a lot in Warcraft of all things (the griffon rider guys say this when you hop on a griffon). Anyway, it's basically bon voyage, so I figure that's a good way to gracefully exit.


Them:
谢谢！:D
Thanks!


And my farewell works... so my first real back and forth live conversation on HelloTalk concludes. Two bored people sitting around with nothing better to do, but I learned a few words, learned a new typo to watch out for, and passed a half hour in a vaguely educational way. Five stars, would HelloTalk again.