Mack's log: Mandarin, damn the torpedoes!

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Dr Mack Rettosy
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Re: Mack's log: Mandarin, damn the torpedoes!

Postby Dr Mack Rettosy » Sat Apr 02, 2022 4:14 pm

I'm still finding a lot of value in material made for learners. For example, I've been dabbling in 每日中文课Free To Learn's youtube channel. She is a Chinese expat living in France and has a whole lot of videos geared towards intermediate levels where she only speaks Mandarin. Her comprehensible input videos are really well done. Imo, the only downside are the subtitles, pretty much everything about the characters could be improved (font/size/color) and the pinyin is distracting. But for the simpler videos (like the one linked above), my listening is good enough to catch mostly everything. It's not the most exciting material but being able to comprehend >95% puts it into the extensive listening zone, and I can feel my brain working it all out, word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence, it enters my head and bounces around like a pinball, racking up serious language points.
9 x
Mandarin goals:
Read: 2146000 / 10000000 /10,000,000 汉字
Study: 2006 / 5000 / 5000 hours

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Re: Mack's log: Mandarin, damn the torpedoes!

Postby Dr Mack Rettosy » Sat Apr 16, 2022 12:10 am

Edit: I’m removing a rant.

I don’t want this log to become a place where I share my views of politics and current affairs, there is enough talk of that everywhere else. Those discussions require nuance that I’m happy to have in person, but online it takes too much time and energy.

What I really wanted to express is hope that the Covid19 situation improves such that traveling to China becomes a possibility.
3 x
Mandarin goals:
Read: 2146000 / 10000000 /10,000,000 汉字
Study: 2006 / 5000 / 5000 hours

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Oct 14th 2020 – April 17th 2022: One Year and Six Months Update

Postby Dr Mack Rettosy » Wed Apr 20, 2022 1:30 pm

Oct 14th 2020 – April 17th 2022: One Year and Six Months Update

Listening
Travel v-logs (so many of these!) for active listening, Peppa Pig while I exercise, 大鹏说中文 podcasts for passive listening. I would love to get into a new TV show but it's just not happening. About once a week I try a new show but nothing sticks. Listening is improving, slowly but surely.

Reading
Finished 细米 by 曹文轩. Started 活着 (To Live) by 余华. This is a popular book in the Chinese language learning community recommended to those starting adult literature. So far there have been some tough patches, but overall it is indeed very readable.

Talking
Soon. No spoilers, heh.

Writing
No plans.

Statistics
Studied a total of 1270 hours, averaging 2 hours and 19 minutes a day. You can how study time took a hit preparing for my job change and wedding (week 33-51), then ramped up between employment (weeks 52-57), now finding a new balance with work (weeks 61-79) averaging 12-14 hour weeks.

1.5 yr update study time.png


How many characters and how many words do I know? Hard to say. Character “knowledge” is not black or white, rather, it exists on a spectrum. Some characters I know very well but without seeing in the context of reading I’m clueless. But at the same time I am getting better at guessing sound and meaning of characters as my intuition of the components builds on core vocabulary. If pressed to make a wild guess at how many I can comfortably read, maybe 1200-1800 characters? Vocabulary is even more out of mind. Maybe 5000-10000 words? I really don’t know. It’s been a long time since I’ve concerned myself about counting these metrics. My focus is on comprehension and enjoyment. I am still very much motivated to track reading speed as a function of total characters read. It's easy to track and a meaningful indicator of how my use of the language is improving. I have read 808,000 characters and am currently reading native fiction at 50-60 cpm. Reading speed is a good predictor of reading comfort which in turn makes reading more enjoyable, so looking forward to seeing this number go up and up.

1.5 yr update reading speed.png


Goals
Suspending my goal to read nine Roald Dahl translations (four was enough). Adding a new goal to read 余华's 13-book collection along with 曹文轩 8-book collection.

Ongoing goals:
余华 Collection: 0 / 13 / 13 books
曹文轩 Collection: 2 / 8 / 8 books
Read: 808000 / 10000000 /10,000,000 汉字
Study: 1270 / 5000 / 5000 hours

Completed goals:
✓ HelloChinese Maincourse [14 Oct 2020 - 29 Nov 2020]
✓ HelloChinese Immersions [1 Dec 2020 - 6 March 2021]
✓ Heisig's Remembering the Simplified Hanzi Vol I [31 Jan 2020 - 22 April 2021]
✓ Read Rainbow Bridge Graded Readers; 20 starter books [04 May 2021 - 24 May 2021]
✓ Read Mandarin Companion Readers; 17 books [July 6th 2021 - Oct 8th 2021]
✓ Read Rainbow Bridge Graded Readers; 15 higher books [25 May 2020 - 12 Dec 2021]

Suspended goals:
X Read nine Roald Dahl translations [read four books; Nov 2020 – Feb 2021]
X Read 500 HSK1-5 TCB articles in pinyin [read ~250 HSK1-3 articles; 1 Dec 2020 - 25 March 2021]
X Anki Spoonfed Chinese [reached 886/8017 cards; 25 Mar 2021 - 13 Aug 2021]
X Heisig's Remembering the Simplified Hanzi Vol II [never began]
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12 x
Mandarin goals:
Read: 2146000 / 10000000 /10,000,000 汉字
Study: 2006 / 5000 / 5000 hours

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Dr Mack Rettosy
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Re: Mack's log: Mandarin, damn the torpedoes!

Postby Dr Mack Rettosy » Sun Jun 05, 2022 6:08 pm

I finished 活着, then went back to a children's book 秃秃大王 by 张天翼 after recommendations from Moon Ivy’s Heavenly Path. It was comprehensive, but very much a step back from the serious literary themes of 活着.

I wrapped up 秃秃大王 in early May around the time a big work project began ramping up. My work has been getting attention from leadership, so while this means I'm receiving personnel and resources , it also means more work, and work begets work, patents, papers, and presentations to follow. It seems I am being groomed for middle management. 哎呀呀,太难了。I don’t want it. I want to do an honest days work then come home to my wife and my books.

Around this time I started feeling fatigued and caught what I thought was a cold. The days felt short and found little energy for anything besides work. One morning I woke without smell or taste and sure enough tested antigen and PCR positive for Covid19. No idea how I got it. Getting a positive test was a relief honestly because instead of working through it I gave myself a few days of genuine rest. Mandarin dropped way off to 30 min every other day. This went on for a couple weeks and now I’m slowly picking things back up. Still struggling with fatigue, for example, normally I can pretty easily do 700+ watt sprints climbing hills on my bike, the other day I got up to 400 watts before lungs began burning and quads cramped. I was up to date with vaccinations but I shudder to think how this would have been otherwise.

I haven’t been able to start a new book or watch travel vlogs. Mostly just working through 大鹏 podcasts. Read-Listening, reading, then listening, building comprehension through repetitions. I feel more bang for my buck with this intensive style, one hour of this is worth two hours of immersion.

Hope everyone is doing well with their studies, and glad I could open up more about some struggles. Mack is a human after all!
7 x

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Re: Mack's log: Mandarin, damn the torpedoes!

Postby Dr Mack Rettosy » Mon Jun 20, 2022 12:54 pm

Alright happy to report my studies have picked back up to where they were before getting Covid19. An hour reading and an hour listening each day. For reading I started another adult novel, 圈子圈套 by 王强. There was a book of the month forum post dedicated to it over at Chinese-Forums. Imron gives a nice description:

It's the first book in a trilogy dealing with office intrigue and politics inside high-tech companies in modern-day Beijing (and greater China). The language is not too difficult, and the characters are mostly the type of young-ish white collar Chinese workers who like to use English names when talking to each other and who pepper their sentences with English (so for example it's not uncommon to see abominations like "必须拿着file什么的指指点点才算report").


It's not been an easy read, but it's keeping my interest so that is a big win.

For listening practice I have been going through 每日中文课Free To Learn's youtube channel. I shared one of her comprehensible input playlists a few months back. I would guess this is the most comprehensible input material I have available to me. It's learner material, but still thrilling to be able to understand someone speaking for long stretches!
7 x
Mandarin goals:
Read: 2146000 / 10000000 /10,000,000 汉字
Study: 2006 / 5000 / 5000 hours

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Oct 14th 2020 – July 30th 2022: One Year and Nine+ Months Update

Postby Dr Mack Rettosy » Sat Jul 30, 2022 3:33 pm

Oct 14th 2020 – July 30th 2022: One Year and Nine+ Months Update

A couple weeks late on this update, but here it is anyway!

Listening
I have recently prioritized listening over reading. Most of my listening materials can be found on YouTube. Ranked in order of most used to least:

1) 大鹏说中文 (Da Peng speaks Chinese). Learning channel.
2) 每日中文课 (Every day Chinese class). Learning channel.
3) 鞋底’s环球旅行. Travel v-log. Highly recommend this channel! Xie Di 鞋底 is traveling the world one country at a time, sometimes by himself sometimes with friends. He’s fun and free-spirited and makes you feel like you’re there with him. There’s also no “influencer vibe” - he simply films his life and you as the viewer are along for the ride. He has 300+ hours of content half of which are subtitled. Videos are language dense and often relatively simple (descriptive, basic communication, etc.). Fantastic immersion material.
4) Recently started watching Season 2 of the infamous sitcom 家有儿女 (Home with Kids). Now that I understand more it is quite enjoyable! Great 北口音儿话 too, I have to be careful otherwise I’m going to sound like a 北京人 when I start speaking. As an aside, I have noticed I subvocalize 儿话 when I read or speak to myself, so it may be too late lol.
5) 阿龙’s 阿龙的旅行. Travel v-log.
6) Peppa Pig in Mandarin. Translated children’s TV show.
7) Octonuats. Translated children’s TV show.

So what is my listening comprehension like? For most visual material I get enough gist to enjoy it. With learners’ material, the combination of context and subtitles provide enough comprehensibility such that I can follow most ideas, but many details are missed because upon rewatching I’ll notice new things not noticed during the first watch. There are of course scenarios where my comprehension drops way off, e.g. podcasts on niche subjects I understand next to zero and will zone out. Acquiring new vocabulary is slowly becoming more feasible with listening, either I have enough comprehension to learn new words through context or I am able to identify repeated/important words that are key to understand the material and can quickly look them up.

Reading
Progress on 圈子圈套 fizzled out. I was following the plot but the reading was painfully slow. Feeling like a reset was needed, I re-read Mandarin Companion’s Journey to Center of the Earth. Felt easy and progress is noticeable comparing reading speeds: 48 cpm in Sept 2021 vs 73 cpm July 2022. I considered starting a new 曹文宣 book but his stories tend to require a lot of effort as a lot of the writing focuses on scenery and descriptions. Instead I picked up 余华’s 许三观卖血记 (Chronicles of a Blood Merchant) which has proven to be the right choice, perfect alignment between engaging story and the right difficulty level. With this book I have reached the 1,000,000+ characters read milestone!

I wasted a lot of time finding my next book, which for whatever reason hasn’t been a problem up until now. Before choosing my next book I’m going to use Chinese Text Analyzer and find the 余华 book with the least amount of unique characters.

I’m quite lazy when it comes to making flashcards but have noticed regular use improves vocabulary retention. I make decks in Anki specifically for the book I’m reading, averaging 2-5 flashcards a day. I do my reviews first thing in the morning before reading (takes about 5 minutes). Once the book is finished I delete the deck and begin fresh with the next book. As far as selecting words for flashcards, I don’t bother with “sticky” words (words that are easily remembered throughout the reading session or across days), instead I select words that have new/less familiar characters, with the intention of giving myself more frequent exposure to the corresponding pronunciation and morphemes.

While my reading comprehension and speed (and overall reading enjoyment) is improving, there are massive areas that need attention. First, I have no real system to determine the right readings (both sounds and meaning) for characters that have multiple readings. Pleco often will have the multiple readings, but I often don’t realize this as I just use whatever definition first shows. Second, my reading ability relies heavily on context. I struggle to recognize and pronounce words (or characters) on their own. Third and likely related to the second issue, the characters themselves are “fuzzy” and I often rely on gestalt recognition, when really I ought to be noticing the components and their relative positionings, as this often clues pronunciation. Intensive character writing or incorporating Imron’s ‘mind drawing’ method into my Anki reviews would help.. Even after short sessions I notice characters developing a “crispness” and their components pop out instead of getting smooshed together.

Speaking
I had two iTalki sessions way back in the month of May. They went… okay. Both sessions were with the same person and he was a very patient teacher. I learned that talking in your non-native language is hard lol. I struggled to find words and to form even short sentences. When I did get a word out, I was surprised how wrong I sounded, and not just tonal issues happening. A positive take away is that I understand most of what he said. I wanted to begin regular speaking practice between 1.5-2 years of study so I have a few months to get a schedule planned. I think small achievable goals to build the habit are going to be key here, and ultimately working towards making friends that I talk to on a regular basis and can develop authentic meaningful relationships with. I am also interested in shadowing to improve accent and cadence, but that is a lower priority.

Writing
No plans, although some online chatting using pinyin input will be required to meet speaking partners. It’s an odd feeling to be able to read a language without being able to write, but that’s where I’m at!

Statistics
I have studied a total of 1414 hours over 653 days, averaging 2 hr 10min a day. Although I am studying less (~1.5 hr a day instead of 3 hr) my time is more efficiently used. A few things are behind this: More material is comprehensible so I’m more engaged in the material and zone out less. No longer passive listen (use to do a lot of this, put on a podcast while cooking and had no idea what people were saying but counted this as study time). I spend a lot less time “meta-learning” how to learn languages, i.e. browsing these forums, reddit, watching polyglot youtube channels. Although I still enjoy learning about language learning, I am much more focused with my free time and use it for Mandarin studies.

Goals
I’m removing my two goals to read the complete works of曹文宣 and 余华. I still plan to read more of their works but the progress bar hasn’t been motivating me so what’s the point? I’m setting a new speaking goal to have ten conversations. That seems manageable and hopefully will be a good place for me to get in the habit of conversing.

Ongoing goals:
Conversations in Mandarin: 0 / 10 / 10 sessions
Read: 1021000 / 10000000 /10,000,000 汉字
Study: 1414 / 5000 / 5000 hours

Completed goals:
✓ HelloChinese Maincourse [14 Oct 2020 - 29 Nov 2020]
✓ HelloChinese Immersions [1 Dec 2020 - 6 March 2021]
✓ Heisig's Remembering the Simplified Hanzi Vol I [31 Jan 2020 - 22 April 2021]
✓ Read Rainbow Bridge Graded Readers; 20 starter books [04 May 2021 - 24 May 2021]
✓ Read Mandarin Companion Readers; 17 books [July 6th 2021 - Oct 8th 2021]
✓ Read Rainbow Bridge Graded Readers; 15 higher books [25 May 2020 - 12 Dec 2021]

Suspended goals:
X Read 余华 Collection of 13 books [read two books; Mar 2022 - Jul 2022]
X Read 曹文轩 Collection of 8 books [read two books; Dec 2021 - May 2022]
X Read nine Roald Dahl translations [read four books; Nov 2020 - Feb 2021]
X Read 500 HSK1-5 TCB articles in pinyin [read ~250 HSK1-3 articles; 1 Dec 2020 - 25 March 2021]
X Anki Spoonfed Chinese [reached 886/8017 cards; 25 Mar 2021 - 13 Aug 2021]
X Heisig's Remembering the Simplified Hanzi Vol II [never began]
11 x
Mandarin goals:
Read: 2146000 / 10000000 /10,000,000 汉字
Study: 2006 / 5000 / 5000 hours

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Re: Mack's log: Mandarin, damn the torpedoes!

Postby rdearman » Sat Jul 30, 2022 3:59 pm

I enjoy reading your updates. Amazing progress. Thanks for the links to 阿龙的旅行 and 鞋底’s环球旅行 they look interesting. I have a border collie who looks just like Banjin. :)

I wonder if you have watched, 曼食慢语 ? I like cooking shows, so her channel is interesting. I also like Thomas阿福 who is a food v-logger (German guy who lives in Shanghi)

Also, there is a lady who used to do a lot of YT lessons, although she doesn't seem very active now. But you might find her stuff interesting. She has over 200 lessons.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpuAQi ... UKA/videos

You can get a lot of language exchange partners on https://conversationexchange.com/ where I am constantly getting invitations to speak from people in China or Taiwan.
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Re: Mack's log: Mandarin, damn the torpedoes!

Postby Dr Mack Rettosy » Mon Aug 08, 2022 12:43 pm

rdearman wrote:I enjoy reading your updates. Amazing progress. Thanks for the links to 阿龙的旅行 and 鞋底’s环球旅行 they look interesting. I have a border collie who looks just like Banjin. :)

I wonder if you have watched, 曼食慢语 ? I like cooking shows, so her channel is interesting. I also like Thomas阿福 who is a food v-logger (German guy who lives in Shanghi)

Also, there is a lady who used to do a lot of YT lessons, although she doesn't seem very active now. But you might find her stuff interesting. She has over 200 lessons.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpuAQi ... UKA/videos

You can get a lot of language exchange partners on https://conversationexchange.com/ where I am constantly getting invitations to speak from people in China or Taiwan.


Thanks for dropping by. A big part of my motivation is showing others my progress, especially on these forums.

Appreciate the channel suggestions! I will definitely give 曼食慢语 a watch! I do most of the cooking for my family and have been interested in trying more Chinese inspired dishes. If I can build some comprehension in food/cooking I would also be more motivated to shop at our local Asian grocer. I use to watch Thomas阿福 and enjoyed his content, but I find the hardcoded English subtitles distracting, although these days I may be able to get away with pure listening.

I'll take a look at conversation exchange. I like the idea of not using a language exchange app and all together avoiding the wonders and horrors of social media. Now that I think about it, I wonder if this has contributed to my aversion to meeting people? I'll give this a serious go.
3 x
Mandarin goals:
Read: 2146000 / 10000000 /10,000,000 汉字
Study: 2006 / 5000 / 5000 hours

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Re: Mack's log: Mandarin, damn the torpedoes!

Postby Dr Mack Rettosy » Mon Aug 08, 2022 1:19 pm

I finally got around to using Chinese Text Analyzer (CTA) on my ebook collection. CTA is a powerful software but I mostly use it for two basic purposes, finding 1) total character count and 2) unique character count. Together these can be used to estimate the difficulty of a book. Here is information for the books by 余华 and 曹文轩, in green the books I've read and in black the book not yet read:

CTA Aug 2022.png


曹文轩 books tend to have higher unique character counts than 余华 books, which probably helps explains why I find 曹文轩 books more difficult. Obviously there are many other factors that contribute to readability, but even a basic tool that can sift through my book collection is going to be extremely helpful. For example, had I not used CTA I would have started 兄弟 (Brothers) for my next book. 兄弟 has 3000+ unique characters. Speaking from experience, I probably would have slogged through it for couple weeks then given up. Instead I started 黄昏里的男孩 which has much more reasonable 1900 unique characters and does indeed provide a reasonably comfortable reading experience.
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4 x
Mandarin goals:
Read: 2146000 / 10000000 /10,000,000 汉字
Study: 2006 / 5000 / 5000 hours

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Re: Mack's log: Mandarin, damn the torpedoes!

Postby Dr Mack Rettosy » Sat Aug 20, 2022 3:42 pm

The other day I had an experience that made me realize how far I’ve come with Mandarin. If you’ve followed my log closely you may know I’m interested in learning Spanish. While the idea of starting fresh on a new language project is really exciting, I’m cautious because there is still a long way to go with Mandarin (and God help me if I succumb to wanderlust). That said, I do occasionally dabble with Spanish. Mostly this entails researching and collecting learning materials, and naturally, this requires some preliminary engagement with the material. The Dreaming Spanish YouTube channel is frequently recommended so I thought I’d give the “super beginner” comprehensible input videos a go. Within seconds I was completely lost. I was shocked at how challenging it was to make sense of anything. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to listen to a language and know nothing! This contrasts what I experience with Mandarin, where much of the intermediate-advance learned material I engage with his mostly comprehensible. Clearly, I have achieved a decent level of comprehension that I have been taking for granted!
9 x
Mandarin goals:
Read: 2146000 / 10000000 /10,000,000 汉字
Study: 2006 / 5000 / 5000 hours


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