No Zero Days

[Axon]

Spanish
It's become so normal for me that I haven't mentioned it until now because it doesn't seem like studying, but I've subscribed to a handful of Spanish meme pages on Facebook. I barely use Facebook at all except to check Messenger and do a little mindless scrolling, but the meme pages definitely catch my eye and I end up reading some comic or image macro in Spanish a few times a day. This has been going on for at least a year.

Russian
The same for Russian meme pages on Twitter.

Thai
A little alphabet study, tried with surprising success to decipher some labels and song titles "in the wild." As much as it feels like the script is opaque, a lot of it has made it into my brain at this point.

Japanese
Having become satisfied with the little boost I gave to Vietnamese, I don't feel bad about putting it on the shelf and spending some time on Japanese. There's another script I know "some" of. I'm flabbergasted that beginning Japanese learners regularly memorize hiragana and katakana in a few days. In contrast to Thai, I don't feel as strong of a pull to learn the Japanese script well. I already know a lot of the most common kanji (and a lot of the very uncommon kanji that appear more frequently in Chinese). When I picture myself traveling around Japan, I imagine using kanji as anchors that give me a little boost with text comprehension, whether that's for product labels or street signs. I know from my experience in Laos that there are no such comprehension anchors for an opaque alphabet.

All that to say, without the feeling that I need to learn the script that "fast," I feel like I have more stamina for watching Comprehensible Japanese type stuff and working with audio resources or things that use romanization. It's silly, because I think wanting to read Thai more than speak it prevents me from learning it as fast as I could. Mainly I wish I could just pick up scripts the way I find it relatively easy to pick up pronunciation.

Mandarin
More reading, more intensive watching with subtitles, more speaking.
716 Pleco cards, of which some new ones are:
笑颜 - a smiling face. 颜 keeps slipping out of my mind as an association with "face."
枝繁叶茂 - flourishing and abundant (to describe trees and branches, perhaps a canopy in a forest or dense trees on city streets).
竹篾绳 - a rope made of woven bamboo. 竹篾 describes flat strips of bamboo, the type that would be woven into a lattice.
开凿机 - an excavator. The character 凿 struck me as immediately unfamiliar because of its shape, since it looks different from many other characters. The traditional variant, 鑿, doesn't look particularly odd to me, just complex and unknown. I normally don't make a special effort to learn the traditional variants.

Scripts I know in order of familiarity, besides Latin:

Chinese - (unique case, impossible to compare, will never be finished learning)
Cyrillic - learned fully for Russian, familiar with some pre-reform letters, learned some extra letters for other languages
Greek - learned fairly well for Ancient Greek, usually forget the correct vowel pronunciation for Modern Greek
Hiragana, Katakana, Korean - studied on and off for many years, very familiar with some things and less with others
Thai, Arabic - learned to the point where I can match Romanization to the native script, hopeless at sounding out text except for a few simple words
Bopomofo - learned fully several years ago, mostly forgotten, no chance of writing it
Lao - learned a few of the letters several years ago, now when I read it my mind is influenced by Thai
Tamil, Javanese - I still have notebooks with lots of handwriting practice, too bad I can't read any of it anymore

[Axon]

I went camping with some of my friends and I think there may have been a zero day in there, but I can't be quite sure because I did read and speak a little Mandarin.

Japanese
I've started being more regular with Japanese as it appears more likely that I'll visit in a few months (does anybody notice a pattern in my log with languages coming from countries I "might visit?"). I'm putting more effort into the script, doing Pimsleur, and working with Tuttle's Basic Japanese. Also watching some dramas on Netflix and looking at the subtitles - I can't say I'm reading the subtitles by any stretch. It's funny how often the easiest and simplest words like "this" "that" "what" confuse me, yet a single exposure to 了解 ryookai with parallel subtitles was perfectly transparent and it comes to mind easier than wakarimasu. I can tell it's way too formal to actually use, don't worry.

German
Some article reading and podcast listening.

Mandarin
A little bit of shadowing to some of Leosmith's Mandarin Conversations recordings. It's a serious workout to shadow all six minutes of both speakers at speed, but I did all right. More vlog watching with intensive vocabulary lookup. I stopped reviewing the flashcards because I'm scared of how big the number is going to be when I look. Just looked - 349!! A scary number for sure. Some new words:
拭目以待 wait and see, wait expectantly (used in the context of "looking forward to it")
徽章 a badge or insignia
枯萎 (of plants) to wilt, shrivel (in sun)

[Axon]

The last two weeks it's been mostly Mandarin every day with some Spanish and German. Nothing too groundbreaking or exciting. I had misunderstood Japan's entry policies and now feel it's not as likely I'll be able to visit even if my wife goes there to study as planned. I still know more Japanese now than ever before thanks to that little sprint.

I wanted to answer this question in my log rather than sfuqua's thread:

What would you recommend as a low stress approach for Mandarin? It was my mom’s foreign language, and I grew up in the Bay Area with her speaking Mandarin to shopkeepers and waiters. (I know Cantonese is the predominate Chinese language in San Francisco, but she still somehow found Mandarin speakers. I’m not sure exactly how that worked.) Europe will always be my primary language focus, but I’ve dabbled in Chinese before and I would like to do more in the future, but not in an all encompassing way. More of a stay connected to my mom sort of way.

I think I went about learning Mandarin in a high-stress way. That was the beginning of 2015, right when I had just discovered SRS and had a huge tolerance for card reviews. The first thing I did was cram 100 verbs from a Memrise deck, then I did a hundred new cards a day from the Spoon Fed Chinese Anki deck while reading the Chinese Grammar Wiki. I finished the Memrise deck but understandably lost enthusiasm for Spoon Fed Chinese once there were 700+ reviews due every day, at which point I switched mostly to a YouTube channel called 5 Minute Chinese. My enthusiasm steadily petered out for about a year, though six months in I had a couple opportunities to use the phrases I'd learned with some tourists and that was an incredible feeling. I can't remember most of the resources I used but I know it was certainly just dabbling, sometimes rewatching "Phrases to use while traveling" videos over and over.

By late 2015, though, I had decided to travel to China and needed to "get good" as young people say. I started cramming Spoon Fed Chinese again and tested into Chinese 202 at my university beginning in January 2016. The classes kept me mentally exhausted enough that I had little desire to resume intensive Anki (I was finishing up a History degree and double minors in Linguistics and German, plus studying Russian from scratch since that was the next stop after China). I had great linguistics-minded study partners in that Chinese class and we'd drill each other on the material for hours in the library. After I graduated I went to China and just kept trying to get good. I'm still trying.

Apart from that trip down memory lane, though, I think working through Remembering the Hanzi and a nice long textbook could be a nice low-stress approach that doesn't involve flashcards. Pimsleur Mandarin is fine, though the pronunciation has somewhat of an older and exaggerated accent where the third tone is stretched out longer than people tend to speak it today. ChinesePod is excellent as well. Really, more and more great free Chinese learning channels appear on YouTube all the time, almost all of them geared at the beginner or upper-beginner stages. One wonderful exception is Chinese Zero to Hero, which has fantastic videos for all levels from beginners to advanced learners.

Yuen Ren Chao wrote a wonderful Mandarin Primer back in the day, which has been updated and made into the virtually bulletproof and decidedly intense Princeton Chinese Primer series. It goes very heavily into pronunciation and is dialogue-driven, which may be perfect for some people. The original Mandarin Primer audio is free on YouTube, where you can marvel at the voice acting talents of Mr. Chao as he performs multiple dialogue parts in distinct accents in a single take before audio editing was invented.

My favorite textbook for realism of dialogue is the Spoken Chinese 汉语口语 series, though the whole books are in Chinese. I would avoid any textbooks that advertise "street talk" or "the real spoken language" - more often than not, they focus very heavily on Beijing slang that reads as strange to non-Beijingers and hilarious to locals. This is a real (yet pretty funny) problem, that students confidently say something they learned as "authentic Chinese slang" that turns out to be the equivalent of trying to compliment someone by saying "You have such a sick face!"

As you know, it all depends on what you want to get out of it. You might discover that connection to your mom after watching some "Slow and Easy" Mandarin videos like the following:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdwdSG ... 58g/videos
https://www.youtube.com/c/BumpyChinese% ... %87/videos

You might prefer something more instructional like Chinese Zero to Hero, ChinesePod or ChineseClass101, or you might enjoy watching a drama with Language Reactor and looking up the words you see in the Chinese Grammar Wiki. It's all about what keeps you specifically moving with the language.

If I had to make an easy 30-60 hour "Explore Mandarin" curriculum for someone with no time pressure, I'd probably come up with something like this:
- Watch the Fluent Forever Mandarin Phonetics videos a minimum of two times (they're excellent but way too fast)
- Find and watch at least two other teachers' "Introduction to Pinyin" YouTube videos that were published within the last five years and that have at least 50,000 views
- Find 10+ Newbie or Elementary videos from ChinesePod that you enjoy and watch them several times
- Poke around on the Chinese Grammar Wiki and connect what you see there to what you've seen on ChinesePod
<- at this point you will have a reasonable sense of what to expect in a conversational Mandarin sentence
- Use Memrise to get a core vocabulary of a few hundred words, focusing on verbs
- Listen to several episodes of your personal favorite out of Pimsleur Mandarin 1, ChinesePod, or ChineseClass101
- Watch the Chinese Zero to Hero HSK 1 Grammar Course
- Read the Glossika Guide to Chinese Pronunciation and Grammar
- Follow the Glossika Chinese Pronunciation and Tone Training course
<- at this point you will never worry about tones again
- Watch the Chinese Listening video series from ChineseClass101, looking up words you don't know in a dictionary and in the Grammar wiki
- Watch at least two seasons of 5 Minute Chinese, looking up unknown words
- Watch and rewatch videos in the Comprehensible Chinese or Slow and Easy Chinese formats, looking up unknown words
<- at this point you will have an excellent foundation in pronunciation and elementary grammar and will know how much you want to keep going with more involved textbooks or tutoring

[Lawyer&Mom]

This is all great, but thank you particularly for the links to the clear and slow Mandarin videos. Slowly spoken Chinese where I understand every tenth word or so brings me right back to Mom ordering pot stickers at Hunan Wok in 1985…

There are so many good videos and apps, but I think a leisurely stroll through a long textbook would be the most relaxing. I’ll definitely check out your pinyin and phonetics resources first!

[rdearman]

This is all great, but thank you particularly for the links to the clear and slow Mandarin videos. Slowly spoken Chinese where I understand every tenth word or so brings me right back to Mom ordering pot stickers at Hunan Wok in 1985…

There are so many good videos and apps, but I think a leisurely stroll through a long textbook would be the most relaxing. I’ll definitely check out your pinyin and phonetics resources first!

You might want to check out this website: http://www.hwjyw.com/textbooks/downloads/zhongwen/

It is for Chinese children overseas to learn Mandarin. You can start very simply with photos, and numbers, and animals, etc. and there are a lot of workbooks here, about 48.

@axon - Sorry to hijack your log.

[Axon]

Nothing that has strayed too far from the path recently. I had a long flight and dozed through the first several episodes of Pimsleur Japanese, occasionally regaining consciousness enough to think about the words. I did some more Vietnamese vocabulary work.

My flight was to Boston, and I'm only just realizing that I totally should have at least tried to meet up with some of the LLORG members in the area. Next time! In Boston I was surprised at the amount of Portuguese I heard on the streets. It's very rare to hear in the San Francisco area, or at least that's my perspective as a non-Portuguese speaker. The runner-up was probably French, as it seemed like every tenth family of tourists or so was French.

I spent a lot of time in Chinatown, where I clearly heard Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taishanese. I don't think I've logged it, but I've done a fair amount of work with Taishanese. I've never practiced it with anybody, but I'm familiar with a lot of the tricky sound and vocabulary changes that make it so hard to understand for a Cantonese speaker. I didn't try to speak it at all as what little ability I have is receptive only. Instead I spoke a lot of Mandarin, kind of wanting to confirm my previous experience that even elderly residents of Chinese communities quite often have conversational Mandarin even if they're clearly used to speaking Cantonese day-to-day. Indeed, none of them batted an eye and each short conversation functioned entirely in Mandarin. There was a younger, incredibly social guy there code-switching between Cantonese and Mandarin with everyone. When I asked him about it, he assured me Cantonese was easy and said he'd picked up all his Cantonese from Hong Kong movies and talking with old guys in the park. "You can pick up Cantonese from input alone" is a reasonably common refrain on the Chinese internet and he's the second person I've met, after my very first Mandarin teacher, who has accomplished the task.

On the flight back, I noticed that the woman next to me was using her seatback entertainment thing in German, and once the flight was touching down and our headphones were away, I pointed at it and said "Deutsch?" I then surprised and pleased myself greatly by performing quite well in the first time I had spoken German since early 2020. She said that my German was "very correct" and "better than her English," which was wonderful to hear even as all of my pronunciation and grammar mistakes clanged awkwardly in my own ears. We covered a wide range of travel-related and political topics, I remembered obscure words and sentence patterns, and I would say I spoke fluent (though certainly not flawless) German for a full twenty minutes, through the roar of an airplane cabin and the muffling effect of face masks to boot.

Unfortunately the conversation lasted for thirty minutes.

She was quite gracious and never did switch back to English, but I noticed myself literally running out of German in the later part of the conversation. Part of that was probably the fact it was the end of a long day and long flight, but it clearly felt language-related for the most part. It really made me think about the aspect of stamina in overall language ability. I've hit walls before on long days of speaking almost exclusively Mandarin, but those come after four or five hours minimum. Apparently the level of active German I have now is some sort of B1-B2 threshold, for about half an hour on a good day. If I put effort into improving my German, I wonder how stamina improvement would appear to me now that I'd be looking for it.

[Axon]

It's been quite a busy six weeks for me, moving between places and shifting plans and priorities more often than I expected. There were in fact several zero days here and there. I can't think of many exciting things to sum up language-wise over the last two months, but here are a few from pretty recently.

Part of the hubbub was moving to San Jose and then deciding the rent was too high and moving back. In between buying furniture and returning furniture, I ate at a lot of excellent Chinese restaurants and spoke a lot of Chinese at most of them.

In the last week or so I heard three languages on the street that I didn't recognize. Three! This is a rare occurrence for me. I thought one of them might be Khmer, but the other two (an Asian language and what sounded like a European language) gave me no points of familiarity at all. By process of elimination my best guesses are Burmese and Albanian, but they might just as easily have been so many others.

My wife recently traveled to South America and wants to go to Mexico, so she's been starting Spanish. She (a native Mandarin speaker) says it's much easier than Japanese because of the writing system.

We've been staying with some Chinese friends, so I suppose you could say I've been in an immersion homestay. My listening is always improving, this time on medium-to-heavy Jiangsu accents. I also like listening to recordings of old people speaking Mandarin from the early 20th century, like oral histories. Unfortunately it's very obvious to me that my speaking in Mandarin has more or less plateaued except for a slow but steady vocabulary increase. Some new words: today we went whale watching (观鲸) and got seasick (晕船). Later we played ping-pong and worked on serving (发球) and returning (接球). This immersion has helped with speaking fluency, but what I need is a good set time to review and practice.

Today I had one of those short French conversations I end up having every few years. I think the last time I spoke any French was in 2018, but fortunately I did some French Assimil the other day so I was a bit warmed up. This time it was just a quick chat with some very nice older French people on the whale watching boat. They could of course immediately tell that I didn't speak much French, but they simply spoke slowly and clearly to let the conversation continue.