Mandarin 2days, 2 weeks, 2months, 2 years

[rdearman]

Well, I haven't been doing any language work in the last week, or much of anything really, other than perhaps drinking. I spent the week in Prague, in the Czech Republic, doing some training courses and the evenings in the pubs and restaurants. All the food was lovely and the beer was tasty, cheap, strong, and plentiful. One of myclass mates joked; Prague, come for the beer stay for the women.

It was interesting to spend time somewhere with a language I had absolutely zero knowledge of. One of the people on the course with me was Slovakian, so she spoke for us on the rare occasion someone didn't know English. I only picked up a couple of words, and they weren't much use to me. I did have an interesting experience in a Chinese restaurant because our Slovakian mate wasn't there, I managed to order the beer and the food. Saying 四杯啤酒。(four beers) and then pointing at the menu and saying 其中之一。(one of those).

I seriously considered buying some books in Czech while in a shopping mall, but resisted the temptation to wander around through languages like a drunken sailor doing a pub crawl.

Another interesting fact I noticed during my stay was these people are constantly eating! I mean all the time. But they are all skinny and fit looking, so I made a point of asking about it. Basically most people believe you should be eating 5-6 times a day. Must work, because they are all so thin, but they aren't eating burgers, fries, and a plate of lasagne, so probably not the diet for me.

[Adam]

... an interesting experience in a Chinese restaurant because our Slovakian mate wasn't there, I managed to order the beer and the food. Saying 四杯啤酒。(four beers) ...

It's fun when you can do that, isn't it?

Interesting word, 啤酒 - sounds almost exactly like the Slavic word for the stuff, and I would presume the Chinese got the word from the Russians. However, I don't know any evidence one way or another; the character 啤 is only used in this word - for what it may be worth, it's a phonetic based on 卑, which means vulgar, and is (according to Harbaugh) a pictograph of a cup being held with the left hand.

Why the Chinese would have adopted their word from Russian is a bit of a mystery. As far as I know, it was the Germans (TsingDao) who introduced beer to them and vice versa.

[rdearman]

Well not much to say about my language learning recently. It is very sporatic and not very focused. For the most part I seem to be spending all my time when I have time just going through my anki decks. This hasn't been really that effective, especially for Mandarin. I've gotten a few mintes everyday in, but that really isn't enough for anyone to learn a language properly. I decided that I would try to spend a bit more time using the language rather than just passively listening or reading it. With that in mind I have used the HelloTalk appliation on my phone a lot more this week.

The HelloTalk application has allowed me to begin to use my languages more frequently with more natives. The advantage of it seems to be with the people who are not native English speakers, since they seem to be well advanced beyond my meagre capabilities. Therefore I have deliberately contacted French and Italian speakers who have marked themselves as weak, or very week in English. This gives me the advantage of them reverting back to French or Italian when there is any miscommunication. The burden is then on me as the more experianced speaker to resolve the problem. However in Mandarin this isn't possible, but these dialoques have activated a number of phrases which I've learnt but not really used.

One thing I have noticed however is that for French and Italian speakers, even the ones who list themselves as "very weak" are either lying, or hold themselves to a much higher standard than I would expect. Conversly the Mandarin speakers seem to rate themselves better at English than they really are. Perhaps a cultural thing, I don't know.

What appears to be happening to me is that I seem to become very mediocre in three languages. I don't have enough interaction with any of these languages. Looking for some assistance in this line of thinking I've been searching through the logs on this forum and reading what other people are up to. There seems to be two different types of long term members on this forum, and they seem to be broken into "People who are very good at one other language", and "People who are very good at lots of languages.". I seem to have found myself in a very very small group of one on this forum of "People who are crap at all languages, including their native one",

Joking aside, some people like emk and Jame29 appeare to have dedicated a significant amount of time to one language before allowing wanderlust to move them to another language. Then there is the example of Expugnator and Serpent, who are learning a large number of languages. I have flipped back and forth between these examples, but while reading Expugnators log and his working system it would appear that I don't need to dedicate to any given language and I might be able to split my time between the three I'm learning, but that I need to be more systematic in my approach.

The one thing I have learned from reading everyones log (I left no stone unturned) was that commitment to do something everyday seemed more important than time spent. In other words consistency seemed the key to getting results rather than massive amounts of time spent.

There are some really interesting methods on offer here for the language learner. Lyrics training, cheat and consolidate, wordlists, smallwhites spreadsheet srs, etc. But is there a silver bullet here?

What am I going to do? That is the question I keep asking myself. Given the limited amount of time I have available, and the severe lack of consistency which I've been learning, how can I sort myself out and accomplish my goals? I know that a habit is a thousand times more effective than motivation, so I need to create a habit. The habit of doing anki decks everytime I take my dogs out for a walk is an effective one. It is the reason I always manage to do my anki decks. It is a habit, and it feels odd not to do it when out walking the dog.

So I suppose I will continue to keep seaching for some nice habit that will more me forward. Dedication of a block of time would be best, but I cannot seem to accomplish that. Changing over to using a language on a daily basis on computer or phone would be good, and I did manage it with Italian for a few weeks, but stopped when people who were getting my emails mentioned the Italian in the reply all and other fields.

I have spent a few weeks listening to French radio talk shows while commuting, but I tend to space out and end up just thinking to myself. I'm not sure this is very effective for me, plus the fact it is on AM, longwave from France and very intermittent is annoying.

Anyway, I'll stop boring you all now. Good luck with your language learning.

[emk]

There are some really interesting methods on offer here for the language learner. Lyrics training, cheat and consolidate, wordlists, smallwhites spreadsheet srs, etc. But is there a silver bullet here?

I doubt it. There are definitely some rubber bullets and squirt guns out there, though, which barely work at all! (Not here, happily. All the methods above sound perfectly reasonable.) But as long as you avoid the really bad methods, then sometimes I suspect that all the good methods work about equally well. Iversen and I once compared the efficiency of wordlists versus SRS, for example, and it came out surprisingly close in terms of minutes per word.

In particular, I seriously doubt that my favorite methods are better than anybody else's. I mostly relied on the idea that given enough comprehensible exposure to the language, that I could eventually bludgeon my brain into doing 80% of the work for me. Call it the "brute force" approach: I really wanted to learn one language, and I just kept pounding away via exposure and conversation until my brain got with the program. (OK, admittedly, a lot of my "study" hours were really Buffy and science fiction novels, but you know, 10,000 pages is still a lot.) Can Gabriel Wyner or Benny Lewis learn a language faster than I can? Almost certainly yes. Gabriel Wyner will give you a complete road map, telling you which vocabulary to SRS at what point, and when to drop US$7,000 on a summer session at Middlebury to get those speaking skills up to C1. And I wish Idahosa Ness would talk about what he does at the intermediate and advanced level, because as far as I can tell, he does really hard-core things with sound memory training.

And even when I imitate somebody else's experiment, I don't necessary get the same results. I mean, Sprachprofi was watching a single Japanese TV show with decent comprehension after 30 days of using subs2srs. I tried the same thing with Spanish, and while I was very happy with the results, I didn't make as much progress as she did, even despite the steep renaissance-language discount I got from French. Looking at Sprachprofi's language learning results makes me feel a bit like I do when I watch these kayakers on the "Buseater" rapid. Some people are just playing in a whole different league! But that's fine: I might not get there as quickly, but I still get there if I just keep plugging away it.

What am I going to do? That is the question I keep asking myself. Given the limited amount of time I have available, and the severe lack of consistency which I've been learning, how can I sort myself out and accomplish my goals?

If you're not progressing as quickly as you'd like, take a look at what you're doing. First, are you putting in enough hours to make progress in any one language? The FSI estimates 600 classroom hours and between 360 and 480 hours of homework to reach ILR 3/3 in French or Italian, or about C1. Some people around here can probably do it faster, but then again, even Benny took a while the first time with Spanish. I probably put in almost that amount of time to get to B2, and then something on the rough order of another 500 hours for the Super Challenge.

It might help to set a goal: "I'm going to enjoy a TV series / read a novel / defend a political opinion in language X", and then just throw a lot of effort at it. Sometimes the best way to make progress is just to throw yourself at your biggest goal, and not worry overmuch about the cost.

[smallwhite]

The one thing I have learned from reading everyones log (I left no stone unturned) was that commitment to do something everyday seemed more important than time spent. In other words consistency seemed the key to getting results rather than massive amounts of time spent.

In this thread they say "Intensity is the Secret".

Time that is not spent studying contributes to forgetting and requires refreshing or even relearning. If you study 1 hour per day, then it's 1:23, 1 hour learning : 23 hours forgetting.

[Expugnator]

It took me a long while to start reaping results in Mandarin, but one thing I've always had in mind and which makes me feel better at this stage is to multi-track as much as possible. There were times when I'd spend 1 1/2 hour in Mandarin, with 30 minutes of passively watching videos, 40 minutes textbook study and the remaining miscellanea. I used to do a lot of SRS, but since I got sick of it and went for intensive reading with Pera-pera instead, I started to like the language even more. But one thing I never gave up on: working gradually on textbooks, which means I'd always have a part of the day when I'd work on resources around my level or n+1. It helps that Mandarin has so much resources that you don't risk 'wasting'/spoiling a good resource and feeling sorry for that. So, with textbooks I'd deal with words and collocations I was more or less familiar with, with reading I'd trey to acquire new vocabulary and with watching videos I'd try alternate strategies of audio+subtitles and get a feeling for the language. When I decided three different series a day was too much, I noticed I was already learning enough from 1 single series with double subtitles. So I found the current format of 20min textbook+20min reading + 10 min TV. At weekends I try to watch a different series, an entire episode a day, in a different subtitle format (only English subtitles). It is almost like a treat to myself.

Ever since Hello Talk, I can say i'm back into 90-min of daily study because I really spend a lot of time answering the many messages I receive at the app. It came up at a good timing because when I tried to write my first sentences I noticed a lot of what I intented to say came from the lines I had had access to from the TV series: I realized I knew much more of the spoken language than I had assumed. So I decided I could even try writing more complex sentences. Besides, there is the voice messages option that allows you to practice listening/speaking without the pressure of maintaining a real-time conversation. All this really works like a multi-track approach for a language that does require and deserve it. I never felt like I was neglecting the written language or the tones or the culture or the colloquial grammar or the grammar of the spoken language. I realized that even the 'business' textbooks teach a language that is fairly colloquial/conversational and that the written language has a grammar of its own, even it the vocabulary is the about the same. So I always had the feeling I was embracing the language as a whole instead of thinking that I'd just place the tip of my toes into the water and wait till it got a little less cold. I'm happy with this strategy not only because of the results in terms of learning but especially because it allowed me to feel more and more attached to the language instead of just thinking "I'm learning it because it's a big language and might be useful in the future". When one of the activities don't go well, the other activities start to suffer,like when I pick a textbook that is too hard and not exactly n+1, and so I feel more tired and even less motivated for watching the series (later the day) or reading (the following day).

Another digital mention is the app ChineseSkill. I started using HelloTalk and working on ChineseSkill consistently at the same time, and it did pay off.

[rdearman]

I'd like to thank everyone for the encouragement and wisdom you've given me in my log over the last week. Unfortunately I didn't get much of a chance to put anything into practice because I had to fly over to Poland (Poznan) for the week for a conference with some other IT people in my company. I really enjoyed my time in Poland and I can definately say that I have no interest in learning any sort of slavic language, Russian, Polish, Czech, etc. Basically they all look too hard! So I'm going to stick with Chinese.

I didn't get much done with languages while over in Poland in the hotel, other than some Hello Talk conversations I've been keeping up. These are using the three languages I study. I did have a really good time with Italian on the way back today however. It seems that there was some kind of football (soccer) game in Poznan with ACF which is the professional team from Florence. I was stuck in the line to pass through security and the entire team was lined up beside me in another queue for the detectors. I heard them speaking Italian, so I started chatting with them. I started by asking if they were a sports team. I don't watch any sports and didn't have a clue who they were. This seemed to amaze them that a male who lived in Europe didn't know every team by heart, but a couple of them enjoyed talking to me about Florence, since it was obvious I didn't have a clue about football. Some really nice fellows, one of whom must have been well known because a couple of other blokes were chanting his name (I think).

Then the fellow in the duty free, who'd been drafted in to speak Italian, got me asking him questions in English. He looked a little scared, then nodded when I showed him a photo and said "si", and was much releaved when I asked the question again in Italian. His rapidfire response meant I only understood about 70% of what he said, but I took it as a good sign that what I said, was sufficently good that he felt I could understand a fast conversation.

On the flight, I was reading a Dan Brown novel in French, and someone asked me about it. So I managed ten or fifiteen minutes of French also.

All of this brings me back to thinking that I just need to keep doing a little something in Chinese each day in order to get good. Ten years ago I didn't speak a word of French or Italian. Today I can hold a conversation with a Florentine football player, and an inquisative French lady. I'm not perfect, I'm not fluent, and I really struggle sometimes to understand, but I can get by. I remember telling my children before a trip through France that they should ask their French teacher for some food words, because if I have to order they'll eat only cheese omlets and snails because it was the only food words I knew in French. Now of course, they can have apples, and cabbage too.

So I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes being on this forum, I tend to get a complex about how slow, and poorly I am learning. But today I'm thinking that this forum is full of Premier league players, and although I'm just a 5-a-side weekend player, I can score goals too.

Another long log entry completely lacking in information about studying Mandarin. Oh well. 晚安好运!

[aabram]

It's interesting and at the same time comforting to see how others struggle with Mandarin. I've fallen off the track for time being and my Mandarin is seriously rusting just because I don't have enought time and energy to put into learning as various work related stuff has seriously intensified over past half a year. I do have trip to China coming up so I gotta find a way to do a refresher.

[rdearman]

OK, well another boring post about the work I haven't been putting into language learning. The only real language related activity I've done for the last week or two, other then read posts on this forum which doesn't really count, has been to purchase some books at Blackwells bookstore in Oxford. They have a really good selection, even in the second-hand part for French, and even a couple of good readers for Mandarin. I was a little shocked at the lack of books for Italian, in fact they only had Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano books, and I already have those. Sigh.

Still I did manage to pick up some more French books and another graded reader in Mandarin. I think I'm just burned out at the moment and I decided that I'd just watch some films and TV shows that I like. Hopefully I'll whip up a bit more enthusiasm in a week or two.