sketchc89 language log - Chinese

[sketchc89]

It's not about memorizing the Chinese name for Malik, etc....it's about being able to remember names that you just heard and repeating those as needed. This becomes important when say asking for directions as those inevitably will include street and perhaps landmark names which you've never heard before.

I suppose I can see some merit to this argument. I still wish they would focus less on it. Transliterated foreign names sound different than most other Chinese words. From what I know about Glossika, they left all of these names in because they're useful for other languages. They didn't customize the course to be useful to people learning Chinese where foreign names are less common than in European languages. I wouldn't be complaining if they were using language appropriate names or places.

[sketchc89]

Recently my studying has been a lot more involved than usual. Here are the activities with approximate times:

• Anki - 40 minutes. Expect this to fall over time
• Chinesepod - 80 minutes. 4 episodes x 20 minutes to listen to the dialogue, review all expansion sentence, review the grammar, and complete the exercises. This should fall after I finish the exercise from my backlog (46 episodes left).
• GSR - 60 minutes - 3 days of 20 minutes each
• GMS - 60 minutes - 2 episodes of 20 minutes each plus 20 minutes to preread the sentences
• The Chairman's Bao - 20 minutes - guessing because I didn't time this. Read through the lesson without audio, review key vocabulary, read through with audio, review unknown words with Perapera extension, complete comprehension exercises.
• Misc - Chinese Breeze if I have time

In total that's 4 hours and 20 minutes. I'm going to have to scale back this week since I have a project on Udacity to finish.

[sketchc89]

The normal structure of GSR is: English, pause, Chinese, response. As words have been making their way through lessons, I've been trying to respond before the Chinese response. That way I'm getting some production practice as well as pronunciation/speaking practice.

The structure then becomes: English, response, Chinese, response. On longer sentences that I'm not as familiar with, I'm not able to get the first response. Some English prompts are also too ambiguous to respond to ("No, it's not" becomes 没下雨 "No, it's not raining") since GSR gets rid of the context. I find this keeps the sessions challenging so that I'm focused, and I have more chances to work out pronunciation issues. I also have a better idea of which sentences I'm having difficulty with since I'm consistently silent before the same Chinese prompt.

[sketchc89]

I found a useful forum post on chinese-forums to help practice pronunciation. The poster, Tamu, studied Chinese intensively in Taiwan for a short period and had really impressive increases in ability (other posts by him 1, 2).

He details using a tool called Praat for analyzing tones. I plan to record my voice when doing the GMS B files. Once I have the recordings, I'll try to analyze my speech and compare it to the native speaker on the track. In addition to Tamu's guide, a Hong Kong university has a website dedicated to using Praat to improve English and Chinese pronunciation.

[Axon]

I like your log! I've used Praat for tone analysis and it's really eye-opening how different your real-life tones can be from what you think you're saying.

On foreign names, like in Glossika: In my day-to-day life speaking Mandarin, I very frequently use foreign names transliterated into Chinese. Somebody asks me a question about America or an American? Foreign names. We're talking about countries and places outside of China? Foreign names. We're discussing major non-Chinese historical events? Foreign names.

Off the top of my head, I've had to render or understand in Chinese these names recently: Obama, Trump, Thatcher, Reagan, Lincoln, Dostoyevsky, California, Washington, San Francisco. Leraning how to do it on the fly is invaluable, and learning to understand it is super useful.

[sketchc89]

On foreign names, like in Glossika: In my day-to-day life speaking Mandarin, I very frequently use foreign names transliterated into Chinese. Somebody asks me a question about America or an American? Foreign names. We're talking about countries and places outside of China? Foreign names. We're discussing major non-Chinese historical events? Foreign names.

I guess I was wrong in my criticism then. Thanks for the new perspective (you too snowflake).

Status: Down to 30 Chinesepod lessons left in my backlog. Day 15-GSR 30,33,34; GMS-A 1601-1700. Anki only took 20 minutes today

[sketchc89]

I discovered a website called Wordswing through Hacking Chinese that offers a lot to those of us learning Chinese.

The first thing I tried was their tone course. The tone course tests your listening comprehension on tones. The tones are all single characters and are relatively clear. I don't think my listening comprehension of tones is that great in conversation, but I received 100/100 in recognizing these tones. During the test, I noticed that 2nd and 3rd tone were the hardest to tell apart, but I managed to catch all of the 3rd tones by catching the low raspy bit of the sound.

The website also has graded text-based adventure games that I'll write about some other time.

[sketchc89]

The Glossika lessons scheduling PDF really underestimates the amount of time in each lesson. It assumed GMS-A lessons are 15 minutes and GSR lessons are 20 minutes. In reality the GMS-A lessons instructions tell you to read over the sentences to see changes in sentence structure which takes another 20 minutes. GSR are almost always 25-30 minutes.

When tallied up this becomes 130 minutes instead of the reported 90 minutes. Currently day 18 of 147.

[sketchc89]

A great resource I mentioned in a previous post is Wordswing. Wordswing has a number of useful tools, but for this post I'm going to concentrate on their text based adventure games.

They're text based games (a.k.a. interactive fiction) where the player reads a story and interacts with that story through decisions they make in the game.
For example:
You're in a room and you see a bookshelf, a bed, and a doorway. What would you like to do?

• Go to the bookshelf and look at the contents.
• Leave the doorway
• Go to the bed

The games have better descriptions and stories than that, but hopefully you get the general idea. It's D&D-like. In one game, you're a zookeeper's assistant and you have to navigate the zoo to feed all of the animals. In another, your apartment has caught fire and you need to escape. The stories are engaging enough and the game is designed with smaller goals that keep me playing for longer.

The text is graded, in an effort to make the input comprehensible so that the game can be thought of as extensive reading (as opposed to intensive). A nice addition to some of the games is audio and audio-only mode. For people like me, who are slightly better at reading than listening, this is interesting listening practice that I can check afterwards by reading.

[sketchc89]

I just got back from a long weekend visiting friends in another city. Despite this, I was still able to get my studying done during breaks in the day and after others went to sleep. Today is day 26/147 for Glossika. Anki has just fallen below 100 cards per day after a month of no new cards.
Yesterday I got Japanese (for my sister), German, Mexican Spanish, and the other Beijing Mandarin Chinese modules (Daily Life, Travel, Business), before Glossika closed down their sales. Hopefully the new Glossika works out great, but it'll be a little while until I try it out while I work on completing the Chinese modules.