Laskeph's language log (ZH, JP, and more)

[Laskeph]

Hi all! Discovered this forum recently, lurked around, and decided to start my own language log for motivational purposes. Here we go...

Background:
Native English speaker. Cantonese heritage speaker, but English dominated my childhood and all I have left is some basic daily life vocab and mangled grammar. Took some Mandarin classes as a kid, but was very unenthusiastic about them and stopped before middle school. I retained very little knowledge from those lessons, except a working knowledge of how tones and stroke order worked. Hooray?

For now I'm primarily focusing on Mandarin Chinese, with some dabbling in Japanese. My main goal in learning any language (excepting Cantonese) is mostly reading/listening comprehension, as reading (online, books, etc) is a big part of my life and is therefore my primary use case.

Mandarin

• I've taken 2.5 years of Chinese in college so far. Based off of the Chinese Grammar Wiki & some googling, I should be around B2/HSK4 passively reading/listening, but my active speaking/writing is not that great.
• So far, I've used the Integrated Chinese series for my first two years of Chinese (I highly recommend them for beginners who want a more structured introduction to Chinese, though the dialogues might be too school-and-relationships-focused for some), and for my third year we are using Discussing Everything Chinese (vol. 1 and vol. 2). I've found DEC to be much more interesting than IC topic-wise, as it introduces more "adult" topics, such as modern Chinese society, parental views on education, current events, and so on.
• I plan to study Chinese in college for all four years. This is the one resolution I'm 100% sure I'm going to keep.
• As for studying outside of class, I use Anki on-and-off for vocabulary, and for grammar the Chinese Grammar Wiki (as mentioned above) and my teachers' grammar notes are good enough for now. For dictionaries, I swear by Pleco, and I've bought the Pro bundle, but if you're just starting out, the Basic bundle will do. It has everything from stroke order to a million dictionaries to Cantonese pronunciation (which I use to get my daily dose of "ohhh, so that's what that word in Cantonese means and/or looks like!!" /mindblown). Unfortunately, I haven't found a good desktop dictionary that I like; for now I get by with Wiktionary and Google. Eventually when my reading comprehension is good enough I'd like to switch to a Chinese-Chinese dictionary like zdic.net.
• I'm having a hard time finding suitable reading material for my level; Mandarin Companion is a little too easy and repetitive for me, and native material online is often too difficult. Harry Potter doesn't work so well because of all the wacky names. For now I have a copy of The Little Prince (小王子), which I should eventually get around to reading, and Graded Chinese Reader 1500 Words, which I haven't touched much (though the difficulty level seems just right) due to the excessive pinyin and the frustrating pinyin block-out card thing.

Cantonese
All my relatives speak Cantonese, so I'm eventually going to have to learn how to speak better. For now I'm stuck in a limbo where my Cantonese knowledge is advanced enough that I find beginner courses boring, but not advanced enough to learn effectively from dramas. As my vocabulary in Mandarin increases I expect I'll be able to make more headway in that direction. If anyone has any tips, please let me know!

Classical Chinese (文言文)

• I'm planning to take Classical Chinese this semester, for several reasons: 1) to be fluent in modern Chinese, a basic knowledge of Classical Chinese grammar is very helpful, if not mandatory; and 2) Classical Chinese isn't a language I can study easily on my own.
• Since the class is offered every two years, this is the only chance I'll have to take it. The only downside is that the prerequisite is three years of Chinese classes, and I've only had 2.5. Adding to that my mediocre speaking skills, I don't know if I'll do so well in the class (though the prof gave me permission to take it), but I know I'll regret not taking it at all. Wish me luck...
• I'll be using Classical Chinese: A Functional Approach by Li and Dew.
• Extended list of resources by Tom Mazanec.

Japanese

• I've been interested in Japanese for a while, mostly due to my interest in Japanese media, but before college, never progressed past teaching myself hiragana and katakana due to the wall that is kanji. In hindsight, I could have started learning grammar, but I never got around to it.
• Decided to start taking Japanese after two years of Chinese. (I have to say, after learning hundreds of hanzi, kanji seem infinitely less daunting. In fact, I wish we learned more kanji in class... all the hiragana makes my head hurt.) I'm halfway through a year long intro course right now, but due to the month-long winter break, I think I've forgotten most of what I've learned. Whoops!
• Currently using Nakama 1.
• Dictionaries: jisho.org and Takoboto.
• Grammar: A hodge-podge of Nakama, lecture slides, and whatever the almighty google serves up. There's also IMABI, but the sheer scale of the website makes it a little difficult to search for things.

Eventually...

• French or Italian (I took Spanish for ~6 years, don't remember a thing. But that was before I discovered my language nerdery.)
• Swedish/Finnish (??) (Umlauts are cool.)
• German

That's enough for now, time to get back to studying. I'll put my plan for the week & progress so far in my next post, but for now it's probably going to be mostly Anki reviews.

[Laskeph]

In the past few days, I've done more fiddling around with language learning tools than actually learning, whoops! I experimented with LWT, which I found pretty neat, but the word segmentation for Chinese leaves a lot to be desired. I was considering using it for Classical Chinese but I couldn't get the online dictionaries working, oh well... I also tried Chinese Text Analyser, which is much better with word delimiting and also has a brutal approach on "knowing" words, but man was it pretty cool to be able to see how much of a text I could actually understand at first glance. I think I'll be using that for any attempts at web-novel binging, heh.

Plan for the next few days before I'm back at school:

Chinese

• Consistent! Anki! Reviews! (I'm so bad at this but it's the only way I'm going to survive this semester without cramming =.=)
• Go through and mark up all of the DEC vocabulary lists: 11 / 11
• Dump said terms into Anki: 1 / 11
• Review all the different terms involving 然 and 而 and grammar/transition words
• Read through Classical Chinese ch 1 + 2: 0 / 2

Japanese

• Review adj/verb conjugations. Especially て-form. Whoo...

[Laskeph]

Did you know that Pleco has the Graded Chinese Readers on the app for US$ 9.99 each?

Do you believe that the Chinese Text Analyser is worth the 12-15 dollars? I'm trying it out now and really wish there were hotkeys for selecting known and looking up definition. Do like that it works offline while LWT needs internet to look up words.

Also Welcome to the forums xD

I did know (vaguely), but never actually looked at them and then forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me I'll have to take a look at that.

As for CTA, from what I've read, the point is to make looking up words as annoying as possible so you don't rely on the pop-up dictionary as you read (a bad habit of mine...). In fact, previous versions didn't even have the pop-up. I think the developer wanted people to make the effort to actually study the word via Anki, Pleco, etc. It's not meant to be a reader, but part of one (hence the name "Analyser") but some people on chinese-forums have been using it as one anyways. Thread linked has a bunch of info.

For selecting known words, you can double-click on a word as a shortcut, or look in the word list panel in the lower right, change to the Unknown tab, and mark as known there. I think you can also select multiple words at a time that way. Also, you can import word lists from the HSK, Pleco, etc, and have those marked as known to speed up the process.

I think it'd be useful if you like reading longer texts (LWT doesn't handle them as well, apparently), or want to be able to copy+paste in reading material and see how difficult it is quickly (instead of struggling through a mass of text). You can also take reading material and export unknown words for importing into Pleco, Anki, etc.

Personally, I've only used it for a short while, but IMO it's not too expensive (like, 2-3 bubble teas?) and seems useful. It's still in development though, and the dev works on this as a side project so updates are pretty slow.

[Laskeph]

Reading your log again and I see for Japanese grammar you don't mention Tae Kim, do you know about it? Also what made you choose that textbook and not the must loved and annoying Genki series?

Yup, I know about Tae Kim. I started and stopped reading his guide a few times; I guess I've been more into learning Chinese for now.

The only reason I'm using Nakama is that it's what my school uses for its Japanese intro course. I tried Minna no Nihongo and Genki before that, but also didn't get very far... As you can see my Japanese studying is very haphazard =.= The reason why I decided to take Japanese in college is so I actually make progress on it for once. The textbook actually isn't that bad, though it can get super expensive on Amazon... sigh.

Hopefully I'll be able to focus on languages more this semester, since I'll have a (hopefully) lighter courseload for the first time in a while.

[Laskeph]

Classes started this Wednesday, and I’ve finally found time to update.

Chinese
I’ve stopped attempting to use Anki, because every time I try to use it to keep up with vocab, I get so demotivated and distracted. I like it but I don’t think I’m using it in a way that works for me. I still need to find a way to review old vocabulary, and I’m going to look at Pleco’s flashcards as an alternative (easier to make cards and such) but I don’t know if I’ll be able to get it working the way I want it to work.

I’m slowly figuring out the best way to prep for class–each lesson requires memorizing a bunch of vocab and grammar and reading passages of text. I’ve discovered that marking up the lesson text helps a lot with comprehension. This feels like something obvious that I should have been doing already (I blame my aversion of writing in books). In the past I just marked up pronunciation, not vocab or grammar, which didn’t work so well since I figured out the meaning of each sentence as I read it but didn’t remember it after the fact. Helps a lot with class participation, too, because my brain is too fuzzy in the morning to parse long blocks of unmarked text.

Since I’m giving up on Anki, I’m planning to go back and mark up each chapter from my textbook from last term as review. It’d help me figure out what vocab I need to relearn and be good grammar review.

As for learning new vocabulary, I’m giving Iversen’s wordlist method a try since I usually write terms over and over again until I remember them anyway. The problem I had with it initially (and with the Goldlist) was the added complication of having to learn word pronunciation. Yesterday, I tried making a wordlist with some modifications. I did a cycle of characters->definition->characters->pinyin->characters, in groups of 5. Since I had some room left over, I followed that up with the definition again at the very end. Here’s a pic.

wordlist-min.jpg

I think it’s working pretty well so far for the short-term, and I like the structured approach. I haven't done any repetitions today yet though. The most important difference for me is learning in groups; it’s much more attractive than going through words one by one down a long list, especially since I get distracted easily. The only problem is that this only helps with recognition--I don’t know if I’d be able to actually use each word, but that’s more of an output/context problem than a memorizing vocabulary problem. Maybe I’ll make an “example phrase” column during/after another repetition.

Some other notes:

• I’ve been giving Clozemaster another try, mostly thanks to ロータス’s log (I can only aspire to be half as productive…) I tried it a long time ago and didn’t like it that much for some reason, but now I have a better idea of how to study with it. So far it’s been good review for grammar patterns and vocab. I’m not sure how useful it’ll be for increasing my vocabulary, though; the SRS is kinda wonky and I wish I could pick the HSK level of the words I want to learn. Anyway, it's better than not reading anything outside of class at all.
• Although my main goal is to be able to read native material, I’ve realized that I really need to work on my speaking and writing skills. For writing, I’m considering using Lang-8, but I’m not sure what I’d write about. I’m going to try and get some speaking practice in during class/office hours, but I wish I had a language partner or something.
• I found a TV series on book reviews in 8 minutes called 《开卷8分钟》. The first episode I watched (partially) was this one. What the host says in the first two minutes or so is harsh but true… (In sum: many readers say they have the problem of lack of time to read. He thinks that lack of time isn’t the problem; if they actually loved reading, they would find time to read. In actuality, reading isn’t as important to them as they think it is.) I complain about not having enough time to read books but I didn’t read any books over winter break (though I read a ton of stuff online). I guess I’m not much of a novel person anymore.

Japanese
I’ve still been neglecting Japanese, unfortunately. Despite my month-long break, I haven't forgotten everything I've learned. Things are slowly coming back, but I still need to review. Now that the weekend’s here, I’m going to properly sit down and study the current chapter and try to apply what I’ve figured out for Chinese. Also, I have a short essay to write. Fun times. (After this one, my next assignment is to write about my favorite restaurant. I don’t eat out much. I guess I’ll have to be extra creative...)

Anyway, this semester is looking much better than the last. I'm hoping it'll stay this way.

[Laskeph]

Long time no update.

So a few hours after my last post, I got sick, and stayed that way for over a week. Fun times. Then I started drawing again for the first time in half a year and now all my free time is going towards that... and then some.

Anyway, I don't have much to say. Due to assignments and such I haven't had the time nor motivation to work on things outside of class (much). But one good thing is that I've been practicing speaking more with teachers and people. Hopefully I can at least keep that up. I need to go out more...

This week I had an oral presentation for Chinese, and we had to present some ad we found interesting, and I picked this one. It's an ad for tissue paper.



For some reason Asian countries (esp. Thailand, apparently) really like pulling people's heartstrings in their ads, even ads for things like banking. They're certainly more memorable, but I wonder if people have the patience to sit through 3-7 min long ads...

Anyway, since the ad I picked is Taiwanese, there are some vocabulary differences:
阿嬷 - grandmother (mainland: 奶奶, etc)
卫生纸 - tissues (mainland: toilet paper; facial tissues would be 面巾纸）(I wonder if my teacher was wincing internally every time I said "toilet paper" during my presentation, haha...)

I also finally read past the first page of The Little Prince (in Chinese) and marked up all the words I didn't know, which is (sadly) a lot. Luckily most of the words I could guess the meaning of. I'm only a few pages in but it seems doable if I don't pause on every unknown word. Maybe I'll manage to finish it by the end of the school year...?

I've still been neglecting Japanese, unfortunately. But I did have an epiphany one night at 3 AM where I was like "ganbatte (do your best) is the te-form of ganbaru! wow!" So I guess I'm making some progress

Oh and one more thing. Today one of my vocabulary words was 勉强, mian3 qiang3 in Mandarin and benkyou in Japanese. Turns out their meanings are very different.
Chinese: reluctant, to force someone to do something.
Japanese: to study, diligence.

Or maybe those meanings aren't so different after all