Rachel's Morning and Evening Language Log (Korean, Mandarin, Classical Chinese)

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RachelMeier
Yellow Belt
Posts: 67
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2018 3:12 pm
Languages: Currently Studying: Korean (Intermediate) KSL (Beginner) Mandarin (Beginner) Danish (Beginner) Classical Chinese (On Hold)

Interested in: Mongolian, Finnish, Turkish, Russian.

Previously Studied: Latin, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Turkish
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... p?p=165080
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Morning, October 12 2018

Postby RachelMeier » Fri Oct 12, 2018 10:56 am

First morning log in a while!

Nothing in Korean

Classical Chinese

- one headlist

Mandarin

-1 HelloChinese review session

Tamil Prep for Language Jam

I checked out a few of the alphabet YouTube videos that the Language Jam creator recommended, they look pretty good. I also ordered some Midori Lights to use as my notebook for the challenge but I don’t know if they’ll get here in time? Ah well. Just trying to figure out how the alphabet is put together right now so I’m not super confused when I start studying on Sunday. Yes, I’m actually moving everything up a day early and then also doing the challenge for 4 days starting Thursday, not 3. I’m going to a party next Saturday night and then probably a concert on Sunday afternoon so that’s 6 hours I won’t have to participate. The concert is still a question mark though since I would most likely be going by myself, but it’s not a composer I’m super excited about so my motivation to go is kind of lacking. IDK, maybe I will skip out...

Goals for the rest of the day:

-full unit of bâ structures in Hello Chinese
-5 pages of Nirvana in Fire
-Pimsleur Mandarin V.25
-add 2 Tamil Anki decks

I think I’m pretty much done with Tamil prep otherwise for now, I have wanted to study it for a while so I already had a few materials. I printed out the alphabet sheets, I found 3 different Memrise courses, I have a textbook and access to the Mango course, I’ve reviewed the quality of the alphabet youtube videos... I think I’m good to go to begin learning the alphabet on Sunday. Really hope I can achieve my goal of 250 words and gaining a good grammar foundation with this challenge.
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atcprunner
White Belt
Posts: 14
Joined: Mon Oct 03, 2016 3:04 pm
Location: Beijing
Languages: English (N), Mandarin (C1), French (B2), Spanish (B2), Russian (B1), German (B2), Old English, Latin
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=4381
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Re: Rachel's Morning and Evening Language Log (Korean, Mandarin, Classical Chinese)

Postby atcprunner » Sat Oct 13, 2018 6:56 am

Just perusing your log here as there aren't that many people who come up in the "Classical Chinese" search.

What resources are you using for Classical Chinese right now. Are there any online ones or YouTube videos you've been using? I went through the first few units on this website here: https://www.stanford.edu/group/chineset ... -bin/site/
Unfortunately I stopped about two years ago. I'm looking to jump back into it.

I'll be looking into "The Rise of the Phoenixes" thanks to your log. I'm surprised I didn't hear about that. I live in China.
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SC French Books Full: 29 / 100
SC Spanish Books Full: 13 / 100
SC German Books Full: 36 / 100
SC Russian Books Full: 0 / 100
SC Mandarin Books Full: 0 / 100

RachelMeier
Yellow Belt
Posts: 67
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2018 3:12 pm
Languages: Currently Studying: Korean (Intermediate) KSL (Beginner) Mandarin (Beginner) Danish (Beginner) Classical Chinese (On Hold)

Interested in: Mongolian, Finnish, Turkish, Russian.

Previously Studied: Latin, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Turkish
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... p?p=165080
x 120

Re: Rachel's Morning and Evening Language Log (Korean, Mandarin, Classical Chinese)

Postby RachelMeier » Sat Oct 13, 2018 10:34 am

atcprunner wrote:Just perusing your log here as there aren't that many people who come up in the "Classical Chinese" search.

What resources are you using for Classical Chinese right now. Are there any online ones or YouTube videos you've been using?



I have been studying with Chinese Through Poetry by Archie Barnes and I also recently added the compilation Poems of the Masters for some extra reading practice. I’m using the Goldlist method right now because strict memorization has not worked for me in the past. After that I will study the book Barnes recommends, A Little Grammar of Tu Fu by Hawkes (?) and then I will finally start to tackle prose with Rouzer’s book.

Rise of the Phoenixes didn’t get great ratings in China which is probably why you didn’t hear about it. The book it’s adapted from is by an author who had a hit adaptation earlier this year (Legend of Fuyao) and it’s supposedly set in the same world but Phoenixes didn’t really include any of the fantasy elements that Fuyao spent a lit of time on so they weren’t able to capitalize on the fanbase. Well, this is what they were saying on my Cdrama blog anyway. I still think it’s great though haha.
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atcprunner
White Belt
Posts: 14
Joined: Mon Oct 03, 2016 3:04 pm
Location: Beijing
Languages: English (N), Mandarin (C1), French (B2), Spanish (B2), Russian (B1), German (B2), Old English, Latin
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=4381
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Re: Rachel's Morning and Evening Language Log (Korean, Mandarin, Classical Chinese)

Postby atcprunner » Sat Oct 13, 2018 12:21 pm

I just ask my friend of mine who tends to binge watch the most popular shows. I think that month everyone was watching Ruyizhuan 如懿传 like crazy. I'll be looking into it.

How are you liking the gold list? I haven't honestly tried it because I don't want to write in anything but the target language when I study. Flashcards were useful for me if I made them myself with paper. I had to write them out, otherwise there wasn't enough for me to remember the card.

Literary Chinese is sounding really attractive right now. Keep logging away!
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SC French Books Full: 29 / 100
SC Spanish Books Full: 13 / 100
SC German Books Full: 36 / 100
SC Russian Books Full: 0 / 100
SC Mandarin Books Full: 0 / 100

RachelMeier
Yellow Belt
Posts: 67
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2018 3:12 pm
Languages: Currently Studying: Korean (Intermediate) KSL (Beginner) Mandarin (Beginner) Danish (Beginner) Classical Chinese (On Hold)

Interested in: Mongolian, Finnish, Turkish, Russian.

Previously Studied: Latin, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Turkish
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... p?p=165080
x 120

Re: Rachel's Morning and Evening Language Log (Korean, Mandarin, Classical Chinese)

Postby RachelMeier » Sat Oct 13, 2018 9:51 pm

atcprunner wrote:How are you liking the gold list?


I enjoy it simply because it is a low stress way to study. I have studied Classical Chinese with Skritter and Anki and just found that the learning curve for me was so great that the same things coming back to me every day was really destroying my love of studying. Goldlist is just a lot more forgiving. Since for right now I am studying Classical Chinese purely for pleasure it’s the perfect method for me. It’s hard to quantify “results” exactly using the method unfortunately so it may not work for a lot of people.
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RachelMeier
Yellow Belt
Posts: 67
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2018 3:12 pm
Languages: Currently Studying: Korean (Intermediate) KSL (Beginner) Mandarin (Beginner) Danish (Beginner) Classical Chinese (On Hold)

Interested in: Mongolian, Finnish, Turkish, Russian.

Previously Studied: Latin, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Turkish
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... p?p=165080
x 120

Celebration Post!

Postby RachelMeier » Fri Oct 19, 2018 4:54 am

On Thursday, October 18, 2018, I finally finished all 5 levels of Pimsleur Mandarin! It’s been a hard slog, giving up my podcasts for basically a year, but I received back the effort I put in in terms of pronunciation and getting used to Mandarin sentence patterns. I have a few different places I could go next with studying, but for the next few weeks primarily I’ll be celebrating my official graduation into unlimited Chinese dramas!

In Language Jam news I am Absolutely Despairing over Tamil pronunciation! My ambitiious goal of 250 words has been rapidly reduced to 100 lol. Next time I don’t think I’ll do the option for a nonwestern script because that’s been a headache too. Very cool, but a headache nevertheless.
5 x

RachelMeier
Yellow Belt
Posts: 67
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2018 3:12 pm
Languages: Currently Studying: Korean (Intermediate) KSL (Beginner) Mandarin (Beginner) Danish (Beginner) Classical Chinese (On Hold)

Interested in: Mongolian, Finnish, Turkish, Russian.

Previously Studied: Latin, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Turkish
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... p?p=165080
x 120

Morning Oct 23 2018

Postby RachelMeier » Tue Oct 23, 2018 11:18 am

Quick update as I need to head to work a little early today.

Mandarin: Yesterday I finally started reading (once again) John Francis’s Beginning Chinese Reader. It’s absolutely amazing to me how much I absorbed during my Pimsleur lessons and my goldlist experimenting because when I picked up this book one year ago it was like pulling teeth. Now I feel I am really understanding and actually *reading* the dialogues. Bless the free audio from Seton and thank goodness I pulled it in time before Itunes university went completely defunct. I used Audacity to scrub some of the annoying static with actually really good results. If I had the time I would love to create sentence by sentence files from the course or perhaps a big anki course but it doesn’t seem like these materials are popular enough to make it worthwhile for others or myself.

Korean: Ever since I gave up on Volume III for this year my Nirvana in Fire reading has been very sadly lacking. Tried to get back into it this morning and read about 4 pages. If I get in two more pages I can be caught up for the week, then maybe tomorrow I can start engaging with my vocab diary again.

Classical Chinese: I am starting to really miss goldlisting and hope I can get back into it this evening.

Thoughts on Language Jam: Well, I ended up being much too busy this past weekend to even do anything at all on Sunday. Tamil resources using only the Tamil alphabet are extremely hard to find and doing the little studying I did for makes me super grateful for my Korean resources and for TTMIK. It surprises me Tamil is not on the list with Korean and Mandarin as a super hard language because so far it seems to me much more challenging than both of them, esp. the pronunciation. It makes me wonder about the perspective of the creators of super-hard list and how much bias there was in creating it towards languages that English or American learners have had more interaction with. But perhaps once you learn how to deal with the alphabet (or learn to simply give up on the alphabet?) Tamil is much easier than it seems. For now Tamil is still on my maybe list and I hope I find some better resources for it in the future, including some actual recordings. If I do language jam again I will do a Latin alphabet language, there’s just not time to learn a new alphabet and actually study with it in one weekend.

Hopefully this is the beginning of me logging again, now that work has calmed down a bit and I am almost done with a few of the books I was reading.
1 x

RachelMeier
Yellow Belt
Posts: 67
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2018 3:12 pm
Languages: Currently Studying: Korean (Intermediate) KSL (Beginner) Mandarin (Beginner) Danish (Beginner) Classical Chinese (On Hold)

Interested in: Mongolian, Finnish, Turkish, Russian.

Previously Studied: Latin, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Turkish
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... p?p=165080
x 120

Midday Update Oct 29

Postby RachelMeier » Mon Oct 29, 2018 7:35 pm

Well, my logging has been petering out significantly for some time. This year I am doing NaNoWriMo again so may be stuck with weekly updates on here for a while. I am going to be paring back to essentials for the next month so language learning will basically be confined to:

Korean--Nirvana in Fire reading, Spongemind podcast, Daily Korean convo if I have time.

Mandarin--Beginning Chinese Reader by DeFrancis, may begin listening to the audio for Beginning Chinese.

Still sadly have no clue when if ever I will begin my goldlisting again.
1 x

RachelMeier
Yellow Belt
Posts: 67
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2018 3:12 pm
Languages: Currently Studying: Korean (Intermediate) KSL (Beginner) Mandarin (Beginner) Danish (Beginner) Classical Chinese (On Hold)

Interested in: Mongolian, Finnish, Turkish, Russian.

Previously Studied: Latin, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Turkish
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... p?p=165080
x 120

Re: Rachel's Morning and Evening Language Log (Korean, Mandarin, Classical Chinese)

Postby RachelMeier » Fri Jul 19, 2019 12:00 pm

Finally figured out my password!

Planning to restart logging here again—excited! Except I may get out of the habit when I go on my retreat week after next.

This morning:

20 min Nirvana in Fire (4 pgs)

20 min Beginning Chinese Reader: Ch 31 dialogues

Current goals:

2 chapters of the DeFrancis readers per week until I finish them. I want to finish in them exactly 1 year so I have 16 “save” weeks where I only need to do 1 chapter. I’ve been doing 2 chapter a week for about a month now already.

1-2 chapter of Nirvana in Fire per week. I already purchased “Winds in Chang Lin”, hoping to finish up the first one in the next month and a half. 180 pages left!

Nice to see you all again!
3 x

AndyMeg
Blue Belt
Posts: 633
Joined: Sat Jan 28, 2017 2:44 pm
Languages: Spanish (N), English (B2-C1), Japanese (A2-B1), Korean (Lower Intermediate?)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 02#p201902
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Re: Rachel's Morning and Evening Language Log (Korean, Mandarin, Classical Chinese)

Postby AndyMeg » Fri Jul 19, 2019 12:22 pm

Welcome back!
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Beyond The Story 10 Year Record of BTS Korean version: 36 / 522


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