Not all those who wander are lost

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat Aug 13, 2022 2:20 pm

What is both fascinating and frustrating about Chinese is that a beginner with a background in European languages really needs to learn everything at once -- a tonal language, an unfamiliar writing system, an unfamiliar grammatical system, thousands of characters, thousands of vocabulary with very limited familiar terms, an unfamiliar culture.

I think that progress will start to snowball eventually, but right now I keep getting tempted to learn a couple of hundred new anki cards a day and spend the rest of the day shadowing Assimil.

That way lies madness.

I must hold back.

One thing that is nice is that there are tons of movies in Chinese that are available. So far I have been using the names of a couple of my "celebrity crush" actresses, Shu Qi and Zhang Ziyi to find movies. It's as good a way to break into Chinese Cinema as any.
Zhang Ziyi always reminded me of a friend of mine from back when I was at the East-West Centre in Honolulu. She was amazing to watch when she played table tennis. Back in the Mao Zedong days, she had been some sort of provincial champion as a kid in Harbin (as I remember). There was a lot of yelling and leaping through the air, which I guess reminds me of Zhang Ziyi.

She tried to teach me table tennis for a while. She said I first needed to learn one stroke with the paddle, moving the paddle through one identical arc until I could return the ball to the same place every time. Of course, I was all over the place with my returns, but I never had to move the paddle to return the ball. She always returned the ball to the exact same spot, wherever I hit it.
The exact spot.
Amazing...
6 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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RyanSmallwood
Orange Belt
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Languages: Native: English
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby RyanSmallwood » Sat Aug 13, 2022 3:42 pm

It sounds like you're off to a good start so far, there is a lot of new kinds of things to get used to with Chinese, so its good when starting out to focus in on them. Anki sentences, Assimil, and FSI all sound like great places for someone starting from 0 to draw on and form the backbone of your study and progress.

I will say that Chinese has tons of great graded learning materials starting from a vocabulary of just a hundred or a few hundred words. So while there is a lot to learn, once you start getting comfortable with the basics you can start flooding yourself with comprehensible input anytime. Obviously people will have their different opinions about what features are most critical to pay most attention to and what study method will best take care of them, and its good to play around with these and find which one works for your needs. But in terms of long term progress and enjoyment at a certain point you just gotta start finding the level-appropriate content you find interesting and just open up the firehose of Chinese learning materials and media. Once you feel situated with the language of course.
2 x

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat Aug 13, 2022 4:30 pm

There is so much material!
One thing, I am definitely not going to spend 5 years pounding anki and then wonder why I can't speak, read, and write Chinese.
I will try to keep a relatively small anki fire burning, but graded readers sound great. For a while here, I'm going to try to spend an hour a day speaking Chinese somehow. I'll be doing pronunciation drills from Assimil first and then I'll shadow Assimil, and then... :?
I've got to get some feedback on pronunciation as I go along. Chinese has a pretty alien phonology for an English speaker, and I would hate to learn an idiolect of Chinese that nobody can understand. :lol:

I've made a solid start at Mandarin, but I still would love to find a copy of that Assimil le cantonais sans peine book and audio. For now, it would have a dignified place on my bookshelf while it waits for me to get more confident in Mandarin. :lol:

Are there any suggestions about an ebook version of low reading level texts?

A really easy novel to beat my head against after a few months?

And my favorite way to break into native speaker material, romance novels in Chinese?

I am profoundly ignorant. I need to do a lot of watching and listening

I really hope I can get to China, somewhere, next summer. I'm 99% certain that we will go to the Philippines, and well, it's not that far away.
3 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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jeff_lindqvist
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
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de, es
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2773
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sat Aug 13, 2022 6:19 pm

In my log (earlier this year), I have mentioned the Youtube channel Mandarin Click, which has playlists sorted by level. The lessons are short enough, Assimil style. Maybe you'll find them useful.
1 x
Leabhair/Greannáin léite as Gaeilge: 9 / 18
Ar an seastán oíche: Oileán an Órchiste
Duolingo - finished trees: sp/ga/de/fr/pt/it
Finnish with extra pain : 100 / 100

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RyanSmallwood
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby RyanSmallwood » Sat Aug 13, 2022 6:22 pm

From what I remember about Assimil le cantonais sans peine the pronunciation of most of the speakers wasn't really standard. I never figured out what the reason was, but I wouldn't necessarily go looking for it as a great resource to copy, although it might still be helpful for boosting comprehension.

For readers, I started readers a little later in the process, so I can't personally vouch for the very low level stuff, but I hear DuChinese suggested as one of the better values, they have a bunch of free lessons you can try on their site, and then a monthly subscription service to unlock all their stuff. Its probably worth trying the free content and see if you find it helpful enough to move onto the premium. If you just prefer to buy ebooks outright over subscription models, then Mandarin Companion is another popular service for beginner materials for learning the first ~150 characters.

My personal favorite readers that I used were from Imagin8 Press though they tend to start more at a higher level. Their 30 volume reader series based on Journey to the west goes from a vocabulary of 600 - 3000, and is very extensive and interesting to read. They have some easier readers too, but not as many as other services.

If you want to really get lost in all your options there's a site called Heavenly Path that outlines a bunch of popular reading and listening options, Free and Paid, at different stages from beginner to native materials.

For native materials, lots of people start with webnovels, which are broken into short chapters and designed to be addicting, and some go on for thousands of chapters. You can often find complete audio recordings for these, for the popular ones you can even find multiple complete recordings that are hundreds of hours long and choose between which reader you like, and some will have multiple actors and music too. They also often get adapted into comics, animated tv shows, and live action shows, so if you need help visualizing what's going on you have a pick of other media options to draw on as well.
3 x

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sun Aug 14, 2022 3:11 am

I'm a long way from reading anything more than a sentence in Assimil or anki. I was just daydreaming and asking, but I don't want to sound too much like the three-year-old at a party who announces that she is going to be a brain surgeon.
4 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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jeff_lindqvist
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3135
Joined: Sun Aug 16, 2015 9:52 pm
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ga, eo
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2773
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sun Aug 14, 2022 11:32 am

sfuqua wrote:I'm a long way from reading anything more than a sentence in Assimil or anki. I was just daydreaming and asking, but I don't want to sound too much like the three-year-old at a party who announces that she is going to be a brain surgeon.


...or the genius in my Russian class who four months into the language, as a beginner, said: "Oh, this is so difficult - I had hoped to be able to read Chekhov!" :roll:
4 x
Leabhair/Greannáin léite as Gaeilge: 9 / 18
Ar an seastán oíche: Oileán an Órchiste
Duolingo - finished trees: sp/ga/de/fr/pt/it
Finnish with extra pain : 100 / 100

Llorg Blog - Wiki - Discord

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sun Aug 21, 2022 2:46 am

Well, it has been a week of revelations.

One thing I learned is that I like hanging out with 11-14 year-olds. Kids are very sane, in their puberty-crazed sort of way, and I find them refreshing from dealing with the rest of the human race. I was a Physical Education teacher and got to spend all day with kids out in the 35 degree sunshine. Whenever they would complain, I would remind them that the next hour they were going to be back in air-conditioning, while I was still going to be out in the sun. I need sunscreen and a big hat before I teach PE again.
We have a nice bunch of kids in our part of San Jose. :D

My Chinese project hit a wall. Despite their claims that everybody in my daughter-in-law's family speaks Mandarin, the truth is that they can understand a little. Maybe they can watch movies or TV, but it is definitely a foreign language to them. There is not that much point in learning Mandarin. I might as well learn French... Well, not really. My first texts in Chinese were a hit, but my daughter-in-law had to use Google Translate to understand them, Chinese school or not. Despite having a nice, 25000 card anki deck to learn Mandarin, that would have probably gotten me up to talking a little and starting to read.... I'm going to slow down the Chinese way, way down. Learning characters is too fun to drop completely. I also need to learn some polite things to say in Cantonese to everybody, at least. Let me regroup and look at Cantonese... If only they had Google Translate for Cantonese, then I could approach things the way I have approached other languages. Golly, I might have to learn other approaches to learning languages! The horror, the horror... :lol:

I have come to the conclusion that the big L1->L2 translation deck is absolute madness. Translation is much harder than speaking after a certain point. I have decided that translation, as a general language learning activity, is good for learning focused grammar points, or for learning survival phrases, but that it is an overly difficult way to get input in a language. I was spending way too long on simple Spanish sentences, trying to figure out what the point of the L1 sentence was that they wanted to be reflected in the L2.

I also was wasting time on stuff that was too easy. :shock:

Not only that, but I also figured out that I can study multiple languages on the same day, but that I really, really can't do an anki deck with multiple languages in it. It takes me a sentence or two to shift gears whenever I go from one language to another, every language shift slows me down a bunch. :o

So I parked the deck, and made a new one made up of only sentences copied from native speaker materials. Not translated books, but books originally written in my L2s. I got a bunch of sentences from García-Márquez and Pérez-Reverte and made them into L2->L1 cards, with audio of course. I also got sentences from subtitles from a bunch of movies that were on "best movies in Spanish" lists and made them into audio->L2,L1 cards, the audio being in Spanish of course. I put them together into a Spanish Native language deck. I made a very similar deck from French language sources -- sentences from books by Marc Levy and Guillaume Musso, and subtitles from movies from other "best movies in French" lists. :D

So I've got listening comprehension cards for sentences from movies and reading comprehension cards from native speaker books from French and Spanish. I hope this will help improve my comprehension in these languages. One thing I like about these decks is that they don't have a real beginning or end; I've scrambled the cards so that there really isn't an order to them, and to prevent context from helping.

I decided to start to defend my "study time" hour of the day a bit more. I've let other activities encroach on it, and I have let myself be driven into anki, because I can get anki reps in a bit at a time throughout the day. I need to spend some dedicated time each day with my book or whatever, so that I can make some real progress. I've started to use my meditation timer to set a time to read El País and Le Monde each day, trying to read them on the fly between other activities wasn't working too well. Furthermore, I also can add in some novels during this time. I like using the meditation timer app on my phone since It has nice "singing bowl" sounds to start and stop the session, much better than the squawking alarms my phone comes with for timers. I meditate, so the sound of the gong makes my brain slow down and focus. Just habit, I guess. :D

Things are pretty good here these days; so far, the fires haven't choked us here in Silicon Valley. The smoke has been going north mostly. It is sad to realise that Europe is starting to burn just like California. :(

I just hope it starts to rain soon. :D
9 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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RyanSmallwood
Orange Belt
Posts: 187
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 12:15 pm
Languages: Native: English
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby RyanSmallwood » Mon Aug 22, 2022 6:50 pm

At the risk of being annoyingly repetitive, I would strongly prioritize FSI Cantonese (and I would suggest removing the pauses) as the best way to absorb the sounds and structure of the language and I would do both listening and shadowing. Probably other sources will be more useful for learning phrases for family discussion, but I think FSI will give a really good foundation from learning from these other sources. With a good listening foundation it would be easier to follow what they're saying to each other and to pick up words useful for conversation. Of course you have to experiment figure out what works for you, but in my experience have repeatedly been that FSI materials are the great for starting a distant language.

Then I think once you get to a decent conversational level of Cantonese you can decide if you there are any intermediate resources/strategies you like, or at this point you could start drawing on some Mandarin reading resources to progress and then more easily catch your Cantonese back up. Cantonese is pretty solid in terms of beginner resources and native media, its just the intermediate phase I'm less sure of. As I said in my experience knowledge transfers pretty quickly between Cantonese and Mandarin, so you can prioritize early Cantonese conversation and then later use Mandarin for easier reading/vocab growth.

Anyways I'll try to take a break from spamming your log with advice for a while.
4 x

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Aug 25, 2022 3:47 am

I'm finding it really difficult to just stop Mandarin. I actually parked the French and Spanish decks, already. I didn't feel like I was learning enough. I just need to read and listen for a year or two with French and Spanish, and then see where I am. Just letting go of French will give me more time for Chinese. I think I have been ploughing through French mostly because of the "sunk cost fallacy," and I should just let it go.
The tremendous amount of material available for learning Chinese just amazes me, as someone who has fooled around with Irish, Norse, and Old English.
There is less material available for Cantonese than for Mandarin, but there is a ton of stuff available for Cantonese. I'm going to do the Cantonese FSI, and play with the FSI deck too... :D
Of course, I glanced at the Japanese shared decks and instantly got sucked down that rabbit hole. I have "wasted" the last two days looking at some of the beautiful decks that people have made. Japanese has even more material than Chinese, at least where I looked. And all of that media...

And there is definitely more native speaker material available for Japanese than there is for Irish. Or Norse. Or Old English... :lol:

Now, back to Cantonese.
3 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...


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