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

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

Postby rdearman » Sat Jul 18, 2015 5:44 pm

After a lot of excellent advice and a reminder that 8 is a lucky number in China, I've decided to learn Mandarin in 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months and 2 years before my birthday. 2+2+2+2=8

I got a lot of great advice in this thread: Realistic Plan for Learning Mandarin

My plan is to start with this:

1) Listen to Pimsleur level I, II, III
2) Learn all the Hanzi used in the Pimsleur course (I found a transcript)
3) Create ANKI flashcards with Hanzi, Pinyin, English & Audio of the Pimsleur course. (I've done lessons 1-4 already.
4) Spend 1/2 per day listening and repeating pronunciation from Pinyin Table until I've done at least 25 hours.
5) Learn stroke order and write all the Hanzi in the Pimsleur course using Stroke Order Tool write out 5 per day.

I'm depending heavily on LeoSmith's plan for Mandarin here

I've decided not to plan any further than this, although I do have a significant amount of resources, books, tapes, etc. All advice gratefully received, as well as links, hints, tips, tricks, software!

Wish me luck!


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Resource additions below
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YangYang Cheng on YouTube
Online Chinese Character to Pinyin (Vocabulary List Builder)
Calibre
Learning Chinese is Fun (Episode 1)
Introduction to Chinese Characters
Chinese Frequency Lists
Online Flashcards Texas.edu
Chinese character stroke order rules
Chinese Dictionary Lookup
Coursera Online Chinese Course
Defense Language Institute Mandarin
Growing Up With Chinese
University Page which has LOTS of links to Chinese resources available on the Internet.


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Television Shows in Mandarin
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( Say It ) 好好说!慢慢讲! Episode 1
Say It Season II Ep 1
http://www.viki.com/tv Has a lot of Mandainr, Korean and other shows which have subtitles in just about every language.

I've found some quite good food shows from Singapore like:

李囯煌 -- 香港
Food Source 3 - Episode 01 (食在好源头 3 - 第01集)

Kids Shows
childrens stories with sub-titles
大耳朵图图

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Collections of Materials
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http://web.csulb.edu/~txie/ccol/pdf/online2.htm


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Recent Finds
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https://www.iwillteachyoualanguage.com/ ... -resources
Textbooks:
http://www.hwjyw.com/textbooks/downloads/zhongwen/
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Re: Mandarin 2days, 2 weeks, 2months, 2 years

Postby rdearman » Sat Jul 18, 2015 5:45 pm

I'd put all my updates in the first page, so I wanted to make sure I kept the links!
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Re: Mandarin 2days, 2 weeks, 2months, 2 years

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Jul 18, 2015 9:17 pm

Here's wishing you luck!
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Re: Mandarin 2days, 2 weeks, 2months, 2 years

Postby rdearman » Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:37 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:Here's wishing you luck!

Cheers! I'm going to need it. :D
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Re: Mandarin 2days, 2 weeks, 2months, 2 years

Postby rdearman » Mon Jul 20, 2015 10:40 pm

Well, I am actually quite happy to see my thread got buried down on page two! It means that everyone is taking the hit to HTLAL website in good form and continuing their language learning and their logs here. I'm cuffed (as they say in England)

Not much to report with the Mandarin, however I continue to use the Anki decks with the audio sentences to drill myself daily and I've been a lot less shy about targeting native speakers and trying to speak with them when ever possible. Of course the conversations only last a sentence or two, but each time they ask me a question I don't know the answer to it forces me to go back and make sure I know the reply. Also when they say something I don't understand I get them to repeat slowly. So I'm learning all the stock phrases; "Please speak slower.", "How do you say?", etc, etc.

It is a little more fun to speak sooner, but also more frustrating. When I began to speak Italian to natives, I had a much larger grasp of the vocabulary and grammar than I do with Mandarin. But some times you have to throw caution to the wind and just go for it!

My first Monday on the new system. Yay me!
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Re: Mandarin 2days, 2 weeks, 2months, 2 years

Postby rdearman » Mon Jul 27, 2015 12:37 pm

I'm now begining to see why FX disappears for years at a time. Not had a lot of time for Mandarin, and although I've had hours and hours of commuting around the country in my car, I've not been listening to my Mandarin tapes. Honestly they are boring the Bejuesus out of me. I'm got the link from somones log (sorry can't remember who) for slow chinese podcasts. So I think I'm going to burn these on to a CD and just start listening to them.

I'm still working my anki cards both WOTD cards and the Pimsleur cards I made.

Well, off for a 3 1/2 hour drive home now, so guess I'll try to do a little Pimsleur in the car.
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Re: Mandarin 2days, 2 weeks, 2months, 2 years

Postby lorinth » Tue Jul 28, 2015 8:08 am

I've not been listening to my Mandarin tapes. Honestly they are boring the Bejuesus out of me.


In my experience it's very hard to find interesting podcasts for beginners/intermediate learners. In between the (often boring) textbook tapes and the (interesting) intermediate-ish Slow Chinese, I did not find much.

Apart from Slow Chinese, you could try:
- The Chinese Breeze graded reader series. I have used them extensively to teach myself to read - but only now, years after, am I starting to use Level 1 mp3s (shame on me!) to try and improve my listening comprehension.
- Podcasts for learners like ChinesePod, PopupChinese, ChineseLearnOnline (I use it quite a lot), iMandarinPod.
- Shows like "Growing up with Chinese" are available on Youtube, which means they can be downloaded and converted to mp3.
- There are several podcasts for kids, if you can stand the fake childish voices, such as 虹包论, 鱼森森讲故事 (can't find the link, but try any podcast app or application), 兒童之路, etc. I haven't used them much because, most of the time no transcript is available and, in my experience, such podcasts are quite difficult too - but don't trust my word: I'm hopeless as far as listening comprehension is concerned.
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Re: Mandarin 2days, 2 weeks, 2months, 2 years

Postby tarvos » Tue Jul 28, 2015 8:13 am

am I the only one who has found spoken practice invaluable for Mandarin? I really don't understand how I would have learned to speak it had I not turned out to have to live in a small town in China for four months where nobody spoke English.
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Re: Mandarin 2days, 2 weeks, 2months, 2 years

Postby rdearman » Tue Jul 28, 2015 5:19 pm

tarvos wrote:am I the only one who has found spoken practice invaluable for Mandarin? I really don't understand how I would have learned to speak it had I not turned out to have to live in a small town in China for four months where nobody spoke English.

I wish I had the same opportunity! But I do try to search out native speakers as much as possible.
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Re: Mandarin 2days, 2 weeks, 2months, 2 years

Postby rdearman » Mon Aug 03, 2015 8:17 pm

你好
我想受我会编写中文。因为我不会说中文很好而我忘掉那些文字。每周我必须实践。
===
nǐ hǎo
wǒ xiǎng shòu wǒ huì;kuài biān xiě zhōng wén。 yīn wéi;yīn wèi wǒ bù huì shuō;shuì zhōng wén hěn hǎo ér wǒ wàng diào nà xiē wén zì。měi zhōu wǒ bì xū shí jiàn。
===
Hello there
I think I'll write in Chinese. Because I do not speak Chinese very well and I forget the characters. Every week I have to practice.
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Because I don't get much of a chance to practice, I thought I would write a few simple lines in Simplified Chinese each week in my log. I'm still heavily dependant on a dictionary and google translate. But I knew 75-85% of the characters in the above, so I'm improving slowly. Any corrections about grammar or character usage are welcome.
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