Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

12 Months of Mandarin

isaak.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 310 posts

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#41

Post by jajko »

pragmomm wrote: post #20
edent wrote: post #7

While I haven't the same proficiency, I had the same "local celebrity" experience when visiting Beijing. While it is fun at first seeing people double take and then ask to take a photo with you - it gets old fast! Mind you, I'll never tire of (partially) understanding what people say about me when they think I don't understand. One thing not mentioned is that it is often a good idea to have some formal testing. Frien…

[flagged]

To keep things polite - that's a bit over the top to call it 'ultra-nationalism' and then in nation of 1.5 billion to point out... 2 attacks altogether for last few months? That's like what, a weak school week in US in comparison?

If its there, and this is first time hearing about it for me and seemingly for others, please provide some serious proofs for such serious accusations.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#42

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

senkora wrote: post #30
vunderba wrote: post #3

I commend the author's discipline - this is a pretty standard approach. TLDR - Move as many things as possible in regular life to the target language (software, tv shows, reading, etc) to maintain the language - There is no substitute for full immersion if you have the opportunity. I learned traditional Chinese in Taiwan while I was an ESL teacher. - The power of SRS (spaced repetition system) cannot be overstated I…

I worked through “Remembering Simplified Hanzi” and my one complaint is that I wish that it were “grouped by frequency” a bit more. The way that these books work is that the first one is the most common ~1500 characters grouped by radical / component, and then the second one is the next most common ~1500 characters grouped the same way. The problem is that this means that you have to learn 1500 characters before you…

Tuttle "Learning Chinese Characters" by Matthews and Matthews is organized in the way you mention. I find it highly recommendable, although I can't compare to Heisig's book because I don't have that one.

It only has 800 characters, though. But they are the most common.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#43

Post by wenc »

alberth wrote: post #18

Different language, but I’d highly recommend Tokyo Vice as a tv show. The main actor, Ansel Elgort, learned Japanese in 1-month time. https://malaysia.news.yahoo.com/ansel-elgort-learned-japanes... Granted he probably was learning more pronunciation to say his lines. But Japanese actors on set have commented at how surprised they were in his mastery of the language off camera in such a short amount of time.

I agree with peer comment. The actor was not learning the language but the pronunciation.

In opera, singers usually sing in different languages that they don’t speak (Italian, German, French) so they learn how to pronounce.

I grew up multilingual (3 languages at home, 3 at school) so I already have a repository of phonemes in several language families that I can draw from. I can learn to to say common phrases and sound near native in a number of languages in a month. I can also mimic accents. I noticed that someone like Trevor Noah has the same ability because they grew up multilingual.

But sounding native doesn’t mean learning the language.

Japanese also has relatively simple phonology. Just have to pay attention to pitch accent. Try sounding native in a tonal language in a month.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#44

Post by vunderba »

joshdavham wrote: post #31
vunderba wrote: post #3

I commend the author's discipline - this is a pretty standard approach. TLDR - Move as many things as possible in regular life to the target language (software, tv shows, reading, etc) to maintain the language - There is no substitute for full immersion if you have the opportunity. I learned traditional Chinese in Taiwan while I was an ESL teacher. - The power of SRS (spaced repetition system) cannot be overstated I…

> The power of SRS (spaced repetition system) cannot be overstated Speaking as someone who has used Anki the last 5 years, has built and sold Anki decks and is working on implementing various spaced repetition schedulers as we speak... unfortunately its importance can absolutely be overstated. Definitely more language learners should be using an SRS, but there are lots of people who take it way too far (I have way to…

Sure - I don't think the article (or myself) are making the case that SRS is all you need - after all - its just flashcards on steroids, and nobody would make the case that flashcards are enough to become fluent in a language.

That's the same type of person who assumes you can become fluent purely through Duolingo.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#45

Post by cblum »

kentosi-dw wrote: post #12

The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated. However I can see how this might be a burden to some when it comes to entering in your own sentences. For this, I highly recommend making use of your OS's dictation (speech to text) feature. You get to practice speaking _and_ enter sentences much quicker.

I use Anki but oh did I have to learn to discipline myself. Anki’s extreme flexibility coupled with an engineer’s mind had me spending whole stretches of days or even weeks just tweaking my card templates, hoping to achieve some sort of optimal card format that will maximize my acquisition of the language (Mandarin like in the post). At some point I had enough scripts in there that I had turned it into my own Duolingo-like app.

These days I reign that impulse in and force myself to stick to simple card formats. Creating cards should take as little time as possible. The Chinese Support add-on is super useful for that by the way.

Another thing about Anki is that it can feel oppressive sometimes, because if you don’t do your reps they just pile up and it becomes a drag to clear the “debt.” Staying on top of my reps before I had a baby and life was chill was easy; now with the baby I sometimes feel like Anki takes away from the already limited time I have to expose myself to the language by reading books, watching videos, etc.

I stick to it though, since for a language that distant from the two other languages I speak, memorization work is a must.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#46

Post by pragmomm »

jajko wrote: post #41
pragmomm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

To keep things polite - that's a bit over the top to call it 'ultra-nationalism' and then in nation of 1.5 billion to point out... 2 attacks altogether for last few months? That's like what, a weak school week in US in comparison? If its there, and this is first time hearing about it for me and seemingly for others, please provide some serious proofs for such serious accusations.

[flagged]

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#47

Post by cynicalpeace »

I hitchhiked China for 3 months in 2018 after studying Chinese for 2 semesters of college beforehand.

Hitchhiking is by far one of the best ways to learn a new language. Long hours with a wide variety of individuals, mostly one-on-one. If you're young, and you're reading this, go hitchhike. It's not as safe as staying home with mom, but it's not as dangerous as people who have never done it say it is.

I "achieved intermediate fluency" during that time. But it's gone now. If you don't use it, you lose it.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#48

Post by cblum »

thatsnotmepls wrote: post #36
kentosi-dw wrote: post #12

The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated. However I can see how this might be a burden to some when it comes to entering in your own sentences. For this, I highly recommend making use of your OS's dictation (speech to text) feature. You get to practice speaking _and_ enter sentences much quicker.

I have ChatGPT create 20 sentences for a new word I want to learn, works super well with Anki. Front -> Word. Click button, shows random sentence out of 20. Back -> Word and sentence translation.

The trouble with ChatGPT is that it can produce wonky sentences sometimes, and as a learner it can be hard to validate that. Most of the time it’s great though, just need to be cautious and ideally find a way to validate the content it generates (in my case I can run it by my wife).

I use ChatGPT to check my answers to the exercises in my textbooks :)

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#49

Post by refactor_master »

Plug for this tool I’ve been using for SRS:

https://hanzihero.com/

Yes, it costs a bit of money every month, but it’s incredibly polished and fun (well, for the first couple of thousands of characters) to use. For a language with so many speakers it’s quite evident that Mandarin lacks the cultural foothold that Japanese has gained in the West. Good resources and community aimed at non-natives trying to learn are really few and far in between.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#50

Post by vunderba »

alexawarrior4 wrote: post #24
vunderba wrote: post #3

I commend the author's discipline - this is a pretty standard approach. TLDR - Move as many things as possible in regular life to the target language (software, tv shows, reading, etc) to maintain the language - There is no substitute for full immersion if you have the opportunity. I learned traditional Chinese in Taiwan while I was an ESL teacher. - The power of SRS (spaced repetition system) cannot be overstated I…

"The power of SRS (spaced repetition system) cannot be overstated" For an alternative take, there is at least some evidence that SRS is entirely unnecessary and can even hinder language learning. I know it at least is not required by first language speakers, and have also seen many examples of fluent second and third language speakers who never use SRS, or any other kind of "practiced" language acquisition such as le…

One of the points in Input Hypothesis is something I'm sure everybody would agree with:

This states that learners progress in their knowledge of the language when they comprehend language input that is slightly more advanced than their current level. Krashen called this level of input "i+1", where "i" is the learner's interlanguage and "+1" is the next stage of language acquisition.

Informally I've always called it "walking the knife's edge" - you have to be always on the slight edge of feeling uncomfortable to realize meaningful gains. I mean it makes logical sense. The brain is ALWAYS trying to optimize away through chunking/patterns/etc. so you have to be constantly challenging it.

It's the reason why there's a huge skill difference between a driver at one month vs 1 year, but a far less difference between a driver at one year vs ten years.

Post reply on HN