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12 Months of Mandarin

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Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#121

Post by watwut »

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.

Importance of SRS system definitely can be overstated. You can learn language without them and depending on your personality, they oftentimes turn into demotivating tiring drag that wastes your effort. If you like it, it is perfectly fine to use it, but if you don't, there is really no reason to force it.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#122

Post by owenpalmer »

naniwaduni wrote: post #114
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.

> The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated. This is definitely an overstatement. It is a useful tool for the specific purpose of blindly memorizing associations. This is a hurdle people frequently run into when deciding to learn a language, but it's a pretty tight problem to be having and SRS is not like, critical.

> It is a useful tool for the specific purpose of blindly memorizing associations.

Then you're not using Anki correctly.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#123

Post by pessimizer »

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…

> For an alternative take, there is at least some evidence that SRS is entirely unnecessary and can even hinder language learning.

I do not believe that the above is an alternative take. Most people who do SRS pair it with tons of comprehensible input. Also, a lot of takedowns on SRS tend to actually be takedowns on memorizing 1:1 translations of words at all which is all they assume people do with SRS. I've never done those, because I think word lists are bad and 1:1 translations from L1->L2 are bad because they are always wrong (languages are different, not substitution ciphers.) I almost only deal in complete sentences in SRS, and clozes.

There's also a piece of advice given by David Parlett in an old book about learning languages straight from possibly incomplete printed grammars and native or anthropological recordings: "learn the hard stuff first." There are some things about languages that are central, complex, and should just be learned by rote. Romance conjugations are some of those things. Using SRS to learn how to conjugate reflexively and automatically in Spanish (after probably 50K card reviews) was the best thing I could have done to open up a world of comprehensible input.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#124

Post by rafeyahmad »

cmuguythrow wrote: post #74

I’ve been learning Mandarin via Comprehensible Input (CI) for about 9 months and really admire OP’s dedication and consistency. In the first 4-5 months of being truly consistent with ~1hr a day of Anki and Peppa pig I got to around 2,000 words and was able to have a great experience when I traveled to Taiwan, so I can vouch for the core methodology in this post. It’s not “easy”, but it’s definitely the most effective…

Your project is very interesting. Thanks a lot!

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#125

Post by hintymad »

subarctic wrote: post #91
hintymad wrote: post #80

A side topic, for those who have acquired Mandarin, do you think Chinese is a really easy-to-learn language in the long run? Yes, learning all the characters has a steep learning curve, but once one passes that stage, it's all about combination of the characters. That Chinese's grammar is heavily influenced by modern English also helped. I feel that the grammatical similarity between English and Chinese is closer tha…

Is it similar to English? The one thing I remember is there's no tenses or gender.

That's the simplified part. Otherwise, the basic structure of the two languages is subject + verb + object. A lot of semantics are constructed with the help of adverbs and particles without verb conjugations. For example, in English we say I have done that, and in Chinese we say 我做了(Or in Taiwan style，我有做了，which is even closer to English, though I'm not sure if that's from Japanese's やったことがありません). In contrast, in Spanish we'd say Lo he hecho - different sentence order, and tons of verb conjugation.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#126

Post by grecy »

jmyeet wrote: post #84
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…

So ~20 years ago I went to Kuala Lumpur. For those not knowing where or what that is, it's the capital city of Malaysia with a population of ~1.8 million people. It once held the title for the world's tallent building (ie the Petronas Towers). So this is a modern city not that far from Singapore. I happened to catch a train to one of the shopping centers while I was there so this was the mass transit system in a rela…

> his son has never seen a white person before

I drove a 4x4 right around Africa from mid 2016 to mid 2019.

It was quite common in West Africa to drive into a village where the kids would run away terrified and the adults would explain the kids had never seen a white person before, and they thought I was a ghost.

I drove across an international border where the border guard had been working for 3 years and had never seen a foreigner.

It's fun getting off the map.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#127

Post by segmondy »

Dude is not your average human tho. Read their about page.

In the recent past:

    I skipped out of high school in rural Austria to graduate early

    In a gap year, I spun up a $1M non-profit and ran the most viral tech conference of the year, featuring Sam Altman, Daniela Amodei, 3Blue1Brown, Veritasium and more.

    Worked through 4000 papers and self-taught roughly an undergrad's worth of biology in a year, then cold-emailed myself into Oxford to do neuroimmunology

    Self-taught Mandarin in a year to fluency

    Got interested in math and did a math undergrad at Berkeley in two years

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#128

Post by rahimnathwani »

If you're doing all these things already, but want something for learning to write characters, Skritter is the best thing I know of.

I used it many years ago (on a Windows PC using a Wacom tablet). Now my son is using the more modern iPad version.

It uses spaced repetition, and you can ratchet up the difficulty as needed. In the default mode, for each stroke you make correctly, it will perfect its shape and position. This often results in an inadvertent hint. You can turn it off so it only ever shows the strokes exactly as you wrote them.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#129

Post by biesnecker »

hintymad wrote: post #80

A side topic, for those who have acquired Mandarin, do you think Chinese is a really easy-to-learn language in the long run? Yes, learning all the characters has a steep learning curve, but once one passes that stage, it's all about combination of the characters. That Chinese's grammar is heavily influenced by modern English also helped. I feel that the grammatical similarity between English and Chinese is closer tha…

Chinese grammar only really seems like English in the beginning. It diverges fairly aggressively from intermediate onwards.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#130

Post by fragmede »

Baeocystin wrote: post #113
hangonhn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to leave Beijing and especially Shanghai and head farther inland to regain your celebrity status! I (ethnic Chinese) went to China with two friends from Texas in the early 2010s. One of them has long blonde hair. She was never stopped in Shanghai, a couple of times in Beijing, but in Chengdu, they were just so amazed by her and her husband (but mostly her and her long blonde hair). People wanted to take pict…

I (white, blonde and green-eyed at the time) spent a lot of my childhood in SE Asia and southern China in the late 70s/early 80s. Once we got to the smaller, interior towns, we had to be really careful with our movement, as we could attract dangerously large crowds just by going to the morning market or the like. The vast majority of people were just curious, and I have a lot of happy memories of smiles and connectio…

You were going to get killed for being white in the wrong place?
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