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12 Months of Mandarin

isaak.net

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Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#181

Post by TheEzEzz »

jcla1 wrote: post #152
wantsanagent wrote: post #138

I don't care about learning Mandarin, I want to find out how this guy's motivation system works and then download it into my brain. Doing a PhD and learning Mandarin as a side project ?! Doing hours of Anki practice and new note taking, some of it while running on a treadmill? There's just a crazy amount of drive (and what sounds like an epic memory) here. I don't think people consider base motivation enough when thi…

Do not underestimate the urge to procrastinate (by still doing productive things, like learning Mandarin) while pursuing a PhD. I am not sure if this will be the author's experience too, but pursuing a PhD will often leave you exhausted without any hope of ever finding "the final missing ingredient" to solve the problem you are currently tackling. So turning to entirely unrelated problems, however productive they may…

I wrote my own dynamic keyboard layout to optimize typing speed while procrastinating on my dissertation.

15 years later I'm still using it. My dissertation not so much.

Procrastination is (sometimes) awesome.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#182

Post by aidenn0 »

Balgair wrote: post #117

For those of you like me that had never heard of Bloom's 2 Sigma effect : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem "Bloom's 2 sigma problem refers to the educational phenomenon that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment." Um, what?! Why the hell am I not doing this for myself?

Every single person I know who graduated college before 20 had a significant amount of their primary and/or secondary education somewhere along those lines. Sure, they were all also of above average intelligence, but most of them by not more than about 1 standard deviation.

The schools around here are moving in a diametrically opposed direction to mastery learning by making sure every student is in the same class regardless of past performance (no honors classes, no remedial classes, no testing into advanced math &c.). The result was entirely predictable to pretty much everybody except the administrators who came up with this policy.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#183

Post by gljiva »

msvan wrote: post #174

I kind of see myself from ten years ago in this blog post! I also obsessively studied Mandarin Chinese in my late teens for the sheer fun of it, before doing a math undergrad. I even wrote comments on Hacker News about it a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622940 . At the time I had seemingly limitless motivation for grinding away on flashcards and other learning materials. My progress was strong and…

Interesting. I had the impression that Chinese will likely become very useful during our lifetimes... With the momentum their economy has, I expect knowledge of both English and Chinese to become a very sought out skill

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#184

Post by Barrin92 »

wantsanagent wrote: post #138

I don't care about learning Mandarin, I want to find out how this guy's motivation system works and then download it into my brain. Doing a PhD and learning Mandarin as a side project ?! Doing hours of Anki practice and new note taking, some of it while running on a treadmill? There's just a crazy amount of drive (and what sounds like an epic memory) here. I don't think people consider base motivation enough when thi…

I think an increasingly big difference isn't so much drive as it is sort of the inverse, lack of distraction. A lot of people's attention is just permanently dispersed. What's very effective is just cut all low quality or non necessary media or apps out of your life or limit them to say 15 minutes a day.

Then when you have inevitably nothing to do you can either throw in 10 minutes of doing anki flash cards or doing nothing, and that'll lower the bar to learn immensely. If I had to guess one thing that Isaak doesn't do is scroll for hours through newsfeeds or TikTok. With myself and most people I know that's by far the biggest thing to eat time.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#185

Post by chairmansteve »

TheEzEzz wrote: post #181
jcla1 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not underestimate the urge to procrastinate (by still doing productive things, like learning Mandarin) while pursuing a PhD. I am not sure if this will be the author's experience too, but pursuing a PhD will often leave you exhausted without any hope of ever finding "the final missing ingredient" to solve the problem you are currently tackling. So turning to entirely unrelated problems, however productive they may…

I wrote my own dynamic keyboard layout to optimize typing speed while procrastinating on my dissertation. 15 years later I'm still using it. My dissertation not so much. Procrastination is (sometimes) awesome.

Dynamic keyboard layout?

What is that? The keys change place?

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#186

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

gljiva wrote: post #183
msvan wrote: post #174

I kind of see myself from ten years ago in this blog post! I also obsessively studied Mandarin Chinese in my late teens for the sheer fun of it, before doing a math undergrad. I even wrote comments on Hacker News about it a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622940 . At the time I had seemingly limitless motivation for grinding away on flashcards and other learning materials. My progress was strong and…

Interesting. I had the impression that Chinese will likely become very useful during our lifetimes... With the momentum their economy has, I expect knowledge of both English and Chinese to become a very sought out skill

tarrifs and other measures within the US and EU seem to be going the opposite direction.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#187

Post by _lvbh »

kulahan wrote: post #83
_lvbh wrote: post #2

This is really impressive. Its not an easy language > 1 hour of Chinese content before sleep, e.g. anime dubs or books There are also anime (donghua) originating entirely in China. I think those might be more helpful than Anime dubs since the content fits better with the language. Swallowed Star, 斗罗大陆, and 一人之下 are pretty fun.

I've come across so many donghua that seem really cool, but the English translations are just so bad . Could be a cool way to get a little further into their culture.

I think immerison is a pretty good way of learning a language. When consuming content without crutches like subtitles, you take in a lot more. I basically learnt Hokkien over the past few years by just listening to people speak it a ton and trying to match the context.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#188

Post by famouswaffles »

kjellsbells wrote: post #168

This is impressive and inspiring. Not to detract at all from his dedication, but it really helps that there are so many content/resources in the target language: news, kids shows, anime, tutors, emigrant diaspora. As a side quest, look at another reputedly-hard language like Vietnamese, where there is not nearly so much. As an example, Google and Microsoft Translator apps speak different variants of Vietnamese (North…

You should try any of the SOTA LLMs (4o, Claude, Gemini) for translation rather than Google/Microsoft Translate. They are much better.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#190

Post by nojs »

msvan wrote: post #174

I kind of see myself from ten years ago in this blog post! I also obsessively studied Mandarin Chinese in my late teens for the sheer fun of it, before doing a math undergrad. I even wrote comments on Hacker News about it a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622940 . At the time I had seemingly limitless motivation for grinding away on flashcards and other learning materials. My progress was strong and…

Passing HSK 6 is hard, congrats.

Instead of seeing it as a massive grind, you could integrate it into your life in small ways e.g. conversing with native speakers, reading some of your daily content in Chinese, etc. You'd get the skill back essentially for free, and enjoy it more.

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