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12 Months of Mandarin

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Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#221

Post by komali2 »

trhway wrote: post #153
seper8 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noone goes without sleep for three days and doesnt pay a severe heavy price for it. Stop it with that dumb sleep machismo...

Man, have you ever been 20smth years old? Do you really remember it as the time when you were thinking about "heavy price" beforehand and were suppressing your "machismo"?

Yes, yes, and yes? People use youth to excuse all sorts of unhealthy behavior. Some of my friends smoked cigarettes but most of us didn't because why would we harm ourselves on purpose like that?

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#222

Post by naming_the_user »

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…

For what it's worth I've been through periods of this multiple times with different things and it never really feels like discipline is required (aside from on some _really_ busy days), you just want to do it if you're actually interested.

I likely couldn't force myself to learn, say, Spanish, if I tried despite it being technically far easier. It's just not interesting to me in the same way.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#223

Post by refactor_master »

comboy wrote: post #109
refactor_master wrote: post #49

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 real…

Do they have anything in common with Mandarin Blueprint? It seems to use very similar mnemonics. How far did the tool get you?

I haven’t used Mandarin Blueprint so I can’t say. I think the mnemonics of Hanzi Hero are a bit hit or miss. They’re sometimes overly detailed compared to Wanikani which I’ve also used (for Japanese), which makes them just as hard to remember as the characters themselves sometimes.

Overall the SRS and the polish took me to about 1200 characters in 6 months.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#224

Post by schubart »

cyberpunk wrote: post #136
haliskerbas wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel similar to how the parent commenter feels, but describe it using different words. Therapists and psychiatrists will use similar language, dopamine, motivation, and executive function. How do you recommend one does this? > I strongly recommend trying to break it I currently try to hack my main activities to prevent myself from being too lazy to do them. Would be happy to hear your suggestions!

I spent many years as a basically spoiled over-paid developer, sitting around with effectively unlimited resources for distraction and definitely, it took some conditioning to recover from it. It's really not something I can easily recommend, but completing 75hard had quite a significant impact on my approach to a lot of things, and I'm extremely fortunately to have done it. I also practice zazen quite intensively bu…

For anyone else wondering:

https://andyfrisella.com/blogs/articles/what-is-75-hard

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#225

Post by baybal2 »

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…

[dead]

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#226

Post by latentsea »

jdkoeck wrote: post #218
latentsea wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that lots of Chinese already speak English, and their Chinese is better, so I don't ever see a large market for mandarin skills in non-native speakers on the same scale as English.

There are very few Chinese speaking English, actually. Go there and you’ll see.

There's lots of you include the diaspora. Way more so than non-native mandarin speakers.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#227

Post by 105424 »

I would be very interested in the ANKI megadeck. I have spend quite some time cleaning up and testing out different ANKI decks in Chinese and i need quite a motivated day to extend or create new ones.

I had a similar "local celebrity" experience while traveling with another dutch person around Hubei, people would ask us for pictures at stores because we where the first foreigner to ever be there. Interestingly i thought it was quite positive as i felt the interest of people was a mix between curiosity and excitement to show of their culture while my friends experience was quite negative as he thought the interest was coming from prejudice or negativity.

Great example of how 2 people experiencing the same thing can have very different take always and how what you bring to a place is usually what you get back from it.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#228

Post by accurrent »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #169
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…

Having something to procrastinate on is half the reason I’m going to grad school while working full time. It truly is an excellent hack.

Same here. I don't know how to fix my PhD, so let me just make my sponsor's code run faster and make a hundreds of open source PRs...

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#229

Post by mettamage »

crazygringo wrote: post #178
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…

> Today my Chinese is absolutely unusable Something similar happened to me -- did intensive Mandarin study in college followed by a summer in Beijing being totally immersed. Was incredible. Then continued with a language course back home, and watched as my vocabulary shrank -- something like 4 hrs/wk. of class (with homework on top) couldn't even maintain my Mandarin, much less improve it. Today I can't understand a…

I know a bit of Italian and I found out that if I think hard enough there are cognates! Or, at least, something close to it anyway. I used your example of fingir/fingere and asked ChatGPT. See for yourself:

Me:

Is there a word in English that looks like fingir and is related to "to imagine"?

ChatGPT:

The English word "feign" is related to the Spanish word "fingir." Both words share a common Latin root, fingere, meaning "to shape" or "to form." While "feign" often means pretending or giving a false appearance, it can be connected to "imagine" in the sense of fabricating or creating a scenario in the mind. So, "feign" might be what you're looking for!

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#230

Post by laurentlb »

hintymad wrote: post #71
lxe wrote: post #68

I don't think I can do SRS. My dopamine system is at a point where I can't do anything for a long time that isn't interesting, has immediate or intermediate rewards, or can capture attention for a long time. And on top of that, repeating that habit requires all these criteria. Examples: Scrolling on the phone?: Basically direct dopamine injected into my brain. Can do indefinitely. Not good. Programming? Sure I can pu…

> I don't think I can do SRS No need. :-) Comprehensible Input and immersive language usage can be your superpower.

I've recently discovered this approach, and I really like it.

I've looked at ways to make it more interactive / gamified, and I've made a prototype with with simple interactive stories (text adventures), designed for language learners (https://lingostories.org - 100% free).

I'm still trying to figure out what the next steps should be to make it more useful, but some people already enjoy it.

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