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12 Months of Mandarin

isaak.net

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Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#271

Post by unethical_ban »

grecy wrote: post #126
jmyeet wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hey, the jeep guy!

There was a guy who rode a motorcycle from San Francisco to Barrow AL about 2014. His and your blogging were the source of some fun what-if dreams of mine back then.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#272

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

hintymad wrote: post #175
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the second time now I see someone saying Chinese grammar is heavily influenced by modern English. I've never heard of that, where comes that from? I definitely wouldn't say Chinese is a really easy language to learn. The absence of word conjugation is a godsense after learning French, but the tones and characters stay hard for me. I've always been pretty bad in French but I can open a book in French and read a s…

I don't have references at hand, but I can recall some of the discussions I used to read. The "Europeanization", or 欧化，came in many different flavors (even though most of the influence came from English), for better or for worse. There was a "new culture movement" more than 100 years, and the Chinese elites tried to translate western works into Chinese that ordinary people could understand, and that movement fundamen…

Yes, traditional Chinese is very different from Modern Chinese, that doesn't mean the differences come from English. Traditional Chinese hasn't been spoken by the common people for hundreds of years. What people spoke was vernacular Chinese and the Beijing dialect is what Modern Standard Chinese is based on.

What I can find is they actually tried to make the standard some mix of Southern and Northern dialects but that never really worked out. Probably not in the least because there's a fundamental problem, how are you going to teach a language to a whole country when nobody speaks that language yet?

I really don't see how they could have gone then with English grammar instead since it has the same problem, nor can I find any reference about it.

>Punctuations. Traditional Chinese uses only period, if it uses punctuation at all. Yet now modern Chinese uses all kinds of English punctuation

Punctuation is just convenient, it doesn't change the language.

>The entire framework of studying Chinese comes from the English/European world.

So?

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#273

Post by freemany »

105424 wrote: post #227

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 thou…

isaak.net/mandarinmethods

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#274

Post by freemany »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #172

Very fun blog to read, especially since I've been through a somewhat related though far less rigorous experience; a China major, spent 2 years in Taiwan while undergrad, then 2 years grad school, 7 years total studying modern Mandarin, classical Chinese, and some dialects (mostly Taiwanese i.e. Minnan dialect, and some Cantonese). The key, in my experience, is having a young brain. Chinese is different from a Western…

thank you for the kind words!

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#275

Post by Agingcoder »

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’m not sure it’s procrastination. Years ago, when struggling with maths , I learned juggling ( 5 balls, tricks etc ) and ended up spending quite a bit of time on it every single day.

In practice, it made me feel very good, more relaxed, because I was able to learn something new and make progress rapidly - self confidence was back. The maths soon got unstuck and life became good.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#276

Post by Agingcoder »

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…

Not really - I’d say he just really wants to. Just like when you meet someone and want to spend time with them, are binge watching a show, playing a video game, reading a book, writing code : you want to do that thing again, here learn mandarin.

I’m a lot more familiar with Japanese than with mandarin (and use srs), and it’s worth noting than srs essentially turns anything into an extremely satisfying game : you learn quickly, you really wonder how far you can go, so you keep playing.

I believe that’s the killer combo : really wanting to do something, and having that something turned into a game to avoid giving up.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#277

Post by Agingcoder »

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…

How do you define ‘worth it’ ?

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#278

Post by wavemode »

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…

> green-eyed at the time

What happened to your eyes?

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#279

Post by Baeocystin »

wavemode wrote: post #278
Baeocystin wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> green-eyed at the time What happened to your eyes?

They turned hazel when I hit puberty. Hair got darker, too. Pretty common in white folks, FWIW.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#280

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #231
shepherdjerred wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started with these decks: https://github.com/teivah/algodeck https://github.com/teivah/designdeck Essentially I'd have a question like "invert a binary tree", "implement union-find", or "structure of a topological sort". All of these are small enough that I can keep them in my head. For small algorithms I would just regurgitate the code line-for-line in my head. For more complex ones I would just go over the struct…

That blog post is unbelievable. It looks very/eerily similar to men dating online in the 2020s.

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