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12 Months of Mandarin

isaak.net

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Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#281

Post by smcin »

snapetom wrote: post #212
umbra07 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was what was told to kids in elementary school 10-15 years ago, yes. We seem to be moving away from that future (or perhaps it was never really true to begin with).

When I was very young in the 70's, I was told to study French because it was the international language. In the 80's, it was Japanese because they were going to take over the world. In the 90's, I was told to take Spanish in college because the US was going to be a bilingual country. As an adult in the 2000's, I watch US helicopter parents scramble to put their kids into immersive Mandarin courses, mimicking the Japa…

Which four languages are you proficient in?

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#282

Post by archsurface »

fragmede wrote: post #130
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…

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

This is normal in many areas of the world.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#284

Post by ancientworldnow »

aguaviva wrote: post #269
holoduke wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without picking sides, but Russia does not have forced conscription. Ukraine does on the other hand force people via the notorious TCC. Russia is not a puppet state of China. Their relation isnt very strong. Naturally they dont get along with each other. But they are both forced to stick together and form a block against the west. Did you know that most Russians learn english on school?

[flagged]

Conscripts explicitly don't serve in Ukraine. The article even notes that.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#286

Post by watwut »

keiferski wrote: post #235
g9yuayon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated. I'm not sure if I agree with that, as no native speakers need to have an SRS to learn their native languages. No doubt that SRS will allow us to remember words, yet few can really acquire those words intuitively. When starting to learn English in school, we used some kind of SRS system to memorize words and phrases and sentences, and man, the result wa…

Native speakers certainly use spaced repetition , as they hear the same sounds over and over again until they learn them. All an SRS is, is a piece of software that optimizes this process.

All SRS softwares are flashcards. And when people say srs, they 99% mean flash cards. Pretty much no one uses SRS for "reread book multiple times".

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#287

Post by jarrett-ye »

pessimizer wrote: post #111
cblum wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Duoling…

> 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. For me the new…

FSRS-based simulator could help user regulate the number of new cards they need to learn per day. The simulator will be integrated into Anki natively in the next release. But it's still an experimental feature. If the simulator is accurate enough, I plan to make it more automatically to support the idea that let the algorithm choose many new cards the user should have.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#288

Post by keiferski »

watwut wrote: post #286
keiferski wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native speakers certainly use spaced repetition , as they hear the same sounds over and over again until they learn them. All an SRS is, is a piece of software that optimizes this process.

All SRS softwares are flashcards. And when people say srs, they 99% mean flash cards. Pretty much no one uses SRS for "reread book multiple times".

I don’t think you’ve understood my point.

Spaced repetition is a scientific phenomenon that has nothing inherently to do with a piece of software. It’s a description of how the brain works and is based on the spacing effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect

SRS is an application of this effect in software form, hence the name, Spaced Repetition Software. So yes, no one uses a term meaning software to describe reading a book.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#289

Post by satvikpendem »

mettamage wrote: post #229
crazygringo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, meani…

I found learning Latin (and to some extent, ancient Greek) to be far more useful for learning new words in the Romance languages (and English) in general than actually learning the Romance languages themselves.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#290

Post by hyperG »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #82
alexawarrior4 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same problem, the solution is to start with extremely easy content, either from a language learning site/channel or content targeted at toddlers. Even 2 year olds already have quite advanced language skills! Peppa Pig is a perennial favorite. You build up from there with childrens' shows, cartoons, and at some point later on introduce graded readers. Watching full-speed native TV shows is like the final exa…

Besides watching things aimed at young children, another tactic I have found effective is to watch something you already know very well in English (or whatever your native language). For me, this has been South Park. I'll watch episodes that I practically know by heart already, so that even if I don't understand all the Spanish words I can pick up things from knowing what is happening.

Thanks. That is a really great idea.
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