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12 Months of Mandarin

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Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#291

Post by fivestones »

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.

Can you share this keyboard layout with us? Sounds amazing

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#292

Post by leereeves »

layman51 wrote: post #264
pabloescobyte wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably using a QMK firmware-based keyboard where you can access different layers and shortcuts. I'm using one right now (though mine runs off ZMK which is similar but wireless) which is a split with just 42 keys. The rest--numbers, symbols, function keys, etc. are all under layers. The layout is dynamic because holding down different keys makes the layout 'change' as you do so. Holding down the left spacebar and pr…

I have never heard of "left spacebar" before. Sounds very interesting. So there can be two different spacebars on your keyboard?

Some ergonomic keyboards are split between to the two hands (usually attached, but not always) and have a spacebar key for each hand.

But I always thought both keys sent the same signal to the computer.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#293

Post by spongebobism »

musicale wrote: post #261
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…

https://structuredprocrastination.com See also "The Art of Procrastination" (2012).

Thanks, that was a great read and resonates a lot with me. Looking back, most of my learning new languages, getting in shape, playing the guitar, and making new friends was structured procrastination.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#294

Post by spongebobism »

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…

And Vietnamese is still one of the luckier languages out there, having a nation state behind it with all the media that comes along with it. A large majority of the world's languages don't even have that.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#295

Post by NoInkling »

laurentlb wrote: post #230
hintymad wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The main thing learners utilizing comprehensible input need is volume, so if you actually want to make it useful as more than a one-off novelty, your priority kind of needs to be in pumping out the content (while keeping it relatively interesting since that's also important). That's really the hard part. I will also say that I'm not personally convinced that "here's the words you heard, now tap them in order" minigames are very helpful. Other than that, the features and functionality are nice. Reminds me of Duolingo stories, which is their best content IMO.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#296

Post by jameshush »

chemmail wrote: post #200
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…

This is nuts, if i learned Mandarin, i would probably move to Taiwan, where the CoL is almost 1/4th of where I am right now. I know some other languages, but loss the will to study anymore lol.

I'm a foreigner who's live in Taiwan over the past four years. You can move here tomorrow if you want :D. You can survive with English (though your life will be easier with Mandarin), and there are plenty of English teachers who never learned Mandarin who've lived here for 10+ years.

Highly recommend living here. I met my wife here. Life's chill. Nobody steals. If you've made at least $60k in salary at least once in the last three years you can apply for a Taiwan Gold Card (kinda like a Taiwanese O1 Visa) and come live/work here very easily.

The main reason I continue to learn Mandarin is because my mother in law speaks zero English, so it just makes everyone's live's more fun and pleasant if I speak some Mandarin. :D

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#297

Post by NoInkling »

hintymad wrote: post #161
braunshedd wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use Netflix to great effect for practicing Chinese, especially when paired with the Language Reactor[1] extension in Chrome. * Note: Netflix has much more Taiwanese content than mainland China content, so do note the difference in the accent / dialect you'll be learning. [1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/language-reactor/ho...

How do you pass the initial language barriers? I'm trying to learn Spanish with Netflix shows and the Language Reactor, but I find it extremely hard to understand spoke Spanish. The characters speak so fast that I couldn't discern individual words or phrases. For a lot of times, they speak as if they are murmuring. When I was learning English, my ability to understand spoken English grew with my ability to read, but…

Have a look at Dreaming Spanish, it exists precisely to bridge the "comprehensibility gap" for learners.

https://www.dreamingspanish.com (or find the Youtube channel)

There's tons of free content to keep you occupied for a while, and then there's a paid tier if you want more down the track. After choosing the level that's suitable, I recommend starting with Pablo's videos - he's the founder and I still like his style the most, particularly his older videos before things expanded. Just click on whatever looks interesting.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#298

Post by NoInkling »

senkora wrote: post #30
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…

I worked through “Remembering Simplified Hanzi” and my one complaint is that I wish that it were “grouped by frequency” a bit more. The way that these books work is that the first one is the most common ~1500 characters grouped by radical / component, and then the second one is the next most common ~1500 characters grouped the same way. The problem is that this means that you have to learn 1500 characters before you…

The first book actually only contains the most common (by their methodology) 1000 characters:

> "The 55 lessons from Book 1 cover the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the Chinese writing system, plus another 500 included either because they are needed to preserve the logical ordering of the material or because they are especially easy to learn at this early stage."

Those 500 are still from the most common ~3000 total that comprise both books at least, but it means that you really have to learn 1500 characters before you're guaranteed to know the most common 1000. And learn all 3000 before you're guaranteed to know the most common 1500.

I've been going so slowly it's taken me years to reach my current point of character #2170, but eventually I'll get there, even if I've already been reading sentences with characters that I haven't gotten to yet for a while now.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#299

Post by NoInkling »

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…

The idea that Mandarin grammar is easy only really applies at a surface level. Yeah for the most part it's SVO word order and there aren't any verb conjugations, but the deeper you get, the more you run into constructions that are completely alien from an English-speaker's perspective. I like how this image represents it: https://imgur.com/neBFnxc

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#300

Post by laurentlb »

NoInkling wrote: post #295
laurentlb wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The main thing learners utilizing comprehensible input need is volume, so if you actually want to make it useful as more than a one-off novelty, your priority kind of needs to be in pumping out the content (while keeping it relatively interesting since that's also important). That's really the hard part. I will also say that I'm not personally convinced that "here's the words you heard, now tap them in order" minigam…

Thanks a lot, I appreciate the feedback! Indeed, Duolingo Stories are the part of Duolingo I enjoyed the most too.

Taping words: I sometimes find it useful to focus my listening and try to recognize the words. But I'm not sure about the design here and maybe I should disable it by default. Thanks again!

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