Live data from Hacker News

12 Months of Mandarin

isaak.net

171–180 of 310 posts

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#171

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…

> Doing hours of Anki practice and new note taking, some of it while running on a treadmill?

I studied with Anki on long 1hr walks and it worked incredibly well for me. I’d definitely recommend trying it!

Some things I learned were DS/algos, Greek alphabet pronunciation (so that I could read math symbols), the periodic table/chemical properties, and misc LeetCode interviewing stuff.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#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 phonetic language and I believe the characters are stored in a different part of the brain than are, for example, English words. Perhaps in an image processing center. Others smarter than I could probably correct & expand on this.

When I was 20, I could learn dozens or hundreds of characters a week. Decades later, that ability has faded. I've never had a very good memory, though, so maybe others are still able to absorb and retain the characters (and character combinations) at an older age.

Isaak seems exceptionally bright, to judge by his "About" page which is kind of amazing. But possibly his best tactic has been to immerse himself maximally, force himself to watch Chinese-dubbed anime, get his teacher to teach in Mandarin, and go to the country itself and spend all day speaking to people which in the long run is the way to really get the spoken language down, complementing all those characters you're stuffing into your head.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#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 I passed the HSK6 after a year and a half or so of studying, which at the time was the highest level of certification offered. I think they changed the system since and added more levels beyond 6. You can do amazing things if you're dedicated!

Today my Chinese is absolutely unusable, and my views on China have soured to the extent that I don't really want to revive my old skills. My takeaway is that learning one of these languages, the CJK languages, Arabic, or similarly weird languages, is just too much effort and I don't think it's worth it. I clearly had a lot of excess energy at the time that I could've directed towards something better. Knowing Chinese is about as useful as juggling and you might as well get really good at juggling if you're bored. It'll save you a few thousand hours.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#175

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…

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 fundamentally changed modern Chinese.

- polysyllabic words (复音词)。Modern Chinese has many such coined words that either came from Japanese or from European languages. For instance, 台灯 == table lamp. Traditional Chinese wouldn't create words like that.

- Introduction of linking verb. Traditional Chinese, even 白话文,don't use linking verbs like "be", "get", and etc. For instance, in English one may say "his dream is to be a scientist", but in Chinese one would only say "他梦想成为科学家“, while it is now perfectly find to say "他的梦想是成为一名科学家“,due to the influence of English.

- Introduction of long sentences. Traditional Chinese does not use long sentences, let alone clauses. For instance, in the modern Chinese, people are used to "if .. then" type of sentences, yet it was not used in traditional Chinese.

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

- New syntactical structures, even though they are eye sores to me. For instance, in English one can say "they made great contribution to the society", and in modern Chinese one can say "他们对社会做出的贡献很大“, even though a more traditional way is "他们对社会贡献很大“。BTW,even the latter is westernized, as in traditional Chinese we don't use propositions like "对“。

- New grammar. For instance, traditional Chinese does not have passive speech, but modern Chinese does.

- The modernization of Chinese syntax and semantics. Check this book: https://www.amazon.com/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%8E%B0%E4%BB%A3%.... The entire framework of studying Chinese comes from the English/European world.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#176
This is an impressive achievement.

> Frequency-based learning. Comprehensible input. Reading lots as soon as I could, especially graded readers.

Reading content that personally interests you is very important and often underrated. The "emotional connection" to what you're reading helps learning a lot.

There’s a lot of potential to improve the reading experience for Chinese. I recently built a syntax-highlighting tool [1] that helps you understand arbitrary text, which I have found quite helpful.

If you are based in Taiwan and interested in working in this space, hit me up! My email is in my profile.

1. https://dragonmandarin.com/reader

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#177
post #143

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!

Controversial take but I think the state of therapy/psychiatry has become a bit of a joke over the past handful of years where people have normalized the idea that everyone needs to be speaking to a therapist. With the fact you can shop around for a therapist, and the fact that most people like being told their problems are others' faults, you have an industry that from my view has mostly just taught everyone to exte…

This is not true.

Honestly, diagnosing for ADHD accelerate the improvement.

It is impossible to fight if you don't know what you're fighting. It enables you to prevent repeated patterns, not chasing your tail in an endless struggle.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#178
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 thing -- I've literally forgotten it all except for counting to ten and some basic phrases. In hindsight, it was utterly wasted effort, except for the cultural benefits of the summer abroad.

In contrast, I can understand and get by in French and Spanish and Italian just fine, despite having studied those far less. If I'm traveling somewhere I just do a quick review of verb conjugations beforehand. But they just share so many cognates with English. When television is télévision or televisión or televisione it's just not that hard. But when television is diànshì, and virtually every word is brand-new like that... it's just not worth it.

(And even when you learn a new word in e.g. Spanish that's totally different from English, you'll often get it "for free" in another one -- e.g. "pretend" is fingir in Spanish, and fingere in Italian.)

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#179
post #103
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm someone who was perfectly able to use anki and learn chinese to a decent level with fairly intense combined-type untreated (at the time) ADHD. What you need is a compelling reason to learn (for me, it was the fear of letting down my wife by not being able to talk to her family).

The ability to focus on some things but not others is perfectly consistent with ADHD. Disordered attention is the whole deal. You might find it easy but that doesn't mean others will.

> The ability to focus on some things but not others is perfectly consistent with ADHD.

This is an insanely broad definition that literally the entire population would fall under.

> You might find it easy but that doesn't mean others will.

No one finds concentrating on any and every subject easy. Assuming this is due to ADHD, and not something in their control, is a cop out.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#180
I've been studying again for the past 6 months after going probably 10 years without putting in any effort. I quickly picked it back up, breezing through HSK 2 and 3, and now just about to be at HSK 5 soon. At times it feels daunting just going off the recommended number of hours needed to get to HSK 6 (5,760 hours), but it's actually been flying way faster than I expected.

It's actually pretty great language for self-study once you get to a good enough foundation. It's really endless and there's so many rabbit holes to get stuck in - ancient literary language especially. I'm excited to try and get deeper in to that. My ultimate goal is to be able to read the Big 4 novels confidently.

It's also one of the weird things where motivation has a real snowball effect. The more you know, the more it feels like you can do, the more doors it opens for exploring entirely new areas. It helps that with Chinese there's so much that feels locked up or hidden from normal western view. Want to learn about tea production, culture, and history? Need to learn Chinese. Want to better understand Japanese kanji and history? Need to learn Chinese. Trying to grasp all the distinct geographic dialects and idiosyncrasies is tricky. Also the fact that a quarter of the planet kind of lives and operates on a separate internet, and the FOMO I felt by not being able to understand that.

Anyways, 10/10 definitely recommend. My plan is to keep chugging through and get to HSK 6 studying after my newborn infant arrives in 2 months, though I don't know if I can keep up the 10 hours a week I'm currently managing. I'm also doing elementary Japanese at a way more casual pace with local classes, and my Spanish has disintegrated to barely being usable.

There are so many more helpful tools and communities that exist now than 10-20 years ago, like chrome extensions and better repetition tools, though I still enjoy just handwriting in a notebook a bunch.

Post reply on HN