Chinese - Week 12

I am starting week 12 of my New Year’s Resolution to learn Mandarin Chinese and a lot has changed over the last 10 weeks since my last entry.

Update

Quick update on current status:

• currently studying lesson 10 (the last lesson) in the Integrated Chinese Level 1 book. I have been pacing at about 1 lesson per week which was aggressive, but comfortable given my time investment.
• by the end of lesson 10, I will know and be able to recognize over 600 Chinese words/characters
• in addition to individual words, I have learned many basic grammar structures and sentence patterns

Reflection

Some reflection on the first three months of study:

Routine

The biggest key to larger goal success is to find a rhythm and stick to the routine.

My routine:

• wake up at 5:30am
• study listening/pronunciation practice until 7:00am
• before bed: 30 min of practice listening and/or reading sentences from TCB app (more on that later)

Be Honest about Strengths and Weaknesses

Find out what your strengths and weaknesses are. If you don’t know, ask a partner, teacher, or friend. They will know.

Then apply those to your goals:

For me, learning new things comes easily. So, it has not been surprising that learning new vocab has been very easy

However, translating or becoming fluent in speaking full sentences has taken more effort. This is where I need to focus and not gravitate to learning more and more new vocab because it’s easier .

Create a Great Learning Space

This awareness has given me direction in what to focus on when I am practicing…and also, where .

Reduce distractions when doing more difficult tasks. Since learning vocab is easier for me, I can do it anywhere. However, practicing speaking, requires a quiet room without a lot else going on.

Get Help

Apps are a terrible way to learn a language. I bet you didn’t learn your mother-tongue through an app, you learned by doing .

Get a tutor, join a language group, or make a friend. This is the way.

The one exception to the app rule would be: Anki - for spaced repetition, flash cards. This will help you learn new words but it won’t help you hear or speak.

Listening first

Per advice from my tutor (this is why you get a tutor), I have shifted my primary effort from word/character recognition learning first to building listening/speaking muscle memory first.

For example, I had previously been approaching learning by mastering words by character recognition and then using those individual words to make sentences. For this reason, my reading/writing Chinese skill are actually pretty good. But when it comes to speaking, this tactical approach has been slowing me down.

Instead, I’m now working from the other way first: listening for “chunks” of sounds that are common phrases and learning to say those together well.

It’s important to do both, but starting bottom up has been more difficult for me for speaking skills, so this change has helped a lot.

Practice Practice Practice

I’ve been practicing speaking a lot by myself (early mornings and late nights) and listening to audio recordings that came work my coursework. But to get some more natural listening skills, I joined a local Chinese Language Study Group that meets weekly.

The group consists of varying degrees of fluency. Most people have been studying over a year, so I am by far the newbie.

My vocab is massively limited compared to them, but everyone has been great about talking down to my level. It’s also good practice for hearing chucks of sentences you do recognize and trying to infer the remaining context.

再见!