I’m officially diving into Mandarin.
This thread is to give the perspective of a beginner Chinese learner, report my experience, maybe ask questions and give you another place to do the same. It will be linked on my profile. I’ll try to keep future posts short, irregular and far between.
I expect to have about 2 dedicated hours for Chinese this term. I am going to continue Russian with ca. 2 hours a day and the school year is not going to be a lazy one as well. Listening (dead)time is also going to be divided between Russian and Chinese, as well as some Portuguese and any damn English I can’t get rid off. Maybe I’m going to do a 90days challenge at some point, if there’s a relatively relaxed stretch.
STATUS:
After maybe a total of two lazy months of dabbling on the side throughout this year my word count stands at 500. Other than lingQing, I’ve only been watching a few free vids of Yangyang Cheng (don’t agree with many of her learning suggestions) and learnchinesenow. I’ve obviously watched Steve’s tips and the story of his Mandarin. Thanks to them and other sources I think I am quite oriented as far as grammar, how the characters work and what to expect overall.
My experience so far has been, that the usual LingQ way absolutely works fine. I just listened to the audio, focused primarily on the characters and looked at the pinyin. I put the pinyin second to the characters from the beginning. No trouble at all with reading the characters after the third time they show up or I repeated the lesson, neither with knowing the pinyin, nor understanding the pronunciation. I don’t find that I have to write out the characters at all to be able to read it and know it in a basic way. (Handwriting I do put off to a later stage.) I can see all the little parts and radicals and have begun to recognize the connotations of a few by myself. I don’t agree with the suggestion to start with pinyin only. I think we alphabet people need to be careful not to lean to heavy on the phonetic crutch, but should establish a mental connection between the sound and the glyph right away.
The tones don’t seem to be an extraterrestrial, otherdimensional problem either. I know at some point everything is going to start sounding the same, but I’m experienced enough myself to resonate with everything Steve is saying about the process.
I also know that at a future advanced stage it might be advisable to write out the characters, get explanations about their connotations, history, development, look at grammar, etc. However I think I can arrive at understanding the news and more or less real life speech with basically LingQ only. I’m not yet aiming at understanding Tang poetry in all its subtlety.
preliminary GOALs:
650 known words by October 14
2000 known words by January 15.
7000 known words by April 15.
China travel ready /vantage point /decent B2ish listening comprehension and readiness for basic fluency by July 15. (That’s about 9 months after the start.)
Unless anything comes up, I would then go to the People’s Republic and maybe even Taiwan and Singapore for 2-3 months in summer 15. But that remains to be thought through and planned by spring.
Maybe I’ll fall miserably short, maybe I’ll far exceed. Time will tell.
THE PLAN:
As stated, I will, in defiance of all the structuralists and overcomplicaters, stay almost exclusively with LingQ for the period. I’m going to start out with simplified.
Like Steve, I am very impatient to get away from silly graded beginner stuff to real content. I just want a leg up with the baby stories and intermediate material and then I’ll plow through real stuff rather soon. Overall you can assume that my preferences and goals are not too different from Steve’s. I value understanding and reading higher than thoughtlessly babbling on when I can’t yet understand much.
I know what I describe doesn’t correspond a 100% to what Steve recommends for Mandarin today, let alone how he learned it back in the day, but the point is to test a method where LingQ is the only mainstay system used. No textbooks, no Speak from day 1 nonsense, no excruciatingly slow courses, that dwell on ni3 hao3 for seemingly 20 hours. The only supplements being random Youtube videos and songs. By the way, this is what I would do in any case. I’m not forcibly limiting myself at all.
QUESTIONS:
I expect lingQing to be a bit of a strain beyond the beginner stage, where vocabulary is less lingqed and therefore you only see the character and the google translation and you have to go to the dictionary every time to get the pinyin. Is this the case?
How is the Chinese LingQ library? Especially for the (low) intermediate purgatory? I always liked the lingQ podcast.
I’ll include the excellent thread for Mandarin resources by iaing (Thank You!) for anyone interested and myself.
Thanks to Bryan for the precedent of his Spanish log and Julie for pointing me to it and the encouragement. I’m looking forward to your feedback.