This is for the chinese language learners or any learners who are curious about the time progression of not having any conversations but only massive input from an only english speaker after a certain amount of time. After realizing that I haven’t had a chinese conversation but only shadowing in terms of speaking for the past 1.5 years, I decided to try Italki for the first time in curiousity of how my chinese would be.
To a surprise, I had a natural 1 hour conversation about random topics that involve culture, language learning methods, politics, and asian beauty standards (ahaha). Thought that I wouldn’t be able to understand anything and would speak poorly but was surprised to understand everything clearly and was able to convey my messages! Initially the teacher thought I didn’t know anything, but as I started speaking, the teacher adapted more to my current level and spoke at a natural pace. Afterwards, I booked 2 more teachers to have more conversations and speaking opportunities. Highly recommend trying online conversations to anyone if they want to improve speaking or just a bit curious how massive input benefits someone. Wanted to share my thoughts as a long time Lingq user. I want to thank everyone that helped me along the way. Input does work wonders! Will be continuing to push my chinese as far as my motivation lets me. Lingq is truly a blessing app.
Time Frame of Serious Chinese Mandarin Learning:
8/1/2021 - 2/5/2023
My statistics when the conversation happened:
Known Words: 49,000 words
Lingqs: 134700 Lingqs
Listening: 2884 hours
Speaking (shadowing) : 29 hours
Hi, I don’t have any preferences since my goal is to find any content with subtitles from youtube that I can import to Lingq. What I notice is that most of my input are more informal conversations between natives, food adventures, and very few political content.
Congrats and thanks for the inspiring post!
I assume the key to your success is the massive amount of listening you did. Two questions:
Did you feel that pronunciation was an issue at all, seeing that you only did 29 hours of shadowing?
Did you do any other “activation” practice like trying to think in Chinese or any writing? I find that when I’m able to switch my brain to work in another language I can also speak it relatively fluently.
Honestly, I was expecting exactly this answer, since the teacher started speaking at a natural pace, it means that he/she was comfortable with the way you expressed yourself. It’s unlikely to happen if someone had input like newspapers or something like that
The bigger problem was activating more complex words to throw out and imagining the exact tone for harder words. My pronunciation was only an issue from words that I haven’t shadowed before which are the majority within the HSK3 amount and above. I shadowed in the more beginning phase at 1000 hours since I was more tempted to speak more at that phase but began to accept that I don’t need it since the listening reinforces every single word that I am consciously noticing.
I actively thought of every word as the conversation went by like a translating machine, but I notice that the more words I knew throughout the journey, the words go by so much faster and faster that I was able to see in my head and speak like I was reading outloud from a physical book. In terms of grammar, the grammar was natural since I heard the pattern so many times. My brain imagines only the tone lines to prevent unnatural rhythm of speech and mostly the pinyin. Never the characters. Perhaps since I just started speaking, I don’t have the natural ability to not imagine every word and speak naturally until I speak each word enough? Not sure about this case
edit: 2. I didn’t do any writing. Only typing on my phone on google translate
With you’re mentioning of 2, this is something I still do all the time when I find I need to pronounce a word for the first time. It is not something I have put much thought into, but, when I am searching for a word, an image of the word will actually appear in my head. So if you’re anything like me, you may be doing this forever with (some) new words!
That is great for you my friend , many people do not how speaking languages is, but we are all always trying to learn some languages more, but althought we need a help
I am not suggesting this is not possible, as I am following largely the same (all input) approach. However, you must be especially gifted or something does not add up. How come you “only” learned 17K Lingqs, but end up knowing 50K words? I assume you are a heritage learner (AB Chinese) and already knew tons of words passively and might have "the sound of Chinese internalised ", right?
Also, 29 hours of shadowing is not “that” much; this is about 30 min per week for a year. I am surprised you can speak with flow (“fluenty”) after only so little practice. I have not done that much shadowing yet, but from what I have done, it appears to take much more than 29 hours…
