For LingQ subscribers, I think Refold is telling us to Speak from Day1.
The advice is to start speaking once you pretty much understand everything.
Judging from a lot of our dogmatic answers here in this thread and elsewhere, we DO feel we pretty much know everything about language learning.
So, hey, whatever language you’re studying, start speaking it.
“I basically stopped using LingQ after around a year of doing so intensively. For multiple reasons that should be obvious there’s just no connection whatsoever between LingQ word count and oral fluency in Chinese.” Really? you dont care about reading books and stuff in chinese? The 漢字 is literally art and walls of it are beautiful. Also you don’t think reading books helps with oral fluency? Its definitely an inefficient route vs just practicing output type things but don’t you want to eventually have the same vocab as you do in your native language in chinese?
Also, is it because of lingq’s functionality or is reading chinese to speak chinese just too slow?
Doesn’t it make more sense to ask the question somewhere where people following the method actually hang out, such as the Refold Mandarin discord server? Then you can come back and enlighten us.
Right now it feels a bit like you’re asking an empty room and taking the lack of response as confirmation that your opinion is correct.
“Really? you dont care about reading books and stuff in chinese?”
Lol How on earth does that follow? Yes I do find reading is important and I can read pretty well in Chinese. I have a lot of room for improvement but do most of my reading outside LingQ now.
“Also you don’t think reading books helps with oral fluency?”
Not much direct impact, no. I had read a bunch of books before I started working on oral fluency. I’m not saying all that reading didn’t help at all, it played its part in establishing a foundation in the language. But I found developing oral fluency in Chinese took quite a lot of time and practice in itself and the best methods didn’t involve reading.
Personally I think reading novels is an excellent way to enrich your language abilities and expand your vocabulary once you have already established oral fluency rather than a particularly good way to establish oral fluency in the first place.
@bamboozled Who is the perfectionist? My goal has always been to be understood clearly. I don’t understand why that’s considered perfectionism.
Why would you stop using lingq after 1 year? In books in my native language i run into words i want to learn all the time and having fast dictionary look ups is just a god send unless there is a type of content that is unimportable into lingq i couldnt imagine me not using (for spanish) I will probably use it for the next 10 years, but i know it less functional with some languages so i don’t blame you if thats the reason. Especially characters with books i would imagine one would need 4-5k to read some real hefty books. I also don’t know if there are good character dictionaries for within words etc.
and yeah oral fluency is obtained by doing like speaking drills, conversing, and focusing on super common grammatical structures etc vs reading is just trying to learn a ton of words etc I agree with this completely.
“Why would you stop using lingq after 1 year? In books in my native language i run into words i want to learn all the time and having fast dictionary look ups is just a god send”
Because I discovered this thing called a popup browser plugin dictionary and no longer cared as much about LingQ stats to keep track of my progress.
“Especially characters with books i would imagine one would need 4-5k to read some real hefty books. I also don’t know if there are good character dictionaries for within words etc.”
Agree. I’m more at the 3000+ mark. My oral is much stronger than my reading as I’ve focussed on that a lot more. So still have work to do on that. But if my LingQ vocab counter were more accurate though I’d be more like 50k+ for vocab though. Now when I briefly go back to LingQ I spend most of my time turning all the yellows into known.
I want to identify some key characteristics of Chinese Mandarin to pinpoint the exact issue of concern.
There are many homophones in Chinese Mandarin.
The article 施氏食狮史 consists of 97 characters with “shi” in pinyin without the tone. The romanization of Chinese characters only has phonetic value to it.
Another typical example is “to ask” and “to kiss”, as you can imagine the situation if you pronounce the tone wěn instead of wèn.
Most Chinese characters form new words as prefixes or suffixes.
动 （dòng） to move
动词 verb
活动 activity
生动 lively
生（shēng, to generate）in 生动 lively is also used in 生气 (to get angry).
蜻蜓 dragonfly, Radical 虫 indicates a type of insect or worm.
青 （qīng）in 蜻 （qīng）
蚊子 mosquito 文 （wén） in 蚊 （wén）
This might not always be the case. I want to say that most Chinese characters and their pronunciation are interconnected in some way, and four core skills in language learning are interconnected as well.
I would praise anyone who has achieved a high degree of fluency in any core language learning skill, but I am amazed by their arduous endeavor to pursue an unknown world with a curious mind.
One good test would be to have two non-native Mandarin learners communicate with each other, provided they have achieved a high level of fluency in reading and listening but not speaking. I would say way much longer than 2-3 months of active speaking is needed for them to exchange ideas freely on a particular subject.
On the other hand, if someone’s functional in all four core language skills, then an immersion environment will be the best way to go.
@ 21:00
The decision not to learn Chinese characters in the first place is counterintuitive for the reasons listed above.
“For multiple reasons that should be obvious there’s just no connection whatsoever between LingQ word count and oral fluency in Chinese.”
While the Lingq word count is not a perfect measure of Chinese vocabulary, it is meaningful in that someone with 3K know words on Lingq will have a more limited vocabulary than one that has 15K, 30K or 50k words on Lingq.
Reading alone obviously does not make you fluent in Chinese, you still need to practice speaking. No one (including Matt from Refold) ever said that. However, it is quite well known that people, who read a lot,in general, have a better vocabulary than those that do not. Yes, reading does transfer to your oral speaking skills. So, someone, who is fluent in a language and reads a lot will have a better oral vocabulary than someone, who does not. Your active vocabulary (speaking) will always lag behind your passive vocabulary (words you understand when reading). But, as your passive vocabulary grows, your acticve vocabulary grows in turn.
Anyway, it does not really matter. I know you try to stir up discussions to promote your podcast. Nothing wrong with it.
“it is meaningful in that someone with 3K know words on Lingq will have a more limited vocabulary than one that has 15K, 30K or 50k words on Lingq.”
Your LingQ counter is not an indication of how many words you actually know. In my case it’s several times lower than what I actually know because I have barely used LingQ for over a year while continuing to learn Chinese and read online with plugin dictionaries and hang out with native speakers.
“I know you try to stir up discussions to promote your podcast.”
This allegation is totally without foundation.
“Your LingQ counter is not an indication of how many words you actually know.”
You actually made this point yourself a couple of years ago when you publicly accused me of lying about my LingQ stats lol.
@Llearner
I don’t think there’s anything magical about Chinese characters in and of themselves that cures the pronunciation problems you’ve outlined.
Using Japanese as an example, I read in full Kanji because it’s faster. I would hate to read anything at this point in just romaji or hiragana/katakana. But my knowledge of the Kanji, and even being able to identify the radicals they contain, doesn’t ensure anything about my speech being proper.
I know exactly what “chopsticks” and “bridge” look like on paper, but the only reason I know how to pronounce them correctly is because I’ve listened to tons of folk stories that talk about bridges, and I’ve been out to eat with friends.
I rely a ton on my listening experience. I’m already clicking quite a bit when I’m stretching myself in harder lessons with a lot of unknown vocab. I don’t click on or double check Kanji that I’m already confident reading or even confident minus. I just assume what sounds natural based on my experience and keep reading.
When I’m having a conversation and a word isn’t coming to me, I circumlocute, and in the few seconds I’m doing that, just the process of talking about similar vocabularly normally scares out the proper word.
I don’t have a mental visual scorecard in Kanji, romaji, or Kana. Nor do I make any discriminatory analysis about homonyms. I just say what comes out naturally. My Kanji knowledge has nothing to do with it, except for the huge secondary efffects of being able to read a lot more and hence have a higher input volume level.
For Chinese, the pinyin are dangerous for people allergic to characters because the pinyin are great. You can even denote the tones just using pinyin.
I don’t see any problem with someone speaking Chinese and only knowing pinyin to do it. The only disadvantage is your reading input volume will be terrible because you could cover a lot more ground if you could easily read the characters.
But again, knowing the characters doesn’t ensure anything about being able to speak properly.
@ kimojima
Pinyin was introduced to standardize the pronunciation of Mandarin in China. It’s an excellent tool for learning Chinese characters. The problem with pinyin is that sometimes we can not clarify the sentence’s ambiguity without the presence of the Chinese character.
mù dì has the meaning of 目的（intention）， 牧地（pastureland)， and 墓地 (graveyard).
Another example will be yù zhī, which can be 欲知 (to find out) or 预知 (to foresee as in premonition).
Unquestionably, contextual clues come in handy sometimes. It’s the very same reason that I recommend learning Chinese characters. I believe some fundamental language learning skills should be acquired as basic building blocks. Be able to sound out words, deduce the meaning of new words, and use context clues to expand and grow one’s language repertoire organically and holistically. Indeed, knowing Chinese characters enables one to acquire vocabulary more efficiently. I am a listener in language learning myself, but without developing these crucial abilities in the language, tons of listening might be like rote memorization.
It is common for people to say, “oh, we belonged to the same family five hundred years ago.” as a way to bridge the distance between two Mandarin speakers. We can never be sure of it without finding out the actual Chinese characters for their last names 关(guān) and 官(guān).
Interesting “conclusion”, kimojima:
As even native speakers “never understand everything” in their L1,
I thought that Refold was telling us to “never speak at all” in our L2s 
How can we come to so “different” conclusions?
“we DO feel…”
Yes, humans feel a lot throughout the day.
Reminds me of the “Be like Mike” ad (Be Like Mike - Wikipedia):
“Being Mike” and “feeling to be like Mike” are two different realities in a performance-oriented basketball game:
).Switching to SLA:
As long as we don’t speak, we feel that we have the best pitches and tones in the world. And nobody can take that away from us!
Ergo, talking is bad, bad, bad - it only harms our ego