Wanderlust frustration

These last weeks, I've been getting a big case of wanderlust. A couple of days ago, I decided that I wanted to learn how to speak Japanese and improve on my listening skills [by far my best skill in Japanese] which meant focusing on books which only contain romaji [the Japanese language using the Latin alphabet]. Back 2 years ago when I was really focused on learning Japanese, I would've refused to touch a book that contained any romaji but learning to read and write in Japanese is going make my efforts much more longer so I think I might go looking for some romaji books or even better, some audio resources to learn Japanese.

Then last night, after meeting a girl online who will be doing the same linguistics course at university as me and who is trying to learn Korean, I started thinking that it might not be a bad idea but I know from past experiences how weirdly hard Korean is, so I think I'll be forcing that thought out of my head.

For the most part, I've been learning Chinese this week, more specifically Chinese grammar which, to my uttermost delight, is incredibly simple and very logical [prepositions in Chinese come before the verb] but then I think about the huge vocabulary and all those nasty tones and it gets to frustrating because I know it will be ages before I'll be able to understand basic conversations.

Then I watched a music video on youtube called Esperanto by a German band which has some German, French and I'm pretty sure some Esperanto too. I thought "Esperanto, that's supposed to be an easy language and oh did I just hear the word 'sprachen'? That has something to do with speaking doesn't it. Maybe I should learn some German". But I'm already learning too many to add more to the pile so I disgarded that thought and then I started thinking to the languages that I can understand at a high-beginner to intermediate level [French and Portuguese]. Whenever I study Portuguese I now feel as though I'm not making any progress because I've learnt the basics and now I'm at that slow stage where I need to read and read in Portuguese in order to pick up vocabulary and less used grammatical structures and make some progress. And then I think to French, the language which I can read the fast and talk with the best accent solely due to 8 years exposure yet I'm still not sure how to say the 'this' in the sentence 'This is a book' in French.

To add more salt to the wound, I've just sat and wasted 20 minutes writing this post when I could've been reading how to write 'this' in French or some Portuguese vocabulary. So here's to an end of the whining about not making any progress! I'm a huge procrastinator and when I procrastinate I tend to think about languages in general but then I complain about not making progress in any of these languages. So from here onwards, I'm not going to waste time thinking about languages, I'm going to start acting and focus on what I have learnt and not about what I haven't learnt including the languages I haven't learnt yet.

Progress 23/08/2010

Not been updating recently. I'm moving out in three weeks and starting university in 4 so between arranging my accommodation and getting all my documentation done for university and finances not to mention spending hours with my dog in labour and then keeping her company after her miscarrage, I've been very busy.

However over the last couple of days, I have managed to find about 50 new words in Portuguese. I've spent most of today learning Chinese. I'm on trainchinese.com which is good for picking up vocabulary and sentences arranged into frequency, student level or in which test in the HSK [the main Chinese profiency test] the vocabulary is most likely to appear. I also started a new anki with both words and sentences in Chinese mixed together since the last anki was full of vocabulary such as 'teachers training college' which really isn't useful to a student who can barely string a sentence together. I currently have 108 words and sentences in my new anki with basic vocabulary.

Progress 13/08/2010

Haven't been updating that much recently but I have been studying some Chinese. Using some of the materials on Google Books [a great resource regardless of the preview limit] I studied 30 characters and radicals out the book 'Reading and Writing Chinese' and then took down notes on the 一 character, which means one or many other meanings when combined with other characters, using the book '250 essential characters'.

I've also been finding it easier to pronounce tones. I no longer make ridiculous faces and head movements when saying each one. However, I still find it very difficult to distinguish between tones in listening comprehension.

Progress 08/08/2010

This month before starting university, I've decided to start learning some Mandarin before I go. One of the interesting thing I read about my course by a former student is that the levels of student's Mandarin in the class varies quite largely:

Standards in the class also have a really wide range, like some people practically fluent and some can hardly string a sentence together, gets kind of irritating whichever category you fit into!

Exagerating or not, I would much prefer to be one of the people in the former category rather than the latter. Hence, I'm starting my studies early! I've been looking for some books on ebay but the majority of them are books published in China intended for foreigners and I have no idea of their quality so I'm going to stay clear of them for now. Instead I'm using online resources such as Chinesepod and a good game called Enterzon. They both introduce both culture and language and are great resources however they don't have a basic course structure to ease you into the language in a way that you can easily build a solid foundation of a language. They tend to offer topics at random which is great but I would prefer to learn from a good main course and have Chinesepod and Enterzon as additional resources rather than the main ones until my Chinese gets to the post-beginner stage. So I'll need to keep hunting for one.

Today however, I played a little bit of Zon and copied and pasted a lot of good language points which I will write in a notepad later. I listened to four podcasts on taxi's today on Chinesepod : Taxi conversations - finding a taxi
Finding a taxi
Taxi small talk
A Taxi for tired feet

So I can now talk about Taxi's [but not much else] in Mandarin. One of the best things about Chinesepod is the discussions about the podcasts where other learners post their experiences and views on the topic. As a result, I not only know that 出租车 chūzūchē is overall the most comprehensible word in China for Taxi but also that 差头 chātóu tends to be the most common word for taxi in Shanghai, 的士 díshì in Guangdong Province and 计程车 jìchéngchē in Taiwan.

But then I decided that I should stop neglecting other languages and even if I want to mainly focus on just the one language, I should fit in 5-10 minutes a day for another language. So I read a small article on Wikipedia on Mandarim Padrão [Standard Chinese] in Portuguese and copied down a few words into Anki.

Chinese & Linguistics

I got accepted into University! I'll be going to the University of Edinburgh to study Chinese and Linguistics in one month and a week/mid-September. Therefore my Portuguese is now onhold indefinitely and Chinese will be my main focus along with Japanese. I've got Colloquial Chinese with the CD's, Teach Yourself Beginner's Chinese without the CDs and a couple of others but I'll need to find more resources online and books.