Made a list of all the resources I have access to in order to improve my Chinese. It includes drama series which I use for listening practice, new vocabulary and colloquial phrases and just to make my learning a bit more fun; and also books thanks to this glorious gem here. [Seriously, never undermine the value of google books].
Anyways, so far I have:
Drama - Currently completed 1/107
Completed one series (Devil beside me), gotten halfway through another (It started with a kiss) and watched an episode or two of another 3. So, 1 out of the 107 Taiwanese drama shows I counted on the drama website with another 4 in progress.
Grammar books - Currently completed: 0/15.
I've read 30/50 chapters out of the grammar book: A Practical Chinese Grammar [which I would really recommend] but I still have another 14 to start in order to pick up some new material not avaliable in the other books and to refresh already studied grammar points.
Textbooks: Currently completed 0/21
At University we follow the material set out in New Practical Chinese Reader. I think we've currently completed 8/9 chapters. I've also completed 5/20 chapers of Mandarin Chinese the easy way.
Character focused books: Completed 0/6
It would be impossible to gauge how many character I've learnt since I recognise some from haven studied Japanese and I prefer to learn vocabulary as opposed to formally studying characters but so far I have officially studied 7/100 characters in 'The First 100 Characters'.
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As for today, I studied two grammar points: 一点儿 [yi1dian'r3 - a little more] and 所以 [suo3yi3 - so]. Also listened to a video on youtube about coffee and tea and which is better and learnt 让 [rang4] can also mean 'to make' as well as 'to let'. There was also something on 对 but I still haven't fully demystified those tricky little co-verbs as of yet.
Wednesday 22 December 2010
Tuesday 21 December 2010
Wanderlust returns! Along with some philosophy on languages.
Another bout of wanderlust has graced itself with me. I decided to watch some of Lost which I haven't watched in age and ended up watching the episode where Sun reveals to everyone that she can speak English. So, I had all the nice vowels of Korean flowing through my ears for a good 45 minutes. Then I decided to browse through the internet looking for things about Lost and stumbled across this page, which lists all the languages the characters speak - Korean, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, Latin, Turkish etc - and boom! Wanderlust returned full on force!
That being said, this wanderlust is different from the other wanderlust periods I've had. First of all, I still want to continue studying Chinese. Secondly, this wanderlust isn't necessarily a bad thing. The previous wanderlusts tried to steal the spotlight from the main language I was focusing on and they didn't bring any benefits other than to sate my curiosity about other languages.
However, now that I'm doing linguistics, this wanderlust may be beneficial. In Morphology, we learnt about agglutinating languages (1) such as Turkish and circumfixes [2] in Dutch. In phonetics, we learnt that the Korean alphabet [hangul] has some letters which represent how the sound is pronounced using our vocal organs. In syntax, we compared some English word order with Dutch and so on. Next semester is all about Society and language, the Brain and language and my favourite: historical linguistics and language families. Suddenly Latin is looking quite appealing and learning some German to be able to contrast some of its features with English wouldn't be a bad idea either.
Different people learn different languages for different reasons. Language learning has been a hobby of mine for the last 4 years now. I'm currently learning Chinese with the aim of someday being fully fluent in a foreign language at university. This means being able to read and listen to Chinese as well as being able to construct my own grammatically correct sentences both on written paper and face to face with some native Chinese speaker. I'm slowly accepting the fact that being fluent in 15 languages is a dream and nothing but a dream. That doesn't mean to say that I can't understand the basics of 13 languages and be fluent in 2. Understanding a language and being fluent in a language are two different things. To me, it's much easier to read a language and listen to a language [both passive skills] than it is to speak and write in a language [both active skills]. I like knowledge and I love understanding things. So I think I might try to understand the basics of a few more languages, not so I can claim to speak the languages, just so I can understand some of them and take some of the grammatical knowledge I gain from those languages and apply it to areas in my linguistics degree. No more guilty wanderlusts! Bring on the German!
That being said, this wanderlust is different from the other wanderlust periods I've had. First of all, I still want to continue studying Chinese. Secondly, this wanderlust isn't necessarily a bad thing. The previous wanderlusts tried to steal the spotlight from the main language I was focusing on and they didn't bring any benefits other than to sate my curiosity about other languages.
However, now that I'm doing linguistics, this wanderlust may be beneficial. In Morphology, we learnt about agglutinating languages (1) such as Turkish and circumfixes [2] in Dutch. In phonetics, we learnt that the Korean alphabet [hangul] has some letters which represent how the sound is pronounced using our vocal organs. In syntax, we compared some English word order with Dutch and so on. Next semester is all about Society and language, the Brain and language and my favourite: historical linguistics and language families. Suddenly Latin is looking quite appealing and learning some German to be able to contrast some of its features with English wouldn't be a bad idea either.
Different people learn different languages for different reasons. Language learning has been a hobby of mine for the last 4 years now. I'm currently learning Chinese with the aim of someday being fully fluent in a foreign language at university. This means being able to read and listen to Chinese as well as being able to construct my own grammatically correct sentences both on written paper and face to face with some native Chinese speaker. I'm slowly accepting the fact that being fluent in 15 languages is a dream and nothing but a dream. That doesn't mean to say that I can't understand the basics of 13 languages and be fluent in 2. Understanding a language and being fluent in a language are two different things. To me, it's much easier to read a language and listen to a language [both passive skills] than it is to speak and write in a language [both active skills]. I like knowledge and I love understanding things. So I think I might try to understand the basics of a few more languages, not so I can claim to speak the languages, just so I can understand some of them and take some of the grammatical knowledge I gain from those languages and apply it to areas in my linguistics degree. No more guilty wanderlusts! Bring on the German!
好久不见 - Long time no see!
大家好，好久不见 = Hey everyone, long time no see. Semester 1 is now finished at university and a lot has happened within this time. My Mandarin has been coming along really well and thanks to having spent time learning Japanese since 2007 [and currently continuing with it at university], I think that has given me a slight advantage over my peers.
Firstly is due to the writing system since Japanese kanji are derived from Chinese characters [汉字 hanzi]. Even if they are sometimes not completely the same, the same character in both languages may still be related. For example, the Japanese word for book is 本 [hon]. In Chinese the word for book is 书 [shu1] however the classifier (1) for books in Chinese is 本 [ben3]： 那本书很有意思 [Na ben shu hen you yisi] - That book is interesting. Although the character for books are not the same, 本 is still related to the topic of 'books'. This can make it easier to remember.
Another reason is Japanese grammar. Japanese grammar is completely different from English with its different word order and particles etc. Because the verb must appear at the end of the sentence, in Japanese you would say 'I at school Chinese study' : 私は学校で中国語を勉強します。Chinese is a SVO [subject verb object] language like English however, certain phrases such as phrases which mark location must appear before the verb. 我在大学念书汉语 = I at university study Chinese. Due to shifting around different parts of a sentence for the last three years in Japanese, it has become easier to adapt to doing it in Chinese.
While this is good and all, I'm still a far-cry from being profient enough to go about daily life in Chinese. In a year and a half, I'll be packing my bags for the first time going abroad to stay in China or Taiwan for a full year. I would quite like to make some Chinese or Taiwanese friends whilst I'm over there but that will be difficult to happen with a low profiency of their language. So, I'm studying everyday to get better. I've found some music in Chinese I like and could listen to over and over and over again. I watch Taiwanese drama shows [with subtitles of course] to get accustomed to the tones and pick up some colloquial phrases. But there are still so many grammar points I have yet to grasp and so so many of those characters to master. So I've drawn up a 'get damn good at Chinese' plan. Each day I plan to:
Firstly is due to the writing system since Japanese kanji are derived from Chinese characters [汉字 hanzi]. Even if they are sometimes not completely the same, the same character in both languages may still be related. For example, the Japanese word for book is 本 [hon]. In Chinese the word for book is 书 [shu1] however the classifier (1) for books in Chinese is 本 [ben3]： 那本书很有意思 [Na ben shu hen you yisi] - That book is interesting. Although the character for books are not the same, 本 is still related to the topic of 'books'. This can make it easier to remember.
Another reason is Japanese grammar. Japanese grammar is completely different from English with its different word order and particles etc. Because the verb must appear at the end of the sentence, in Japanese you would say 'I at school Chinese study' : 私は学校で中国語を勉強します。Chinese is a SVO [subject verb object] language like English however, certain phrases such as phrases which mark location must appear before the verb. 我在大学念书汉语 = I at university study Chinese. Due to shifting around different parts of a sentence for the last three years in Japanese, it has become easier to adapt to doing it in Chinese.
While this is good and all, I'm still a far-cry from being profient enough to go about daily life in Chinese. In a year and a half, I'll be packing my bags for the first time going abroad to stay in China or Taiwan for a full year. I would quite like to make some Chinese or Taiwanese friends whilst I'm over there but that will be difficult to happen with a low profiency of their language. So, I'm studying everyday to get better. I've found some music in Chinese I like and could listen to over and over and over again. I watch Taiwanese drama shows [with subtitles of course] to get accustomed to the tones and pick up some colloquial phrases. But there are still so many grammar points I have yet to grasp and so so many of those characters to master. So I've drawn up a 'get damn good at Chinese' plan. Each day I plan to:
- Learn 5 new characters including words in which they appear in and some sentences for each of these words.
- Study a new grammar point each day - one if it's a large point, two if they are both small.
- Do a new lesson in a book from google books on any topic.
- Do 5 minutes of shadowing per day.
- Construct a sentence each day.
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