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.