My Self-Study Plan - Please Critique

[myann23]

Hi,

I found this forum a couple weeks ago and it's been great so far! I am moving in Beijing in April/May for my career, but my company will only let me work part-time to start out because they want me to really focus on learning Mandarin to start out.

That being said, I am trying to devise a self-study plan, of approximately 2-3 years give or take, that I would spend for developing good Mandarin skills. Initially, I was thinking about going the BLCU/Chinese University route, but I don't think I'll do that because it does not seem efficient to me so I'm trying to figure out a self-study plan supplemented by private tutoring instead.

Currently, my plan is to divide my learning into phases -

1. Between now and when I go to China (5-6 months from now): Do PIMSLEUR and ASSIMIL CHINESE for a decent foundation for the Chinese language. Goal here is to at least be able to speak enough to go around China and speak basic things when I initially get there. I'm already into lesson 22 of Pimsleur Level 1. Also, I'd master pinyin during this phase as well by practicing at various websites.

2. Tackle the NEW PRACTICAL CHINESE READER SERIES when I get to China. I am thinking this might be the "meat" of my study plan since this would take the most time. Spend 2-3 hours each day on this and supplement my book/audio learning with a Mandarin tutor 6-8 hours a week. I'd add vocabulary development with Rosetta Stone and e-tools like Pleco and Wenlin. Lastly, get language partner or do language immersion.

3. ???? I'm looking for some places to go in my third phase. Should I attempt to tackle FSI? Anything gained by doing this? Or would I be too advanced for FSI since I would have finished the Practical Chinese Reader Series by this point? Are there any other comprehensive books or materials that would suit me at this point? Otherwise, I'd start to do a lot of movie watching, listening to songs, reading newspapers (attempting) at this point.

So I've broken down my Mandarin study plan into 3 phases. One question I have is how long would it take to finish all six books in the New Chinese Practical Reader Series? If you know any other text or learning materials that are must-do in any of these phases, let me know. Lastly, do you agree or disagree that doing something like this would be better (and cheaper) than studying at BLCU? Thanks for any help!

Mike

[wrbt]

Pimsleur/Assimil to start - Good idea. I know some in these forums aren't fond of audio-only programs like Pimsleur but IMO if you've got the dough that'll get you up and running very quickly to where you'll be able to function at a basic level buying things, asking directions, etc. and you'll get a good feel for tones.

NPCR - Surely a nice series but often criticized for being too light or unclear in grammar for independent study, although since you're throwing in a tutor perhaps no worries. Another thing on NPCR is starting book 5 it's all in Chinese, and while I can give a nod to the need to teach in Chinese at some point when still learning grammar concepts are more clearly expressed and understood in the learner's native language.

Rosetta Stone for vocab - I'd skip this and use Chinesepod concurrently with NPCR instead. NPCR is going to throw lots of vocabulary at you, 2400 words by end of book 4 and probably 3500 by book 6. You won't lack vocabulary. Use your time instead to advance thru NPCR more thoroughly and quickly as it reinforces by drilling new concepts with previously learned vocab. If you've still got time use chinesepod to work on listening comprehension, the most overlooked and underworked aspect of most formal study programs.

I suspect after finishing all of NPCR you'll be able to get a lot from watching TV, interacting in your environment, and working thru some more advanced Chinese readers for developing your literacy and character recognition skills.

Then again I'm only an intermediate learner in the US, I'd be curious what the more advanced or living in China have to say.

[myann23]

Thanks for your 2 cents. My only problem with starting out with Pimsleur is that it doesn't really teach you pinyin in a formal way. The extent of me knowing how to pronounce Chinese words so far is purely by mimicking the audio in Pimsleur, not necessarily knowing the pinyin tones. Does this pose any danger as far as forming bad habits that might be hard to unlearn?

[wrbt]

If you're mimicking the speakers in an audio-only program how can you be forming bad habits with pinyin? What pinyin?

[myann23]

Yeah, there is no pinyin. I was meaning that when I do learn pinyin, doing the audio first would confuse me because sometimes, or a lot of times, the pinyin spelling is counterintuitive to how it is actually said because I'm so used to English pronounciations. I was thinking the longer I wait, the harder it will be for me to get used to pronouncing the pinyin correctly.

[Hero Doug]

I have a couple things to say about your study plan.

First is that I haven't really looked into Pilsmeur, but I've only read good reviews about it so that say's something.

There are transcripts somehwhere. I'm not sure if I still have them or not, if I do I'll post them, if not do a search for them on these boards and Google.

Most importantly though, is review. I'm studying the same book as another friend and what he does is studies the lesson for a couple hours, then goes to the tutor and studies with her. Next week, he does the same thing with the next lesson. The problem with this is while he's already on book two (exciting I know), I guarantee there's a lot of stuff he's forgotten from the first book. So I've finished the first book, and I'm now doing it again and as I suspected, there is a lot I forgot. I really don't see the point of learning something only to forget it two months later. Yeah, you'll learn slower, but it'll be more automatic, which is what the ultimate goal is.

A note on Rosetta Stone though. STAY AWAY. It's the most horrible piece of garbage I've ever seen. They teach you totally useless phrases and sentences. Like "the boy fell down", "the girl is riding the horse", "the boy is under the plane", a dog. By the time you finish it you won't be as far as you'd like.

I'd highly recommend Chinese Made Easier. It teaches the same (and more) grammar points, and does it in a very useful way. So instead of learning "the boy is under the table", you learn "the pen is on the table". The big difference is that Rosteea Stone just throws a Chinese sentence and a picture at you, no explination on pronunciation, meaning, grammar nothing. It's all up to you to figure it out, so if you guess wrong, you'll be teaching yourself the wrong stuff. I'd save your money, really.

Also, I like your idea about getting a tutor over going to University. In a University you have to share a teacher with your whole class, but with a tutor you get her all to yourself. Plus, you'll get to learn the way that suits you best.

I don't have any comment's on the Practical Reader or FSI. But I would say don't jump in too deep too soon (reading newspapers).

[myann23]

Your points on Rosetta Stone are duly noted. I have tried Chinesepod and I like it. How essential do you think it is to pay for the premium stuff, or is just listening to the free lessons enough?

Regarding Chinese Made Easier, after doing some research it seems like its gotten good reviews. I'm really glad that they are coming out with cd/tapes to accompany the text as well. I'd be afraid to dive full bore into textbooks that don't have cd/tapes now because I don't have pinyin and the pronounciations down yet. There's simply no way to know if I got the pronounciations down right.

Thanks for your 2 cents.

[simonlaing]

Hi all,

I agree with pervious posters to becareful of audio only courses that don't teach pinyin let alone characters. I learned the hard way that learning jsut to speak first doesn't mean you don't have to read learn the same words when it comes to reading and writing them in characters.

You should try and get good at tones (a.ka. pinyin) at the beginning because you will become lazy later with them because a lot of chinese people are lazy with their tones sometimes.

The reader series is good, though I agree there is not too much english, One series I particually like is the Fazhan Hanyu developmental chinese series. As well as good progress, pinyin, characters, and exercises it does little things well. Like explain grammar as you learn things and have interesting chinese texts that can make you chuckle.

One good book for learning radical method of learning charaters is a book called the easy way to learn speak and write chiense, by a french guy, I will look up the book name later.

Make sure when you schedule your tutor you have a set time every week to get routine, it is easy to become lazy since chinese is such a hard language,

good luck,

SImon:)

[wrbt]

The problem with this is while he's already on book two (exciting I know), I guarantee there's a lot of stuff he's forgotten from the first book. So I've finished the first book, and I'm now doing it again and as I suspected, there is a lot I forgot. I really don't see the point of learning something only to forget it two months later. Yeah, you'll learn slower, but it'll be more automatic, which is what the ultimate goal is.

Definitely, especially if one is learning in the West ji hui lian xi bu gou. I've found that constant review thru audio only is sufficient for me to retain older stuff... like right now I might be on book 5 of some series but the audio from books 2-4 are always playing in my car commuting to work or in my headphones when walking the dog. Hear the dialogue and vocab again enough times and it sticks, and when some word or pattern does throw me off I'll look it up next time studying to reinforce. The characters get reviewed just by being in new words and texts I encounter.

I also like doing different series on same level, because two books for say 3rd year students have so much different vocab yet so much same to review from others. Probably takes a little longer to advance but surely thorough and it's quite rewarding to open up a chapter and realize you already know 30 of the 45 vocabulary items. Learn a few news ones and review the ones you've already learned, used in different ways.

[myann23]

Regarding pairing different series of textbooks on the same level and studying them concurrently...what are some good series to pair with New Practical Chinese Reader? Some have already been mentioned on this thread. I've also seen Integrated Chinese Reader mentioned almost as much as NPCR. Anything else?

[simonlaing]

Hi Myann,

I found for the intermediate learner the BCLU books were quite good. If you're in China they have the qiao bridge on the front and there is a part one shang and a part two xia.

As well as good vocabulary and excellent execises, they often had english grammar explanations. I found this very helpful as I had a crazy Grammar teacher that would refuse to answer questions during class because he would be unable to read all of his 2 hour lecture. (Also he went super fast , korean speed which I had a lot of trouble keeping up with.) So the English explanations helped a lot.

have fun,

SImon:)

[hunxueer]

you mention that your company is sending you but also that the university route doesn't seem efficient. i'm wondering why? i would imagine you could ask your company to sponsor your studying at university, and i really think this is a good way to show you the way in terms of discipline, regularly putting in time, and also getting the basics down.

unless you're a super self-motivated person and/or have a lot of experience independently studying languages, i'd strongly recommend this route because coming to live in china is such a trip in and of itself that you're going to have plenty to handle and think about and be distracted by that putting in the time for self-study often just doesn't happen, in even some of the most well-intentioned folks.

now that i've said that, onto the specifics of your plan:

i think pimsleur is really good, especially for pronunciation and developing your ability to generate automatic responses to common questions, although i have a couple complaints:

-the speaking speed is really not as fast as people speaking normally, so i think it might give users the impression that once they master pimsleur they'll be able to jump right into conversation, which isn't really the case because you'll continually have to ask people to repeat themselves and probably slow down as well

-with pimsleur you really only learn one way to say everything, so if somebody says a sentence with the same meaning but words/grammar is slightly altered, you might be completely lost. they also tend to speak a bit formally compared to what you might hear on a daily basis. for instance, the first time i listened to a mandarin pimsleur i'd already been here a while and learned a bit of the language. one of the sentences on the disc was "wo3 xiang3 chi1 yi1dian3er dong1xi" (i'd like to eat something), which i'd never heard in real life--it's generally more like "wo3 yao4 chi1" or "wo3 xiang3 chi1" (i wanna eat).

pinyin study--very good, and i might even suggest doing that prior to starting pimsleur because sounds and pinyin spelling often don't correspond to their english counterparts, so this will give you an easy way to visualize the words which, if you're a visual learner, will help you to pronounce as well as remember the words you're saying. if you can find a chinese tutor where you are, i'd say it's well worth it to hire/him her for this phase so you can be sure your pronunciation of these fundamental sounds you learn are as accurate as possible.

new practical chinese reader. this is the series we used during my semester of university study. i completed book 2 and am partway into book 3. i'm not very impressed, frankly. it looks to me to be awfully similar to many of the other books on the market with the exception that it's printed on nicer paper and is therefore twice the price. a couple nice features are their pacing (dropping pinyin by book 2, for instance) and that they have accompanying discs (not so necessary if you have a tutor i think) and workbooks, but so many of the exercises in them would be useless without a tutor telling you whether or not you've completed the exercises correctly (unless there's a teacher's book? not sure on this). also so many of the exercises are writing passages, which is ... blaaaaah. the grammar explanations suck, frankly--impossible to decipher--and the characters whose stories are depicted in the series are kind of annoying. though some of the culture clashes in book 3 are turning out to be somewhat interesting. another nice feature of book 2 is that it has the tones printed above the characters, which helps when you're reading out loud. but book 3 omits these.

also, to give you an idea of timeframe, we were studying monday through friday, 9 to 12:20, for about four months and made it through book 2 and three or four chapters of book 3. m, w, f we usually did the textbook and t, th we used the workbook. but i also felt that we were progressing too quickly, i.e., we skipped many of the exercises in the books i guess in the name of pushing ahead.

so i guess i'd look for other books. there's one set of 2 books called "40 lessons for basic chinese course" that i think is pretty good for self-study in terms of layout, variety of exercises, method of pointing out sentence structure. its main drawback is that the first book is too pinyin-heavy for my tastes, and i heard that it's now out of print. i went textbook shopping yesterday and picked up "shifting tides: culture in contemporary china" which i'm pretty excited by for its clear grammar notes and interesting-ish topics, "step by step chinese intermediate speaking" for its oral language patterns, which an experienced CSL teacher said were very authentic, and "climbing up" which i'm kind of regretting having purchased after finding the first one i mentioned. it looked like the best at the time, but that was compared to lots of others of not very high quality. when i can find it i'd like to pick up the appropriate level of "chinese made easier" as i've seen the beginning level and it looked really easy to follow which is key for self-studying.

one last word about self-study vs. university: even if you enroll in university you'll probably doing plenty of self-studying outside of class to keep up, so i think overall you'll be learning at a faster rate going this route. you're also free to study whatever/however you like on your own time. and it's not necessarily more expensive--sure, you can get tutors for rmb20 or 30/hr, but after less-than-satisfying experiences with half a dozen tutors, i'd be happy to pay a good tutor to meet with me on a daily basis for a monthly salary equivalent to what i pay for tuition at a university. also the time you'll invest into finding a decent tutor might make just studying at a university at least initially worth it. it's amazingly difficult to find one here, though in beijing you might have better luck since that's where most of the foreign students are, it seems.

[renegadedog]

I must say that I disagree almost entirely with Hero Doug.

For the first two years I was in China I found it really hard to learn Mandarin. Then around a year and a half ago someone introduced me to Rosetta Stone. My Mandarin has come along in leaps and bounds since then.

Hey, it doesn't spoon feed you everything, but then that is because it is acting like a good teacher SHOULD act! Do we not criticise the Chinese for being dependent on spoon feeding?

Rosetta Stone, by being entirely in Chinese with no English-based explanations, helps you to learn naturally.

To call it a 'horrible piece of garbage' is a bit daft, as this is the way to actually learn a language, rather than being spoonfed everything in a phrasebooky approach.

[wrbt]

I've generally given NPCR higher marks than many in this forum, and when I think about it could because when I did book 2 I already had a year of college Chinese so knew all the 1st year grammar, and when I did book 3 & 4 had already finished David & Helen so again wasn't very focused on the grammar.

Given grammar explanations are considered the big weak point it just hasn't bothered me, so I was liking the outstanding font, excellent audio, repition of common patterns, and relatively modern (if somewhat amusingly sino-centric) texts about things like space flight. I do remember thinking it was pretty stupid that they didn't translate example sentences into English... just explain it briefly in English than roll out four examples all completely in Chinese.

Cost hasn't bothered me since I started off with classes that were several hundred bucks each so spending $45 for a book and CDs seems like a bargain.

[Pravit]

Although I've never used Pimsleur, personally I think it's overrated based on the language abilities of people I've met who use it as their sole means of learning Chinese. The ones I met seemed to be good at listening and could definitely communicate what they meant, but their pronunciation and grammar was really bad. I guess it couldn't hurt if you use it as a supplement to other things, unless you take your wallet size into consideration...;)

Another recommendation for NPCR, which I have never used, but wished I had learned with once I thumbed through them at 西单图书大厦. My girlfriend is learning from them and making good progress. The Integrated Chinese series(which I learned with) is decent, but nothing out-of-the-ordinary - in my opinion, NPCR does a better job.

[ironlady]

IMHO especially if you are beginning on your own, you could do much worse than to start off with no Romanization (i.e., doing it all by ear with an audio course). Accent interference from native language in terms of Romanization mostly comes from processing written forms in Pinyin and pronouncing them as the brain says the native language would pronounce the letters. You're better off to have the words in your brain first, solidly, in their acoustic form, and then learn to match up the written form. It would be good to have some guidance on the sounds of Mandarin that don't exist in English, just to clue you in on how to produce them correctly.

You may feel that you can't "remember" all the words you have "learned" -- but if you haven't heard a new item 50-70 times in novel contexts, your brain hasn't had a chance to absorb it anyhow. There's a difference between "learned" and "acquired", and "learned" usually means "we've read that page once in class". That's the major drawback of pretty nearly all the Chinese courses and textbooks out there today - insufficient repetition of items and too-broad presentation of new items, plus concurrent teaching of all four skills.

Since foreign learners usually need extra support with tones, though, on the other hand it's not a bad idea to use Romanization with added visual cues for tone retention (tonal spelling, color coding, etc.) to reinforce knowledge of tones. That will come in handy later on when the focus shifts to performance of tones rather than knowledge of them. One part of tone errors is simply being confused about which tone the syllable is supposed to be and using reinforcing methods helps to minimize these problems by anchoring the correct tones more firmly in the learner's memory.

[klear]

Your plan seems great. I would also definitely recommend using rosetta stone though. I used it when I was studying Spanish and it was great - I've also looked at the Chinese version. It may not teach you the most interesting and useful phrases but it will give you a great foundation in Chinese grammar and as long as you have a microphone it will be very valuable at working on your tones.

The only other piece of advice I would give is to include some authentic materials into your plan after a few months. Chinese cartoons or television drama are great- you may not understand very much at first but it will help you to get a feel for the language and also give you a buzz when you hear and understand a phrase that you've just picked up.

Good luck!

[renegadedog]

Rosetta Stone is not for total beginners though, I would add. I can see why someone who had never learned the language before would be stumped by it. When I picked it up I had already been in China for two years, knew a lot of words, but was unconfident at putting them together. Rosetta helped me to do so.

[xxl_male]

I found Assimil absolutely below standards as regards the audio part. The recordings are sloppy and of poor quality. As an introductory course I did Integrated Chinese (berkely files on the web) + the Oxford university lessons (also on the web).

A very good intermediate course on the market is David & Helen in China. You don't have to chase dozens of booklets and subbooklets like the NPCR. The listening exercices are superb and you get some vocab for them (which you don't get in NPCR 5 as far as I can judge). "Listening exercices" in most courses are wasted for students studying on their own because they're never able to fill in all the blanks in their understanding. Not so, or nearly not so in D&H in China. Without a tutor it should however not be started on unless you are well beyond beginner level since it is not primarily meant as a self-study course and the voacab + grammar require a good deal of sorting out on your own.

ChinesePod is unbeatable for modern, realistic dialogue, for its all-encompasing coverage and for keeping you motivated in your study, but it may be too expensive for some people. Strictly speaking, given its price its value for money is not above that of other courses at a given level. But if money is not at all an issue, as from intermediate level you have to be foolish not to subscribe to ChinesePod

By the way, I'd be grateful for any clue as to whether the NPCR 5 has audio files for the grammar, and whether the texts (= solutions) of its listening exercices can be found somewhere. The audio files I have contain 4 files per lesson.

I finished D&H and I'll now be doing ChinesePod + (if I don't get fed up with chasing bits an pieces) NPCR 5.

Edited January 7, 2009 at 09:47 PM by xxl_male

[chalimac]

My recommendation:

- Learn to read with the DeFrancis Reader series. Awesome material. Check some reviews:

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Chinese-Reader-Part-I/dp/0300020600/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/191-7623054-3408639?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231366243&sr=8-1

- Learn to speak doing Pimsleur with transcriptions. They are here:

http://www.ramms.myby.co.uk/mandarin-1.htm