My Self-Study Plan - Please Critique

[myann23]

At the behest of Roddy I'll give you guys a quick update on my Chinese learning.

I actually started "officially" working my job in January. The 16 months previous to that I was singularly focusing on learning Chinese, with a 4 month break in back in the US last summer.

Stopped Pimsleur after finishing level two. Using Pimsleur seems like ages ago... I can't believe how slow this learning method seems to me now that I've been in China for awhile. If you have the time, sure...go ahead and use it if you just want some Chinese to get by in China. You'll still be far from fluent though.

I think at the beginning, continually listening to the short dialogues of Assmil were a big help. I brought my Ipod with me everywhere I went to.

The TLI classes were a big help. I was in Beijing for one summer with TLI and then went to Dalian's TLI for the rest of my Chinese learning time here. TLI is solid if you can afford it, as they have strict quality control with their teaching and produce their own materials. They are the biggest help during the beginning and intermediate levels. Afterwards we continued to study with Kouyu books from PKU Press and BLCU. After you finish their materials and start to use third-party materials, the classes did sometimes seem to gravitate towards just going by the book with little value-add from the teacher. I suppose you can get someone cheaper if you just want to do this method.

In addition to TLI, I had a heavy dose of listening materials from BLCU and PKU Tingli Books. I stopped at the intermediate levels after I realized Chinesepod was a little more enjoyable to use. Right now I'm still using CP - finished 95% of the lessons from intermediate/upper-intermediate and now working on advanced. There does seem to be somewhat of a big jump from upper-int to advanced here with regards to the speed and specialized vocab.

The sucky thing is that I'm not using much Chinese for work so far other than reading a ton of Chinese newspapers and magazines. I feel like I'm cheating though because I'm pasting the text into wenlin. I work in the film and media industry and my boss has poor Chinese. So to help him and myself out, he wants me to do a daily read (takes maybe 2-4 hours each day) of Chinese media publications focusing on news for film, television, and general media. I'm getting excellent global exposure to characters, but I still need to use the dictionary a lot as I'm still far from fluent.

One last sucky thing is that since I want to become a film producer/manager in this industry, my boss is letting me get to know acting/directing clients by teaching them English. This is a great move by him for me professionally, but this moves me away from a Chinese speaking environment.

I feel like I can do daily conversation fine, but when it comes to talking business, talking about story points in scripts, or explaining a process in detail, my Chinese still needs a lot of work. For those of you that were at this point and still needed improvement, how did you break through the barrier?

[gato]

feel like I can do daily conversation fine, but when it comes to talking business, talking about story points in scripts, or explaining a process in detail, my Chinese still needs a lot of work. For those of you that were at this point and still needed improvement, how did you break through the barrier?

The best way to do it is to read more about your field (i.e. movie making) and then use the vocabulary/sentence structures you learn in your conversations at work. It's going to take some hard work as you still need to use the dictionary a lot while reading.

Here are a couple of recommendations for books. Kristin Thompson's book on movies has just been translated into Chinese and has been pretty popular here.

http://www.amazon.com/Storytelling-New-Hollywood-Understanding-Classical/dp/0674839757

Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique

http://product.dangdang.com/product.aspx?product_id=20541922

好莱坞怎样讲故事

作　　者： （美）汤普森　著，李燕，李慧　译

You might also interested in "一个人的电影", a book about the Chinese non-mainstream film scene:

http://www.douban.com/subject/3239824/

一个人的电影

作者: 格非 / 贾樟柯（等）

[leosmith]

.

[myann23]

Very awesome! I'll check it out...

Mike