All Chinese All The Time?

[OneEye]

(shameless plug warning)

I wrote a summary for my blog of how I'm adapting Khatzumoto's All Japanese All The Time method for learning Chinese. His method has gotten a lot of attention (mostly good from what I've seen...although I know around this board it hasn't been as well-received), so I thought it might be of interest here.

Link

[Strawberries513]

Thanks for posting the link, I've been looking forward to seeing how it came along. Great job! This will hopefully help out lots of Chinese-studying AJATT fans.

[OneEye]

Thanks for the comment, and for the help.

[ipsi()]

I do have to question whether listening to songs in Chinese is as helpful as listening to songs in, say, Japanese. Sure, it's good to have Chinese voices to listen to, but as I understand it most songs obliterate the tones in favour of making it sound good, which kinda means that it's not all that helpful for learning how to speak.

Agree/Disagree?

[OneEye]

Agree/Disagree?

Both. I usually use music as filler when I'm not actively listening to something. Say I'm doing flashcard reps or adding new flashcards to Supermemo. I like to have at least some Chinese input then, but I can't pay attention to conversation, and it's distracting, so music helps.

Also, every now and then I find I understand a new line that I didn't before. Sure, it doesn't have the tones, but sometimes that doesn't really matter. "Ni shi bu shi wo de nan peng you" is perfectly comprehensible without tones, right? Maybe I'll hear a new pattern that I just learned, or some vocab item, or something. And hearing it in a song helps to solidify that. Of course, it's even better if you have the lyrics, so you can just look up the tones if you have them. Several of the 二手玫瑰 (one of my favorite bands, Chinese or otherwise) videos on Youtube have the lyrics, so that's helpful. I believe several 许巍 videos have them too.

[tooironic]

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of listening to Chinese music in terms of its didactic value.

Don't get me wrong, there are a few Chinese artists I really adore (Stefanie Sun/ Sun Yanzi, for example), but I don't know, I've never listened to Chinese songs as a listening exercise, more just for fun really

Even analysing the lyrics, you're not really learning new words in the right context are you? You're learning them in a creative/poetic context, so you can't always take them on face value. It's for this reason I tend to just put on Chinese music in the background, or sing to it during drunken karaoke, rather than take it as a serious Chinese lesson

[OneEye]

tooironic,

Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. I'm not trying to learn, I'm just listening to rock. But better to have Chinese rock on than English, right? It isn't a "lesson," it's just music.