Advanced Beginner self study plan - advice welcome!

[Pendragon]

I've been learning Mandarin for about a year by scraping together bits and pieces of learning material. It helped me past the first hurdles but now I'd like to study in a more systematic way. Here's what I figured out so far, any feedback is very welcome.

I used info from other discussions on this forum to get to the plan I have so far. I include some links to books I intend to use, other beginners may also find them useful.

Goal: to speak Mandarin comfortably with my Chinese girlfriend; and to make a career as foreign expert in China possible (not sure whether I want to do that, but I'd like to make it a possibility)

Done so far:

- 1 month summer course at Zhejiang Daxue: lots of pronunciation drills and basic grammar explanation. I can recommend this, especially for beginning learners. I stepped in as a blank slate and came out with some basic idea of what Mandarin is about.

- 2 months evening school in the Netherlands: basic grammar and vocab building, but only 2 hours per week. Covered Integrated Chinese level 1 part 1.

- self-study: nearly completed Pimsleur (all 3 units), nearly completed the characters and vocab of HSK A (I use Matthews&Matthews "Learning Chinese Characters", they put the characters in a logical order with some pictures and stories as memory aids - works fine for me).

Soon I'll be off to China for 7 months, here's my plan:

- 1 on 1 lessons with a certified teacher, 10 hours per week (2 hours per working day) throughout the 7 months

- learn the characters of HSK B, and any vocab from HSK B, C and D that works with the HSK A and B characters (I use

ZDT; awesome program, I would be lost without it).

- work through Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar, the textbook and the workbook, with help of the private teacher

- work through Integrated Chinese level 1 part 2, and level 2 both parts

- character writing practise with the teacher, writing the characters I'm learning for HSK B to hit two birds with the same stone

- Chinesepod for additional vocabulary (putting all the new vocab in ZDT), maybe an hour a day

- after Integrated Chinese, work through the textbooks at MIT Open Courseware (here's part 1 of 4, it's a nice textbook from beginner to intermediate and totally free for download). By then I've probably seen most of it in the other books I use, but it seems worth it to go through the more advanced grammar and vocab.

- work through some graded readers as soon as I complete HSK A (hopefully I can use the most basic graded readers by then, without looking up every word in the dictionary).

I'm planning to take the HSK elementary-intermediate test at the end of these 7 months, I'm hoping to score something like level 5 or maybe 6 (right now I might hope for level 2 or 3 if I would take the test).

Any work I can do outside of my room, I'll do outside at any random place where people speak Chinese

Do you think this could work, or is the program a bit biased towards some aspects of the language? I guess it's a full program for just 7 months, but soon my study (not related to Mandarin) will be finished so it feels like it's now or never. Could I reach my goals in this way? Thanks for any feedback!

[renzhe]

I think that you have most of the bases covered.

You should think ahead of time what exactly you want to do with your teacher and how to divide the time, but I guess you'll have to see how you're developing there. Getting through the textbook is a good thing, just leave the exercises for homework and use the teacher for explanations, pronunciation drills and conversation. Prepare for lessons ahead of time. You should be easily able to cover a textbook lesson per week.

For an HSK6+, you'll likely need to know most of the vocab in the HSK A-C vocab lists. The reading in the test is more difficult than most graded readers I've heard people discuss. So, by all means use them, but be prepared to read a lot of stuff, and advance to more complex stuff soon. Comic books are a good intermediate resource, and you can get them easily in China. I recommend looking at past and current Book of the Month and Short Story of the Month here on this forum for some good suggestions. If you can get through a moderately easy (real) book, your reading will be fine for what you're trying to accomplish. Reading will also help you remember characters well and is really important on the cloze part of the test. I've read a decent amount and I still suck royally at this part of the HSK.

I'd recommend an hour of reading a day throughout your stay. You should also try to get at least an hour of talking, either with your teacher or with some language exchange partner. It will be hard to do more than a few minutes in the beginning, but regular exposure will help you think in the language and get used to common phrases and sentence structures.

[Pendragon]

Thanks Renzhe, that's really helpful!

Yea using a teacher well is an important skill, to make sure the few hours I have will be productive. I plan to do the basic drills with language exchange partners, so I can save up the tricky questions for the teacher. Maybe writing the questions down in advance of the lessons will also help.

Reading is a blind spot for me so far, so I'll make sure to give that more emphasis. I guess the challenge is to find reading material that's motivating since it will take a lot of effort. I found a small series that may do the trick, they're just still too hard for me at the moment: "Ancient Chinese Minitiature Stories" and "Chinese Jokes Through the Ages" from the series "Chinese classical treasury - the traditional Chinese culture classical series". I picked them up second-hand, not sure if they're still being printed (they're from 1985; I can't figure out the publisher from the book cover). They include a full translation and pinyin next to the characters.

[Hedge]

Check out the Chinese Breeze series (this thread for more info). If you know the HSK A characters/vocab, Level 1 should be a breeze for you:)

[Pendragon]

Thanks Hedge, I'll take a look!