So apparently I'm going to lose my Chinese...

[renzhe]

Two weeks is a blink of an eye. If you had really forgotten, you'd need 2 years to get back to where you were

[drktmplar]

Yes, you will have certain areas which will go backward after you leave China - namely your tones and fluency.

What you can improve upon is your vocabulary and reading/writing skills fairly easily.

If you learn 3-5 new words everyday, then each day read for 20 minutes, you will improve.

However, if you want to retain what you learn, you will have to review aggressively. This is how I recommend you go about doing this:

Each day you study:

-Today's new vocab

-Yesterday's vocab

-The day before yesterday's vocab

-Some other day's vocab

-A second other day's vocab

Get your new vocab from nciku.com. Find an example sentence with a word you don't know, and write that sentence two or three times. When you review, rewrite those sentences two times. This will give you a context as well as give you an endless source of new vocab.

For 3-5 words per day, it really doesn't take a lot of time, and the benefits are huge. I To study 20 words altogether takes me about 30 minutes (but I've gotten quite fluent at writing with this method). Think 3 * 365 = 1095. Once you reach 3000-4000 characters, you can simply review three days worth of characters each day, and spend more time reading random Chinese stuff.

As for your tones, it sounds like you need some intensive tone work. I am not sure what the best way to fix tones are, but I have a possible solution:

Buy a textbook (they usually come in a series of small work books) that is used to teach Chinese to the children of Chinese FOBs. Go to your local Chinatown bookstore, or ask around at your local Chinese language school where they force unwilling Chinese children to learn their parents' tongue.

Practice reciting the dialogues and paragraphs aloud, and once a week have a Chinese person listen to you and correct your tones. Read loudly, slowly, and pay very careful attention to your tones. It's been two years since I left China and I noticed an improvement in fluency and tones using this method. Slowly, you can move to harder material. Again, the point isn't to learn new words, but to improve your tones, fluency, and internalize basic grammar and sentence patterns.

Movie scripts work too, but...well, you'll have to spend some effort finding those (called 剧本）, and I, personally, would sometimes get distracted and just watch the movie!

加油，Ninja先生！

dt

[tony1343]

It sounds like you've made up your mind. But one thing that you might want to think about is, what are you going to do when you come back to America? You might already have a job lined up, or maybe you are still going to be going to school here. If you don't have anything yet, you may want to consider the economy. It's not easy to find a job. It might be better to stay over there in school learning Chinese than come back here and look for a job for a semester (though there are signs that hiring is starting to pick up).

[zhen_shuai]

how long did it take you guys (for those who have achieved it) the "critical mass" stage? 

10,000 hours.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_%28book%29

(Not there yet either.)

[renzhe]

If you learn 3-5 new words everyday, then each day read for 20 minutes, you will improve.

Learning is easy.

Retaining is difficult.

That's why everyone should be using a flashcard program using spaced repetition.

[drktmplar]

Renzhe writes:

Learning is easy.

Retaining is difficult.

That's why everyone should be using a flashcard program using spaced repetition.

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly with the fact that retention is difficult. For precisely this reason, per my suggestion, most of the daily study time is spent reviewing.

I wrote:

Each day you study:

-Today's new vocab

-Yesterday's vocab

-The day before yesterday's vocab

-Some other day's vocab

-A second other day's vocab

4/5 of the program is review.

Yes, flashcards can be great if used properly. If used as a mixable vocab bank without sentences, your word usage in proper context may suffer, thus making flashcards of sentences which incorporate vocab is often better. Also, when studying flashcards, I would recommend that you not only recite what's on the other side of the flashcard, but write as well. Adding tactile memory is a big plus.

Another problem with flashcards is that they encourage English-Chinese translation in your head. I'm not sure how much this affects things, though. Either way, I never used flashcards and always had the highest grade in my Chinese classes, not because I'm special or anything, but because I spent most of my daily study time reviewing by writing previous vocab and saying grammar patterns.

Whatever method you use, as long as you do it daily and always review, you should see some improvement, even if other aspects of your Chinese (oral fluency and tones) necessarily sag due to lack of use. Listening can also be improved by watching movies, listening to online radio, etc.

Again, good luck,

dt

[imron]

I think you missed the key part of Renzhe's post:

....using spaced repetition.

You say you spend most of your time reviewing, but how often are you reviewing stuff you already remember quite well, and how often do you find you've left it too long before reviewing and so need to spend extra time to recover the things you had forgotten? Spaced repetition solves this problem (or at least attempts to) by calculating the optimum time to schedule review of a given piece of knowledge so you only spend time reviewing things that you are about to forget (that's the theory anyway).

For example, if you remember half of yesterday's vocab really well, and the other half not so well, it's a waste of time reviewing the stuff you remember well today, when you could just as easily review them tomorrow (or the next day) when you are closer to forgetting them. From a time management perspective, the time you would have spend reviewing them today would have been put to better use reviewing words you were less familiar with.

Also flashcards don't necessarily encourage English-Chinese translation in your head. When I use flashcards, they are Chinese-Chinese only.

[renzhe]

The manual revision approach worked for me until I got to about 1000 characters. After that, it started falling apart, I was forgetting many characters, and I was finding it difficult to separate the characters I knew well from the ones that wouldn't stick. SRS helped immensely there.

Also, I find that the reliance on English translations is really something that only matters in the early stages of learning a word. After a few revisions, I don't think of the English word, I simply assign a meaning to the character/word. It doesn't always work great, but generally it does.

For example, when I see 中 nowadays, I don't translate it into English or whatever, I see 中 and I know exactly what 中 is, and that's my review.

[animal world]

The manual revision approach worked for me until I got to about 1000 characters. After that, it started falling apart, I was forgetting many characters, and I was finding it difficult to separate the characters I knew well from the ones that wouldn't stick. SRS helped immensely there.

This is exactly what happened to me. It was depressing after having spent endless hours to learn 1150 characters to have the sensation that they were whirling around in my head as if it were in a blender. It had become a losing battle because i had the choice to either spend all my time reviewing over and over what i had learned until then or continue learning new stuff that inevitably would end up in the "blender." Learning Chinese stopped being fun at that point until i found a SRS.

As to a previous poster's comments about daily reviews, I'd like to point out that the brain is a master at devising patterns. So, it will do a great job when recalling words on a certain page, to automatically visualize the words from the page before that represent the previous day's review. Three months later your mind desperately looks for a word and you remember distinctly that it's the fifth one on page 78 but for the world of it you can't come up with the word! Hence, you need randomness in any review system to fight off this tendency of finding unhelpful patterns.

I have a question to those who use SRS also for sentences. I don't presume the intent is to become mindless parrots. What criteria do you use to grade yourself? Recalling the major words, context and an interesting grammar issue if applicable? Anything else?

Edited September 24, 2009 at 01:36 AM by animal world

[renzhe]

Yes. I was spending a huge amount of my time sorting out which characters I had forgotten, sorting things into categories by hand, randomising things so I don't recall the pattern, etc. I was almost spending more time managing the database of what I had learned and forgotten than I did on learning and revision.

Now I have a program give me 50-100 items for revision every day and I concentrate my efforts on more productive things. It's not always perfect, but it's a life-saver in any case.