How fast should my pacing be?

[joshuawbb]

Hello,

My pacing of learning Chinese has been a nagging issue for me for a while, and I'm mostly asking this about the NPCR books. I am studying in Xiamen and want to make my Mandarin good enough for HSK 6 at the earliest possible time.

I arrived here at the end of June and to be honest, my pacing was quite slow and not too efficient. Until I started my Xiamen University course in September I picked up far less Chinese than I wanted to and didn't know how to study efficiently. I started focusing entirely on NPCR1 near the end of September after deciding to dump the poor textbooks my class are currently using (Hanyu Jiaocheng series) and started it from about lesson 9 after looking back on the lessons and deciding I knew enough to skip them, but still reviewed the previous lessons for quite a while. I finished the first book at a slightly slower pace than I wanted, started NPCR2 about 5 days ago and am currently on lesson 17 (the book's third lesson). I'm wondering: how should I best pace myself?

So far I usually spend at least 7 hours studying per day, on most days, with the textbook, (that includes 4 hours of daily class, which I will detail below). I have been working on finishing a general overview of one lesson on average every 1.5 days and then immediately moving to the next one, whilst doing reviews of previous lessons. Obviously this is quite a lot and is easier said than done, but as of the past 5 days or so, this has been going well and I haven't slacked off. I feel satisfied. This is a fast pace aimed at completing NPCR2 in hopefully just over a month.

I read a topic before about someone trying to finish an NPCR book within a month, and if my memory is correct, others said that it's probably doable, though naturally one may not remember everything. I want to finish NPCR2 by about this day next month (hopefully slightly earlier), and NPCR3 in maybe a bit longer. As I mentioned, the textbook my class uses is poor and frequently impractical, and now I only use it for vocabulary and obligatory homework. Quite a lot during class, I open up my NPCR and focus on that, progressing as I would outside of class (my teachers know and don't seem to mind, I don't think they like the books either). Outside of class I tend to study intensely with NPCR for at least 3 hours with a few rests, then relax. I focus on new words first, then grammar, etc before studying the dialogues.

My listening class, thanks to very poor quality recordings, isn't so useful either. I do the listening activities there but my girlfriend's kind teaching and ChinesePod provide my speaking and listening practice the most. As for speaking, I need to improve but I'm conversing a lot more with the Chinese people around me and of course, my girlfriend is an invaluable help for me. I also use Anki every day, as much as I can, finding it incredibly helpful.

So taking all this into consideration, do you think my pace for the NPCR books is suitable? Realistic? I have read from other people's topics that a suitable pace is to do about 1 to 3 lessons per week and get very solid recall, but so far I am actually finding it comfortable, and though I am working as intensely as I can - I need HSK 6 as quickly as possible - I don't feel like I will burn out with this. It seems to be going well. Granted, after each lesson I can't recall every character in my mind but I feel I can remember quite a lot, and I review each lesson as I go through new ones. I find I pick up grammar, reading speed and some characters quickly, but other characters I have to reinforce a lot through Anki and keep drilling them as I go through new lessons.

I need to go at the fastest pace I can practically allow myself without burning out down the line; what do you think of this?

Many, many thanks for your advice.

[taylor04]

If you are studying 7 hours a day, you will most likely burn out somewhere a long the line. What kind of practice do you do outside of reading? The biggest thing to learning new words is to use them, if I use a new word and someone corrects me on how to use it, or it goes well, I pretty much will never forget it. What is your goal? Do you want to be a great reader, great speaker, or both? When I was in China I wanted to be a good speaker, I didn't practice too much reading and writing. Now I have to catch up hehe. But you need to find out what you want to do and stick with that, if you want to speak, stop reading a text book 7 hours a day and go make some chinese friends. If you just want to read, then youre doing great so far. Why do you need HSK level 6? Looking to go to a Chinese school? Chinese company? If so, you need to get your speaking and listening skills up quite a bit along with reading.

[renzhe]

Learning huge amounts of stuff is not that hard, it's remembering it months later that is difficult.

Everything that you're learning now will need revision later, so make sure to make room for those. If you don't review regularly, you'll forget older lessons and end up stuck in a rut.

So you can expect your pace to slow down, and that's the right thing to do.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of intensive learning and information overload. But it does lead to burnout unless you structure your studying so that i) it's fun and ii) you are doing enough revision, and iii) you are not afraid to take a step back and go into minimal mode once you feel burnout creeping in. This last part is an extremely important part of learning, even more important than cramming things in.

I recommend SRS flashcard software and occasional breaks for having things settle in your mind. NPCR has review lessons twice per book if I remember correctly, and you can use these lessons to also go back over older lessons and make sure you can still do the exercises easily and that you remember the key vocabulary.

[abcdefg]

This strikes me as a somewhat strange and inefficient study plan. If I understood you correctly, you just quickly prep the lessons in the textbook used by your class because you don’t like that book. In the classroom while the teacher is explaining things, you read a different text at your own pace. You don’t like the listening lab or find it very helpful.

So instead you rely on a different set of textbooks (NPCR) for the bulk of your learning, supplemented by Chinese Pod, Anki and assistance from your girlfriend.

This sounds mostly like a self-study plan. Unless I’ve heard you wrong, the university enrollment sounds just like un-necessary bother and expense as well as a major drain on your available time.

Edited November 14, 2009 at 04:03 PM by abcdefg

[Understudy]

I agree with much of what is said in the above posts. Burnout is a true risk, but it also depends on the level of overload that you can deal with. I will also note that there is much more involved in being able to speak a language than just having a running knowledge of the grammer and vocabulary. You may acheive a level where you can understand everything that is being said, but because of a lack of cultural knowledge (As it ties into all languages) may miss the deeper meanings of a conversation (Ie. what are they really saying). If you are just pushing to get to level six of the HSK, this may be less the case, but I always suggest moving a a moderate but thorough pace. As always, though, some people can certainly learn much faster than others.

[joshuawbb]

Thank you everyone for your replies and advice, I really appreciate it. I'm sorry to return to my thread so late. This week I've been taking it easy and reviewing in case things start burning out.

As for HSK 6, I aim to get it because I want to study a BA degree here in China. My thoughts have been hovering around generally Chinese Language or Literature, but now upon hearing a classmate's plan, I've been thinking about TCFL/Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (perhaps). I don't have a degree yet; I came here after college graduation in the UK, because of both an interest of a career involving China and my girlfriend living here, whom I have known for 2 years now. For a degree, I would assume I should focus on all aspects of Chinese language.

My girlfriend helps me a lot all-round but I still need to improve my speaking more with her in Chinese. Still working on that and it's going well. Study takes quite a lot of my time and I do have some Chinese friends, though a few. I'm a happy introvert at heart and my social energy is very well-satisfied within a small-ish close circle of friends, and especially with my girlfriend who will honestly correct my mistakes. I try to chat with shop staff and others I see too.

I do enjoy my study though I will be making more room for revision. Recently I worked on lessons 1 to 3 of NPCR2 and stopped to review this weekend. Thank you for that advice, and I guess I should slow down somewhat. Tomorrow I should go through some lessons from book 1. Anki has been quite a lifeline for me and now that I often use it, I wouldn't be without it. Though I should be getting a better routine for it.

abcdefg, what you said is quite true. To be honest, and I really hate to say it like this, but the university couse has been a real disappointment so far though it might change next semester as they are considering dumping the current books. I enroled at Xiamen University for an intensive one-year course, and felt it would be the best way to study and gain HSK 6. When I got there the class was initially very good (it was the first year class, lower semester and mid-difficulty class), though I didn't realise how poor the textbooks were. My class was a bit too easy for me and I didn't mind at first, but the classes soon got slower and the content worse:

In both our courses our teachers are extremely friendly, excellent people as persons but with, in my opinion, holes in teaching. It is now November and our class has been taught little further grammatically than simple declarative sentences, questions, etc, and no grammar terms have been used. There's no "subject, predicate and predicate types" etc, just "this word goes here and usually you can't say this". Any new grammar was only taught when a student got a sentence wrong when speaking, then the teacher would give a better example (but leave it there). I don't have only bad words to say though - he's left the university now and we have a replacement, but our general Hanyu teacher didn't follow the books because he agreed they were awful and did some really great jobs at building his own lessons structure. He was extremely passionate and really helped us. Our new teacher, however, follows the book structure rigidly and that's all. She knows it's bad too but the university management don't seem to mind using it still.

As for Tingli, the material is still poor and the sound quality is awful, since they seem to have taken the tapes (no CDs available), re-recorded them and then converted to MP3. Furthermore, I feel there are problems with the way we are being taught Tingli (i.e. dialogues and questions read only once, no pauses given in the material, etc).

Sorry for the long-winded descriptions there. I thought it best to explain in detail. All-in-all, the books are poor and though I really like the teachers as people, there are holes in teaching to the extent I don't think the class is going well at all. I'm not the only one feeling this way. I do have the option to move up to a faster class and one particular class is clearly better, but that means better intense study only on the books (I've seen the class). The teacher is passionate, but the attitude is kind of "teacher is god, textbook is bible". Sorry for a bit of exaggeration there.

You're right - it pretty much is a self-study plan unless the university go through on their words to improve the books. I feel guilty and quite bad that my family and I have spent a lot of time, money and energy on this course to find that it is not very good and is slowing me down, and to be honest, I want to study somewhere else and not feel the money has been wasted. It is a drain on my time. If I don't attend the course, then my residence will become invalid if they strike me off, and I don't yet know an alternative to keep my visa here justified. I have to be tied to some institution studying - is it possible to go to a training course to justify a new X visa and residence permit?

Thank you once again everyone for your helpful replies. Here in China I'm striving to further my cultural knowledge a lot too and feel it's going well.

[taylor04]

See if you can switch classes, I went to Zhejiang University and my first semester was amazing. It was all because I had the right teacher, she is quite possibly the best teacher I've ever met. The second semester I ended up with a horrible teacher, we were covering a grammar point and no one understood it, she tried to explain but gave up. She told us to go home and read the examples from the book. I eventually stopped going to class, and do full time self-study, but a better approach would be to just switch teachers. The book is irrelevant, its the teacher that is important.

[abcdefg]

Joshua, I understand the bind you are in. Sounds like you can’t really just toss in the towel there and go to a private school or hire an experienced tutor.

I’ve used both the Hanyu Jiaocheng series and the NPCR series, and don’t much like either one. Agree with what Taylor04 said.

The book is irrelevant, its the teacher that is important.

Good luck in working it out. Don't be too hard on yourself during the process.

[daofeishi]

Learning Chinese is a marathon, not a sprint. No matter how fast you progress through your textbooks/courses, you will never become a proficient user without tons of interaction and exposure to authentic Chinese through friends, TV, magazines, etc... Instead of spending hours upon inefficient hours studying outside the classroom, go out and practice what you've learned.

[wushijiao]

Let me just chime in with my two cents, joshuawbb. I'd suggest taking as fast of a pace as you can possibly handle. Don't worry much about retention. Chinese learning is a marathon, but why not be

?

Start to combine textbook reading and reading of real materials. If you make reading of real materials (novels, books, newspapers, comics...etc) part of your daily regimen, I guarantee you that you will retain all this stuff from your textbooks. If it is too hard at first, you could just try buying the local newspaper, and just read the a few captions of photos per day, or read just one article per day. Or you can buy a newspaper, and just scan for words that you know for 10-15 minutes per day. You can think up quite a few drills. Try to look up new words from the dictionary. It can be helpful to set a goal of how many words to look up per day. Set a goal of 20 maybe. Go higher, if you can handle it. Eventually, try to read as much as possible.

If I were to summarize my language learning philosophy in a few sentences, it would be:

-do a lot of extensive reading

-become obsessed with learning new words and phrases

-do tons of audio (authentic audio is the ideal, but you're getting authentic input from your gf. Chinesepod and other podcasts are also really great. The Grand First Episode Project is also a great resource. Do as much work there as you can handle).

-learn about stuff using Chinese

-pick materials that interests you.

So, your plan overall is pretty good, but the missing ingredient (just to be honest with you) is learning from authentic sources (as daofeishi and other also mentioned). You always can start with a ratio of 10% authentic/90% textbook per day, and adjust the ratio by 5% or so per week. I hope you can reach an HSK 6 ASAP! Good luck!

Edited November 17, 2009 at 12:36 PM by wushijiao

[renzhe]

I agree 100% with wushijiao.

I'd only add that learning should be fun, so pick materials that are interesting, because this will help you stay motivated for long periods of time. This will also help you against burnout.

If the going gets tough, my studying boils down to wuxia series. It's impossible to get bored with those

[wushijiao]

I'd only add that learning should be fun, so pick materials that are interesting, because this will help you stay motivated for long periods of time. This will also help you against burnout.

Hehe...I was planning to add something like that to expand upon my point "pick materials that interests you". If you're able to find materials that interest you and that you can be passionate about, then you'll avoid burnout. Also, it's worth keeping in mind that, for the first year or so in using authentic materials, it also may take quite a bit of searching to find authentic materials that are both interesting and understandable. Some are one, but not the other. So, doing a lot of searching is important. Of course, I don't want to diminish the role of good textbooks. I just want to emphasize that it should be used in tandem with other stuff.

I was thinking recently that making move from prepared stuff for learners to authentic stuff is probably the most important thing in language learning. The metaphor I was thinking of is: imagine you have an army that is vastly superior to the enemy's army, but you are separated by a large body of water (a channel or a huge river), and you need to get across to the other side. You need to put a lot of thought into how to get to the other side, what time of day, what whether, which beach will you land on...etc. You might go across and fail, or get killed by the enemies snipers. But once you make it across-- in a long difficult bloody battle-- then you can secure a base, move the troops across, and start to take land territory fairly easily. So, finding a beachhead is like finding a good authentic material (in terms of interest and understandability). Spending initial time with that material might be a bit hard, but after you have that "base" you can much more easily expand from your base into more and more genres, styles, accents, and difficulty levels, until eventually you will have won the war. Where this metaphor breaks down is, unlike a real beach landing, you can always try lots of different TV shows, books, newspapers, novels, movies, until you find one that seems to fit. That, and, no has to die.

[joshuawbb]

I'm awfully sorry about how late I am returning to my post again. I am really grateful for all your replies and read them immediately, I've been offline for quite a long time lately.

Again, thank you everyone for all your advice, and I really appreciate it all. My class hasn't really changed much except gotten rather less useful - I think it's both the book and teacher to blame. I agree that the teacher is the most important, though depending on the actual teacher, the teacher does essentially teach the material within the book - particularly in my case, since my general 汉语 teacher teaches us by basically voicing the book's entire material to us, going through it in some depth and providing some explanations. In my opinion she's not teaching us that well at all, but if we used books like NPCR, for example, at least I could get something out of her lessons. But yes, a better teacher would find ways of teaching better material in an efficient way. I can't see such phrases as "production line number" or "magnetic tape" being useful for an elementary student's daily life.

My girlfriend and I speak far better Chinese together recently than a month ago, which we both feel good about. From reading wushijiao's post on advice for beginners, I agree a lot, especially the part about things becoming easier after a "click". About a week or so ago I used to find flowing speech, especially stringing multiple tones together enormously difficult, but almost overnight I started speaking a lot better. I can string tones together with good accuracy (according to my girlfriend) and thankfully my speech doesn't hit hedges every four words or so. Ugh, I used to feel pretty downput after forming some sentences in my mind, only to have them come out with an "err..." between each few words whilst I tried to put everything together. Also, people I speak to don't reel in surprise anymore, saying my Chinese is excellent - now they give me the truthful "not bad", "good for three months", with some constructive advice.

After reading about them here I started on the "Chinese Breeze" readers - have any of the readers above level 2 (500 characters) been published yet? I guess not, as I can only find the first two levels online and in my bookstores. I'm finding them fantastic reading and listening practice, with level 1 now very easy and level 2 also pretty straightforward with some characters I don't know quite yet.

Regarding class, I'm waiting until the next semester starts to change class - if they change the books. There are better teaching environments in the other classes, however they place entire emphasis on the textbooks too. Going up to the ideal class in level would take away my time to do "real" study as homework is very numerous. I feel I do plenty outside class of the study mentioned above to count as better than said homework; perhaps I sound arrogant to say this, but I'd rather such homework related to the textbook didn't get in my way. abcdefg, what did you think of the Hanyu Jiaocheng series when you used it? Which book/level were you using?

Thank you again wushijiao for all that really good and detailed advice; I've been pushing through the Chinese Breeze books as a start, and looking for good material for more as you said. I can't believe I only found the Grand First Episode Project now, which I'm sure will be invaluable. Reading the first two levels of Chinese Breeze has been fairly easy (easy for level two thanks to the audio for finding out the characters I didn't know). I especially like the metaphor. I'm on the way to that island I think, with a pretty big army but still looking for the best beach. I wonder if Chinese Breeze is the only reader series for elementary students? What I mean by that is a lot of readers tend to start from an elementary level, but cover all the elementary level, which is extremely broad in Chinese. Chinese Breeze seems to start very well from the lower end.

Once again, thank you all very much. I'm really sorry to have vanished for such a long time.

[abcdefg]

abcdefg, what did you think of the Hanyu Jiaocheng series when you used it? Which book/level were you using?

I used the two Hanyu Jiaocheng first year books （第一册上 and 下.）

Both have lots of vocabulary that was useless to me in daily life, but they still provided some structure. I’ve used several other texts, and they all have flaws and drawbacks. Changing books is not the answer. I think the teacher is the most important factor.

Continue supplementing your classwork with lots of focused outside immersion learning that is relevant to your personal interests and then be patient with the process. You are supplying the effort and diligence; only the calendar will supply the time for it all to soak in and gel.

I am fortunate in having more flexibility than you in that I am not pursuing a degree. I usually study in three to six month blocks and then return to the US to work in between.

One of the best study experiences I had early on was with a tutor who walked the streets with me for an hour a day. We would ramble around, see things, discuss and make notes or snap photos. Then we would go back to the classroom and use that material as the crux of a more formal lesson for the next two hours. He was skilled enough to introduce essential grammar and sentence structure along the way.

[taylor04]

I used Hanyu Jiaocheng books 2 and 3 in China. The vocab isn't the greatest for everyday use, but I learned a lot from those books(because I had a good teacher). The books honestly matter very little, it's the teacher. Also, if you don't like the books, you can still use the tests to evaluate your level and teachers as a personal tutor. I often went to my teacher's office during her office hours, had her explain grammar I found outside of the class (she is the best grammar teacher I ever knew), write some examples for new words I didn't quite know how to use, etc.

If there is something you think they can change to improve the class, you should tell them, most of the other students will probably agree with you. With the exception of giving rid of the crappy books, the teachers will change but the system won't. The best thing my teacher did was give a few examples for each new word and grammar points in the book, and talk about the ways you shouldn't use them. A lot of teachers just don't know how to teach (foreigners) or don't have the experience, but most truly want to help you succeed.

Edited December 6, 2009 at 05:29 AM by taylor04

[abcdefg]

I often went to my teacher's office during her office hours, had her ...write some examples for new words I didn't quite know how to use, etc.

Memorizing a table of new Chinese terms with one-word English definition leaves a lot to be desired no matter where those words are from. Asking a native speaker friend or teacher for examples of use is great when you can do that. I'm currently stranded in the wilds of North America and sadly don't have that luxury just now.

I often turn to http://www.jukuu.com/ for sentence contexts.. Also http://www.dict.cn/ is sometimes helpful for sample sentences. If you aren't using those resources already, you might enjoy having a look.

[taylor04]

I got a language partner off of sharedtalk.com, sent them a list of 150 words and got it back the next day! A warning with regular native speakers if you choose this route, just as you probably couldn't explain a lot of English grammar, most Chinese people can't explain Chinese grammar. They are pretty useful for sentence making though.

[abcdefg]

That's a good idea. Thanks.