iPad v Chinesepod - which will be more beneficial to my oral Chinese if any

[pprendeville]

So I'm considering investing some money in one of the following. Not sure if either will help but I know they can't hurt my chances of improving. 

Bit of background on myself: I went back to college last year having been a mechanical engineer but almost impossible to find a job for 18 months (of course when I made the decision to return I was offered a job straight away but stuck to my plan of goin back to study). My wife is Chinese and we have 3 young kids so this decision to invest in fulltime reeducation was not taken lightly. I had spent a year in China in 2003/2004 teaching English (albeit poorly as I was a terrible teacher and the thoughts of teaching English again give me nightmares) so from that experience, whilst not learning any characters (apart from 元), my ear was accustomed to the sound of Chinese and I did do a bit of pinyin so it wasn't a total waste in terms of learning some Chinese. Had made a few attempts at improving my Chinese post return to Ireland but lacked structure and commitment. Used to listen to Chinesepod podcasts now and again and took a beginners class in Chinese with UCD Confucius Institute so the seeds were planted and I just needed to harvest them. 

Roll on Sept 2011 and my return to college in Dublin Institute of Technology. I had met the course director for a coffee 6 months prior to the course commencement and he sold it to me immediately as he said pinyin wasn't used much after 1st year and he seemed like he had a genuine love of he language having learned it himself (I know this doesn't guarantee success but he is a good teacher IMO and he focuses on the cultural aspect of Chinese which is taught in English). We would also have a native teacher so that was NB also. Anyway, classes started and initially I found 汉字 very difficult but 2 months in and a lot of practice writing them I had improved a lot. I made several investments early on including a full version of Pleco which course director showed me and I also got a mnemonics book by Tuttle to help me learn Characters. 

I've been taking stock of the past year recently and reflecting on how much progress I made and there seems to have been a lot of hit and miss (more misses than hits). 

Hits

- One of the best things I did was invest in Pleco (my only beef with it is that there is no reminder system to prompt you to review flashcards. I'm the sort of person that needs a rigid structure). 

- I now have a base of about 500 characters that I can recognise (at least if they are in context) and I can write about 300. Apart from that however I can't think of too many other very positive aspects to my first year. 

- Realised that mnemonics isn't the way for me to learn every character, perhaps just the problem characters as it provides another way of reinforcing them. I think it's a good idea to use multiple ways of learning a character.

- Recently invested in the Chinese Breeze graded reader series which is really good as I can almost completely understand what is going on from the context and it is very fulfilling when you can understand 70% of the characters.

Misses

- I was a bit slow in developing good study habits so I seemed to be playing catch up all the time.

- I found it hard working with a language partner I the fact that I didn't really know how to make use of the time together with him/her.

- As the year progressed I got a little bit sidetracked. Lots of uninterested people in the class who were more interested in catching up on sleep (I was young one also so know the feeling) and I allowed this to get to me, ie. I didn't really try engaging with other students in Chinese as much as I should have perhaps. This is something I've told myself In goin to work on in the coming year.

- OurChinese teacher communicated with us mainly in English which I understand was necessary, particularly at the beginning, so I just got into the habit of talking back in English and only using Chinese when it was absolutely necessary. Again, something I know that needs to be addressed.

- Chinese teacher was very fond of us learning the dialogues in our Integrated Chinese books. This doesn't really work for me as I'm not reproducing the language naturally, only from memory. 

The one area I am most disappointed with is my oral Chinese. It has improved but not as much as I expected it would. One thing I find difficult is to gauge my progress of oral Chinese. The only way I know I have improved is that I can speak a little bit more with my inlaws compared to last time here which is NB to me (see my posts in the culture forum ;). One would imagine having a Chinese wife that I would be in the ideal situation and that my oral communication would be my strongest point. However, it is only from reading here recently about the concept of 2 people communicating with each other and reverting to the more convenient language (my wife's English is better than my Chinese) that I understand where one of my obstacles lie. 

So, as per the thread title, does anyone think an investment in either of the above will help my oral Chinese, ie. or is it just a case of setting myself manageable goals and being more disciplined and using Chinese more often.

[esoyohoo]

I think my experiences may give you some help. I'm Chinese but am not born in Shanghai, my girlfriend is native Shanghai girl, so I need to learn Shanghainese in order to communicate with her grandpa and grandma. I try to speak Shanghainese as much as I can, she correct me in Shanghainese. If I don't understand her explaination, she correct me again in mandarin. But keeping on practicing, it do help me to speak Shanghainese.

So forcing yourself to speak Chinese with your wife is best choice. 或许一开始会很艰难，但是坚持下去就会见到成效的。 加油！

[PengHaoShi]

I'm living and working since quite some time in China and have been talking to Chinese people in Chinese in the office, to taxi-drivers, Ayi, friends, etc. I have to say that this didn't give me a lot of progress, especially when my listening skill was so bad that I couldn't understand their reply. I think you can only make real progress, if there is a person who has the patience and the willingness to correct you, explain to you why, let you know the way how to express certain things (and you have to note it down and review it) - sounds like a teacher, right? So, does your wife want to take the role as teacher, if not, then you have to look for another way.

What has helped me:

- Skritter, for learning characters and words, I'm an absolute fan of it.

- I use Pleco as dictionary and as a collection tool to collect unknown words and phrases (and then export them to skritter later, Pleco has a flsahcard system too, but I find Skritter more efficient, especially after the ios app is out),

- I've got a teacher on italki.com for 8 US$ an hour, lesson is via skype, she is correcting me, items I cannot express I just say it in English and she is giving me the Chinese in Skype, which I take after the lesson and put it in Skritter, I really made a lot of progress there; the good thing is, that there are so many Chinese teachers on italki that you can try who is best for you, you are not bound to school and you are flexible in time, whether you want to have a lesson during night or on Sundays. Italki also proposes to try several teachers first and then decide, who is best for you.

- Listening to some stuff on CCTV http://english.cntv.cn/learnchinese/ which I like more than ChinesePod and it's free,

- Try to read as much as I can, which might be difficult for you at this level, I'm reading in newspapers, books, etc. even if it is slow and I have to look up quite some words, doesn't matter, they are then in Pleco, I move them over to Skritter, learn them, and a few days later repeat the article again,

- Watched some parts of a Chinese movie, which I definitely didn't understand the first time. I downloaded the sub-titles (you can get them here:http://www.shooter.cn/), read through them, picked out the unknown words and phrases, learned them and then watched the episode a couple of times again until I could understand it.

I first increased my level on Chinese characters and words and then started to read and listen. I know, that a lot of people will disagree with me, as best method is to work on writing, reading, speaking and listening at the same time. However, it didn't work for me, because I find the Chinese textbooks so boring (and I tried a lot of them) that I am losing interest on working through the books after a short while. So I am a believer that everybody has to find out for him/herself the best method and way to learn the language.

I'm not mentioning grammar, as I assume you will learn this at university anyway.

That's at least my way and I can today easily manage my private life in Chinese and have smalltalk in Chinese.

[pprendeville]

cheers.

- a few questions. is skritter worth getting? i've downloaded the app just now. i'm a big Pleco fan but the flashcard system is what lets it down a bit. i have been waiting for version 2.3 eagerly but there's no sign of it coming soon. so i said i'd give this a try. what makes it so good and is it as good as the statistics it mentions (90% retention rate)?

- thanks very much for the italki website suggestion.that's a good rate. how do you usually make payment. through the website. my wife just isn't a great teacher like i'm not a great english teacher.

- i have downloaded a lot of the stuff of cctv and it's pretty good alright. i just need to get into the habit of watching it.

- newspapers are definitely beyoned me at the moment but i'm in the process of transferring 错错错 (one of the Chinese Breeze graded reader books) to Pleco reader and reading it on that which is great as I can look up unknown words immediately. looking forward to when it can read ebooks. also have put the mp3s that come

- have tried using shooter before but it seems complicated to get software and add subtitles or am i just ignorant? can you advise what software you use to add subtitles or is it as easy as putting them into windows media player or any type of player?

[lechuan]

Hi pprendville,

I started using Skritter after they released the iOS app. I started just doing writing tests in Skritter because I had already set up everything in Pleco. I really liked Skritter so I started using Skritter for all my character and word flashcards now. I really like the algorithm, ease of setup, ease of use, and the retention I'm getting. I still use Pleco flashcards for Sentence testing. Skritter has tons of presets for book vocab: Chinese Breeze, Chinesepod, Heisig, chineselearnonline, and on and on.

I found chinesepod helped a lot for my listening skills. I did a ton of newbie and elementary. Now I'm trying out chineselearnonline since it's a more progressive series. After I'm done that I'll probably go back to chinesepod and contine with intermediate. What I found useful for speaking practice was memorizing the dialogs and repeating them out loud (or not too loud if in public, depends how shy you are about looking crazy) until it would flow naturally (I actually need to do more of that). Chinesepod has good voice actors, Imitating the speakers helps with tones and expressing emotion without mutilating the tones.

My wife's also Chinese, but English is by far the strongest common language. Still I throw in as much Chinese as I can when we talk which gets in some practice. If it's getting frustrating she can always keep answering back in English

[PengHaoShi]

I started using Skritter a bit more than 3 years ago, at that time I was at about 1000 characters with a so-so retention rate. Now I am at 3.500 characters and over 7.000 words. The retention rate in Skritter can be set by yourself, e.g. 85%, 90 or 95. This determines, how often the review of a given item will pop up again. But be careful, Skritter should be only one of the study tools, it's a little bit addictive.

I pay italki via credit card, once a lesson is completely, italki transfers the money to the teacher, but only after you confirmed the lesson completion.

For subtitles, I just download them, import them into word, get rid of the time stamps and then print it. Then I work through the dialogues, mostly not a complete movie, but some scenes. I found it difficult to always stop a movie and read the subtitles on the screen, so I'm doing it in this way. You can also import this into the Pleco or any other reader. In Skritter, there is an interesting list made by Mandarinboy. He filtered out the 5.000 most used words from a large variety of movies. When listening to movies, you will find quite some words which never pop-up in any coursebook or HSK. Currently, I am studying this list (Skritter filters automatically the already known words).

[pprendeville]

Lechuan - I think I’ll end up taking the same path as you. Just installed it yesterday on my iPhone and it is darn good. I can’t believe I didn’t try it sooner. Very intuitive and I like the UI. Can you tell me what you mean by sentence testing in Pleco? If it’s what I think you mean then I’d like to find out how to set it up. Is there a lot of manual work to it. I was using Pleco for testing myself on Integrated Chinese vocab mainly and I quite liked the Tuttle dictionary as there are graded example sentences but it takes a long time to get through them if I’m being very thorough so I suppose this wasn’t helping me short term. What I’ll probably do is start using Skritter for retaining old and acquiring new vocab and intermittently use Pleco for reading the sentence examples that are shown under the word. Also, what’s the Heisig Keywords in setting>Definitions?

Penghaoshi - good to have a good selection of things to study with whether it be books, tv, radio, handwriting etc. I think I will give italki a shot also and see how it goes. Thanks for the great info.

[lechuan]

@pprendville. Unfortunately, it's not what you think it is. I make a category for a word, copy-and-paste the sentence from the Tuttle dictionary, create a custom C-E flashcard, Paste the characters/pinyin/english into the definition section, then cut-and-paste the characters and pinyin into their appropriate fields. Not pretty. In future versions of Pleco an automatic add of sentences is supposed to be supported.

Heisig is a system for learning characters. He assigns a unique english keyword for 3000 chinese characters/radical. You then combine use those keywords in combinations to remember characters that are made up of those components. More info here: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/19969-heisig-vs-matthews/