Studying in China, I need some big help

[jmido8]

I studied Chinese for 2 years at my university in the US but my classes largely focused around reading/writing. They put no emphasis on tones, listening to passages, or practice speaking. I spent the last semester in China studying abroad and it really kicked my butt. I realized that I have a really really poor foundation in Chinese despite studying for 2 years. When I first came here, people couldn't understand 75% of what I say. I couldn't understand 95% of what people were saying and forming sentences were very forced and not natural sounding. Even after 5 months in China, I'm still having huge problems with all these areas. People still don't understand at least 50% of what I say, and I can't understand 75% of what people say. All my skills have improved by a little from being in China but not near as much as I had hoped for being here 5 months already.

I understand it's mostly my fault. At my University in the US, I wasn't a good studier at all. I did the homework, would cram the characters 30 minutes before a test and that was about it. I never studied or practiced on my own. To be honest, I wasn't even sure I wanted to learn Chinese. Then I had the chance to come to China for a year to study and it really motivated me to learn the language. When I got here, I expected my Chinese to sky rocket from being immersed in the country. Instead, I made really good English friends in my study abroad program and spent most my time out having fun, exploring and experiencing a new culture. It also didn't help that my program here is only 3 times a week, never had any quizzes, let us use pleco for our exams, and only assigned 5 minutes of homework a night. I never saw a reason to study or work hard for a good grade. Since I became good friends with people who speak English (and knew almost no Chinese), I almost never practiced my Chinese. Even when I sit here and think about it, I hardly never use Chinese here in China. When I go to restaurants, the extent of my conversation is "我要这个" and I'll either point or look up the characters with pleco and say it. I never hang out with Chinese people and I'm never in situations where I need to speak a lot. I want to make Chinese friends and go out with them but my conversational skills are so poor that it's really awkward because I only understand basic sentences and I can't go deep into conversations. Everything I can say is very superficial, basic and 1-2 sentence statements that only consist of like 4-7 words per sentence.

Now, I'm sitting in my dorm over winter break and I really regret not taking advantage of my first semester. Even though it is my fault, I can't really blame myself for wanting to explore China and spend most my time out doing stuff when it was my first time leaving the country. However, now I have worn myself out and I'm ready to really crack down and study. Over winter break, I have been studying 2-3 hours a day and I have learned about 300 new words in 2-3 weeks. I want to dedicate 3-6 hours a day this semester studying but I'm not sure how I should go about it. When winter break first started, I was learning 30-40 words a day but less than a week later, my flash card deck was so big that reviewing all my words even once was taking over an hour. It takes me about 1.5 hours to fully learn 20 words inside and out. If I want to keep them memorized for the next day, I need to study them again for about an hour at a later time in the same day. Then I still need to review them everyday to keep them memorized. I found if they're words that I view as really useful or interesting, I tend to use them in daily life and it helps me long term memorize them 1000x better.

It's also really starting to frustrate me that people can't understand what I say. Before, I didn't care because I knew my tones and pronunciation were horrible but I have really started focusing on it and people still don't understand me half the time. It's making me almost want to give up. I feel like I'm saying stuff correct now but I'm obviously not. I have some Chinese friends I talk with and they can understand me perfectly fine. However, I have some Chinese friends who I hate talking with because they don't understand me if 1 tone is off and it's really frustrating. It just makes me nervous about speaking because I have studied for 2.5 years already and my English friends expect me to speak/know Chinese really well and it's embarrassing when I can't help them out with easy things. Just yesterday for example, a new student arrived for the spring semester and I brought her to the local Trustmart to buy some stuff. We go over to the bathroom section and find the guy razors but she's a girl and needs a girl razor. I needed to ask where the girl razors were but I realized I had no idea how to say that so I pointed at the razors and said “女孩的这些东西在哪里？” and they had absolutely no idea what I meant. So I tried to express it in another way by saying “这些东西是男孩可以用的东西，女孩不可以用。她要一个女孩的。” but the lady just looked at me and said girls could use it too. They were obviously guy razors and it's a really big wal-mart like store so I'm positive they had girl razors somewhere but we never did find them and it was really embarrassing that I couldn't help her find some of the stuff she needed. My point in this story is that I have a hard time saying a lot of things that seem like they should be really basic to say.

I need a plan. I'm really motivated to learn and I'm really interested in learning the language. I'm currently using the "Road to Success" series books to study. I'm on the orange book #2 which is Upper Elementary 进步篇。 I have 1 more semester here in China and I don't want to go back home without being at least proficient in Chinese. I feel like a lot of my listening trouble comes from not knowing enough vocabulary. I know everyone says to watch tons of tv shows and movies but will that actually do me any good if I don't know 80% of the words they use? Basically, I already plan on trying to learn 20 characters a day but I need ideas for how I can improve my conversation skills. This includes pronouncing the tones and letters correct as well as being able to form developed and descriptive sentences that make sense. I think my listening will naturally improve a lot as I learn new vocab and get better at making sentences.

[skylee]

Strange that your motivation is the desire to help out other foreigners. Good story about the girl razors. You should be happy that the supermarket staff could understand your question. It was possible that there were no girl razors in the store or the staff was just lazy or did not know things as well as you thought,

I have 1 more semester here in China and I don't want to go back home without being at least proficient in Chinese.

This seems to be a very ambitious goal. Depending on your defiinition of proficiency, it might be difficult to become 'being proficient' in one semester.

Good luck with your studies.

[jmido8]

Thanks! I don't mean fluent. I would like to pass the HSK 5 when I go back home and I think it's a possibility. I have HSK 4 & 5 practice books and just by looking through the HSK 4 book, I know about 90% of the vocabulary and for the most part, I have no trouble understanding any of the written passages or written questions. The listening is super hard for me but working on my listening is one of my goals for this semester. By the end of the semester, I honestly just want to be a lot better at communication. Not fluent, but proficient enough to the point where I can use Chinese to take care of any issues I might have or friends might have on my own.

I think the main reason I wasn't too interested in Chinese back in the US was because it was never applicable outside of the classroom. It never helped me in the real world and that made it hard to take an interest in. Now that i'm in China though, I have really fallen in love with the language. When I study hard and learn new material, I actually see real life returns and that's really exciting. It seems dumb but I love it. I had just learned how to use 成 as a verb compliment and the very next day at dinner, we were at a Tibetan restaurant where it came to practical use. We had ordered a yak meat pie but they cut it into 4 pieces and there were 6 of us. I was able to use 成 and get the sandwich cut again by saying 可不可以把这个牦牛肉饼切成六块儿。It was awesome being able to use it in a practical situation! I want to learn as much possible and now that I have had time to explore China some and get the awe of a new country out of my system, I think I will be able to really crack down and learn the language. I'm really motivated right now, I want to know every little thing I can learn and I'm always open to criticism. Just the other day one of my friends pointed out that I wasn't pronouncing the first vowels of words with double vowels correctly and that really helped me. I was saying words like xiao as shao and words like chuang as chang. Anything that can help me learn the language, I'm willing to try!

I just need help because I don't know how I can improve my pronunciation. I have been focusing on saying stuff correctly with the right tones but I'm really struggling, especially if I don't want to speak at a turtles pace. I have the voice files for pleco and I always listen to words if I'm unsure how to say them. I have also started making my flashcards without pinyin. I put the tones above the characters but that's it and it helps me memorize the words with tones way easier. Even with all this extra emphasis I have been putting on tones and pronunciation, people still really struggle to understand me sometimes. Also, I'm not sure what kind of exercises I should do to start making more complex sentences. My sentences right now are always very basic and super simple.

[OneEye]

In my experience, using other textbooks at a similar level as the one you're using in class is very beneficial. There will be some overlap in the material covered, particularly the grammar points, but there should also be a decent amount of difference in the vocabulary. I've looked through the Boya series, and it seems very good, so you might look there. I did this multiple textbook thing fairly intensively for most of last year, and my Chinese shot up, allowing me to skip nearly two full levels at my school in the process and eventually begin auditing graduate courses in my field, only a year after coming to Taiwan (with very poor Chinese at the beginning).

Another thing: say each sentence from your textbook out loud. Repeat after the recording, making sure to match the tones, rhythm, and intonation exactly. Say it in unison with the recording if you want. Do this until you can spit the whole sentence out without thinking about it, just like it is on the recording. Practice it to yourself while you're on the bus or subway. Say it as many times as you can, so it gets ingrained in your brain. I can't overstate the importance of actually getting your tongue moving and imitating the native speakers on the recording.

You're probably right that your listening trouble likely stems from a lack of vocabulary. I don't believe it's possible to learn too many words in Chinese. I recognize somewhere between 17,000-20,000 words, and it still isn't nearly enough. It is enough to make a good guess at most new words I encounter when reading though, and that makes a big difference. As far as making yourself understood, it's all about accent. Put in some serious work with pronunciation, tones, sentence intonation and rhythm, etc. The sooner your start the less painful it will be to correct.

But I agree with skylee, you will not become "proficient" in Chinese after a semester in China, or a year, no matter how hard you work. At least not according to my understanding of what it means to be proficient in a language. By my count, I've learned an average of nearly 1000 words per month for the last 14 months or so, and I still don't feel "proficient," I still constantly run into words I don't know, and I still produce some awkward sentences. These things take time. A lot of my friends moved back to their respective countries after 9 or 12 months, and every single one of them has said they wish they had more time because their Chinese still wasn't good enough for whatever they were planning to use it for (be it research, business, whatever). IMO, if you want to really be proficient and you have to return to your university this fall, you should start making plans now to go back to China after you graduate. And pay attention in the classical Chinese class that your department likely requires of you, because that helps a lot with reading serious material in modern Chinese.

[Silent]

The listening is super hard for me but working on my listening is one of my goals for this semester. By the end of the semester, I honestly just want to be a lot better at communication. Not fluent, but proficient enough to the point where I can use Chinese to take care of any issues I might have or friends might have on my own.

For listening I think the best way to improve is to take some recording and play sentence by sentence in a loop just as long till you understand. If you have the written text with it you can check whether you understood correctly. (Don't read before listening!) Many learner books have audio with it suitable for this excercise. But audiobooks or soaps may be suitable too. If you do this consequently for half an hour or so a day chances are you make great progress.

Better understanding alone will help you with your own pronunciation, recording it and listening it back and comparing to native speakers helps a lot too. You also could visualise the tones with praat (http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/). When I discovered the program I found out that I often pronounced a different tone from the one I intended too speak! But probably by far best would be to find a good teacher to help you with your pronunciation. A good teacher can not only point out your errors, but also tell you how to improve it.

[Lu]

You sound really motivated, and that you enjoy seeing the real-life returns of your learning is also great. As others have said, your Chinese will probably still not as good as you'd like it to be by the end of the semester, but you can make serious progress and just continue to build on that.

It sounds like you're already doing well on learning vocab, so just keep it up.

As to pronunciation, some Chinese people can be very unforgiving in their listening and will simply not understand if you say something slightly wrong. The only thing you can do is try and improve, as you plan to, and just keep trying. For improving your listening, you can perhaps try Chinese-pod, I haven't used it myself but from the little I have listened to it sounds like a really good resource.

If possible, try and find someone who can help you with your pronunciation, be it a tutor or a friend or a language partner. Best is if they can explain what exactly is going wrong and what you should be doing instead. Then apply that. Others on this forum have found it useful to record themselves and then play back and listen for what goes wrong, I've never tried that but it sounds useful.

For increased fluency, drilling sentences sounds a bit stupid but it is actually useful. It helps remembering patterns. Memorizing dialogues can come in useful, or in a restaurant, decide what you want to eat and then repeat it to yourself a few times until it rolls of the tongue fluently. Then order. That'll at least get you out of the 我要这个 rut.

Lastly, skylee is probably right about the razors. Chinese women hardly have any body hair (compared to white women) and thus don't shave all that much, so girl razors can be hard to find.

[anonymoose]

Is the white tiger natural?

[evasiege]

I have no idea how to quote, but this:

"By my count, I've learned an average of nearly 1000 words per month for the last 14 months or so", is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.

You are meaning to tell me, and everyone else reading this thread, that you successfully internalized 35 new words a day for 14 months?

Ok, let's assume you could manage 5,000 common words in 5 months. Possible with god-like memory. But after a certain point the rate of frequency in which you see these words drops dramatically, making it nearly impossible to retain them in that short a time. No wonder you claim you know 17,000 words and it still isn't enough. Probably because the majority of those words you have already forgotten, or don't even remember studying! Happens to me all the time. Nevermind being able to use even a fourth of that amount in spoken dialogue. I don't like to call people out, but c'mon dude.

[jmido8]

I'm thinking about staying an extra year but it would involve me taking a year off college, finding a full time teaching job here, and directly enrolling at my host school to make that happen. Right now, I know I'm staying until at least June 30th (that's when my Visa expires).

I had a short dialogue with the owner at a 烧烤 place today and it was really encouraging because I understood her fine and she could understand me! I'm studying in Chengdu and the local dialect is really crazy sometimes. It makes listening extra hard because many times I don't know if my listening is really bad or if they're speaking in their native dialect. I love it here though, I could see myself living in Chengdu one day and I'll probably end up doing so for 5-10 years

I like the idea with the dialogues. I also downloaded Audacity to practice recording myself. I have a few Chinese friends so I'm going to ask them if they can start correcting me when I use wrong tones. Right now I'm using several different books to study; Road to Success, Integrated Chinese, a conversational book, and a fun teenager/kid book series called 查理九世 CharlieIX & DoDoMo. I like having several different books because they provide me with lots of dialogues around my skill level, listening cds, and a set plan for learning stuff. The Integrated Chinese books I have are a little under my level but they're great for reviewing grammar that I don't have a good grasp of. I also want to buy a calendar and start marking off how many new words I learn per day and how long I studied so I have a visual reminder to let me know I need to pick up the slack when I fall into a slump.

[gato]

17000 words does sound like an awfully large number. The old HSK vocab list only had a total of 8000 words. The fairly basic 《新华词典》 has only a total of 32,000 words.

See below for some numbers.

http://www.chinese-f...rk/#comment-235319

The Old HSK vocab list below has 8000 words, divided into four levels. The four levels together are supposed to be minimum needed for the old HSK Advanced Level test. You would probably still need to know more words to comfortably read newspapers (most of which are targeted at a 9th, 10th-grade level of literacy).

http://www.chinese-f...rk/#comment-235383

Native-language vocabulary

Native speakers' vocabularies vary widely within a language, and are especially dependent on the level of the speaker's education. A 1995 study estimated the vocabulary size of college-educated speakers at about 17,000 word families, and that of first-year college students (high-school educated) at about 12,000.[10]

It is estimated that one needs a vocabulary of about 10,000 word families to read a general college-level text

http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh/%E6%96%B0%E5%8D%8E%E8%AF%8D%E5%85%B8

《新华词典》 多字条目约32,000条。

[jmido8]

10,000 words! That's crazy. Is there a way to measure how many words you know? I keep hearing people say you only need to know like the 500 most frequent spoken words to get by day to day without much trouble (obviously not in-depth conversations). According to my text book, I should already know about 1200 words.

[OneEye]

I think we're getting a little off-topic here, but...

The old HSK vocab list only had a total of 8000 words.

And everyone knows that it takes more words than that to pass. It's been discussed here many times.

As far as how many words native speakers know, I'm talking about words, and the things you linked to talk about word families. Not the same thing. There was an interesting chart posted recently here that's relevant. My estimate of 17,000 words comes from c_redman's test mentioned in that thread. The estimate seemed pretty accurate to me based on the number of cards in my flashcard decks.

the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.

You are meaning to tell me, and everyone else reading this thread, that you successfully internalized 35 new words a day for 14 months?

Ok, let's assume you could manage 5,000 common words in 5 months. Possible with god-like memory. But after a certain point the rate of frequency in which you see these words drops dramatically, making it nearly impossible to retain them in that short a time. No wonder you claim you know 17,000 words and it still isn't enough. Probably because the majority of those words you have already forgotten, or don't even remember studying! Happens to me all the time. Nevermind being able to use even a fourth of that amount in spoken dialogue. I don't like to call people out, but c'mon dude.

I think you're assuming a lot here, and being fairly rude about it to boot.

Call me out all you want, but I'm not sure what I would stand to gain by lying on these forums about my Chinese level. It comes down to the fact that I've worked extremely hard since I moved to Taiwan. I haven't met anyone who's worked harder. I moved to Taiwan to study Chinese, and I'm now preparing to do a master's degree in a Chinese literature department here in Taiwan with a focus on pre-Han philology. The majority of my time is devoted to studying Chinese, and it's out of necessity (if my Chinese isn't good enough, I won't survive even the first semester). Add that kind of motivation to a large amount of study time and work as hard as I have, and then we can talk about what's possible and what's not. Until then, I don't think I have any need to defend myself to you.

[Guest realmayo]

Actually gato I don't think 17,000 is an outrageous number. I see I've learned (or tried to learn) around 15,000.

As you suggest, with the HSK the 8,000 is only a starting figure, it's not enough to understand everything in the exam.

As for word families: I don't know what a "word family" is in a Chinese context. For instance, if I know all the characters in the list below, how many of these are the same word family or how many should count as "different words":

茶话会, 茶馆, 茶叶, 茶道, 倒茶, 龙井茶, 泡茶, 沏茶, 清茶, 乌龙茶, 用茶, 喝茶, 红茶, 茶饼.

[Guest realmayo]

(Ah, OneEye posted while I was typing, typing much the same thing!)

[creamyhorror]

Native-language vocabulary

Native speakers' vocabularies vary widely within a language, and are especially dependent on the level of the speaker's education. A 1995 study estimated the vocabulary size of college-educated speakers at about 17,000 word families, and that of first-year college students (high-school educated) at about 12,000.[10]

It is estimated that one needs a vocabulary of about 10,000 word families to read a general college-level text

Funnily, the quote in Wikipedia has been changed to:

A 1995 study estimated the vocabulary size of college-educated speakers at about 8000 words and that of first-year college students (high-school educated) at about 5000.[9]

Also, I think these numbers may not necessarily apply to Chinese (correct me if I'm wrong). In previous discussions here on the forums, we already noticed that it takes a higher number of known words in Chinese to reach, say, 98% understanding than it does in English. In other words, for a given level of understanding, Chinese actually requires you to know more words than English does.

Of course, Chinese words are composed of characters, so they have a higher level of 'guessability of meaning'. But you still need to learn them to use them, so it's hard to get around this fact.

I keep hearing people say you only need to know like the 500 most frequent spoken words to get by day to day without much trouble (obviously not in-depth conversations).

You needn't worry about 10,000 words for conversations, since the actual set of words used in speech will be significantly smaller. If you focus on words highly frequent in verbal communication, you can probably make faster, more satisfying progress. Give it a try - relentlessly ask about words you hear, and add them to Pleco/Anki.

edit:

As for word families: I don't know what a "word family" is in a Chinese context. For instance, if I know all the characters in the list below, how many of these are the same word family or how many should count as "different words":

茶话会, 茶馆, 茶叶, 茶道, 倒茶, 龙井茶, 泡茶, 沏茶, 清茶, 乌龙茶, 用茶, 喝茶, 红茶, 茶饼.

This is a good point. Some of these could be considered phrases - (泡/沏)茶 is to "make tea" - and others are compounds (茶饼). I think whether they'd be considered as words in linguistic studies depends on the researcher. Personally I'd view them as words, except for the verb-noun phrases: 倒茶, 泡茶, 沏茶, 用茶, 喝茶. Those should be split up into their components.

From time to time I crack open an old practice book to read a passage or two, and I always get tripped up by unfamiliar usages/terms and the occasional new character. It's very humbling and reminds me that Chinese is a (life)long journey. Some examples from recently:

借古讽今，指桑骂槐 - second part only guessable from the first

[这]风气从此兴起 - immediately understandable but 风气兴起 is a new phrase to me

值得推敲 - metaphorical usage of 推敲, knowing the individual characters won't help you that much

否则你可能走宝 - immediately understandable, but 走宝 is a new phrase to me

Chinese is a long slog - savour it well

[jmido8]

What do you think the best vocabulary lists to study are for learning conversational chinese? My school books seem to have really weird vocabulary lists that seem kind of pointless to learn right now. I love learning cool words like phoenix, king, marksmanship, crossbow, and other neat stuff like that but it just seems kind of silly when I still don't know so many basic verbs/nouns that would be so much more helpful to know.

I have the New HSK vocab lists downloaded and I know about 90% of all the words from levels 1-3 and about 40% of the HSK 4 words. Should I keep focusing on the HSK vocab lists or does anyone know any better vocab lists to focus on?

[Guest realmayo]

jmido8, as far as these kind of lists go I think the HSK ones are as good as any. I don't know of any lists that focus on conversational vocab -- yes, the HSK list will include words which sound too formal to be used in normal speech, but I don't think there will be too many of these to bother you.

Some people reject the idea of learning from lists as "unnatural" and eventually unproductive. That may be true for some words at a certain level, but I found them a good way to boost my Chinese up a level. But I'd seriously consider getting some listening comprehension books with audio, and with transcript included. Obviously these will often be very focused on conversational language. And if you get books at the appropriate level for you, do an exercise, check your answers, then work through the transcript, you'll surely mine some very useful vocab. Plus, after a few weeks you can listen to the audio again to hear the words in context again, which should help cement them into your brain a bit. With free software like audacity it takes half a second to isolate a sentence and repeat its audio a few times. If you mimic or shadow read along with it you'll also be improving your pronunciation and confidence in actually using newly-learned words in conversation.

There's a tendency for people on forums like this to instinctively prefer "real" language on the radio or TV, over textbooks. But I've found listening-comprehension books really useful in the past. I remember finding them super-hard to begin with, but lots of that was simply that I needed to get used to the format: get used to actively listening hard for information, under time pressure, while also reading the questions. But when I persevered and got that "acclimatisation to the format" out of the way, I found doing these exercises to be very useful. If you want to improve your listening, and you don't mind the pain and frustration of doing these things every day even when they seem a big struggle, I recommend buying some listening comprehension books.

[Guest realmayo]

creamyhorror: And I think there's also a cultural element that muddies the water here. For a westerner, 红茶 isn't red tea, it's black tea. A 茶饼 has a specific meaning which mightn't make that much sense unless you know a bit about pu'er tea. So there's an extra load on a foreign learner that isn't captured on lists that show how many words a native speaker knows.

[abcdefg]

#9 --

I have a few Chinese friends so I'm going to ask them if they can start correcting me when I use wrong tones.

You will probably find that they are reluctant to correct you out of concerns that it might be impolite. Chinese friends may promise to do this for you, but seldom will keep with it consistently. This is something with which a tutor can help you.

[skylee]

To me, 茶餅 are those biscuits sold in Marks and Spencer. But of course if the context is about Pu'er tea I would know what you mean. But Pu'er tea goes very well with M&S biscuits, too. HAHA.