Kinetic learners - I'm looking for study techniques.

[sparrow]

For you in particular, Engage the Body to aid concentration.

• Studying while pacing or standing.
• Chew gum or eat low-calorie finger foods while studying. Buy tons of celery or sheets of seaweed to munch on.
• Practice characters with your finger (or by pen/pencil).

Vocabulary

• Use a frequency dictionary for most of your vocab. Routledge makes great ones—in my opinion, it's worth getting it shipped to you.
• Never spend more than 5–10 minutes studying NEW vocabulary at a time. If you want to practice a word, write it one to three times, depending on how well you know the characters already, then move on. If you think that's not enough time, I got through a list of 48 words in under 10 minutes today, writing each word one to three times.
• Spend 15–30 minutes studying vocabulary each day. That translates to 3–6 sessions of 5–10 minutes each. You should remember vocab very easily with so much review spread throughout the day, and with little risk of fatigue due to the short sessions.

Listening & Speaking

• Find a good comedy sitcom (I recommend 爱情公寓). Record 5 minutes of it as an mp3, put it on your phone, and listen to it constantly. Record a new segment every few days. Comedy sitcoms are good because there is constant dialogue and they discuss common situations (banter, travel, ordering, arguing, buying, markets, movies, banking, money, business, romance, and so on).
• While listening, try to shadow the dialogue. This will help your speaking as well.
• Make friends and talk with people.
• Get a private tutor or a language exchange partner (free) and do 30 minutes of English, 30 minutes of Chinese.

Reading

• Beginners to Advanced: Find newspaper articles or a book that seems interesting. Read through it very slowly. Take it one or three sentences at a time and underline what you don't understand, then look up all the words. Write them down in a notebook with their definitions. Try to do all this quickly—you are not doing this to memorize them later, but to expose yourself to the language. Don't spend too much time—5–30 minute sessions including looking stuff up. Yes, if you are just beginning Chinese and know two characters, you should still do this every day—it will pay off immensely because you are exposing yourself to real material. Read about Kató Lomb for more information.
• Remember, you're getting most of your vocabulary from the frequency dictionary! If you haven't encountered the word in there yet, it's not very important.

Using a Tutor or Language Exchange Partner

• Find random pictures of stuff online and bring them with you. Practice describing what is happening in the picture, where things are located, and so on. This is harder than it sounds for beginners and advanced beginners.
• Bring an article you've read and paraphrase it. Don't spend more than 20 minutes preparing this each day.
• Describe scenes from the sitcom you're watching.
• Practice reading and getting your pronunciation corrected.
• Bring a grammar workbook and do the exercises together, or do them by yourself and bring them in to be corrected.

 

I'm one of those people who think Learning Styles is not a terribly important thing. I read one book on it (I can't find it at the minute, but I think it's the Linksman book); I wasn't impressed. While the theory may be somewhat true (it might be false as well), since nearly no one is 100% one way or the other, it is best to employ a variety of methods.

 

Furthermore, I think everyone learns best via hands-on methods. It's rare to master Mathematics without days of practice with pen and pencil. You can't learn Mechanical Engineering without building anything. You can't learn Programming without writing code. You can't learn to speak a language well without talking and using new vocabulary yourself.

 

The brain gives attention to whatever seems most important. One way to make use of this idea is to put yourself in situations where the brain is encouraged to pay attention to whatever your target skill is. For Chinese, this means constantly running Chinese audio in the background, studying Chinese vocabulary in very short sessions throughout the day, and finding opportunities to use your Chinese with friends or tutors, and reading a tiny bit everyday—plus whatever else you do in terms of more focused study. It's not a whole lot of extra invested time, but you get a huge boost to how quickly you learn.

[imron]

Find a good comedy sitcom (I recommend 爱情公寓).

This is good advice, however 爱情公寓 might not be as suitable for lower level learners due to the language used, the speed, and all the cultural references.  家有儿女 might be better for people with lower levels of Chinese. 

[sparrow]

Yes, I agree. 爱情故事 is intermediate–advanced. 家有儿女 is awesome. I lost my bookmark for it when I switched computers a few years back and forgot the name, so thank you for the link!!!

[alanmd]

I'm not sure if they would help kinetic learners specifically, but the graphs/charts/webs I have made that show words with common characters have really helped me...

[Ruben von Zwack]

I just recently used those graphs by alanmd to go through the vocabulary, and I really enjoyed that.

I printed them out large in colour and put them on my desk under a clear piece of plastic (these mats you use on a wooden desk surface, I don't know their name in English).

[alanmd]

Great! glad to hear you're making use of them! Could you send me a photo of it in use for my site? I have a 36" version of one of the graphs on my office wall.