Another blogger setting out to learn Chinese in 3 months

[icebear]

This whole topic is subjective and a bit of a can of worms. I am not convinced that this subject can be satisfactorily shown to be right or wrong.

 

 

I think the better publicized blog experiments haven't been that impressive, but others have shown that much progress is feasible in a few months (or under a year). I didn't have a good concept of the best way to study early on, let alone have the commitment, so I didn't do it, but its clearly possible. I do agree that its considerably more difficult that western languages for a westerner.

 

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/43939-independent-chinese-study-review/

[tysond]

I'd be fairly convinced if people sat for HSK and the oral HSK test after they did their speed learning.

At least it would be an objective measure of progress.

 

I have little doubt, however, that applying 6+ hours a day over months will achieve good progress.

It's the difficulty of keeping yourself motivated and focused (not to mention funded and not distracted) for this amount of time that is most tricky.

 

However I do think that listening skills and fluent speaking skills build up more slowly than pure memorization of vocab/characters.

I expect that speed learners will find their pronuncation a bit rough, and their listening is more based on grasping key words and extrapolating than really absorbing sentences and long passages.

 

A year, however, is enough time to get pretty decent at this with lots of exposure, even for Chinese.

Having a few other languages under your belt would help too.

[Kelby]

There is nothing wrong with this except for the claims made in advance and the results that never get satisfactorily (for me) shown. In the truest sense of the word experiment is something done to test a theory, you follow procedure: put forward a theory, conduct trials and tests, observe, report. I am not sure this can be applied to something like a language learning method.

Representing the blogging contingent, I'd put forth that these sorts of experiments are hard to conduct as they don't really jive with building a readership. First, regularly reporting and writing write ups is horrible time consuming and if the are overly detailed only a small minority is going to care, making it not worth the effort generally. Trying to pull out lessons for your readers from the experiment you're doing can also be rediculously time consuming and can easily come across as hype-y if your results reveal nothing groundbreaking. Blogging (or at least interesting blogging) also isn't about delivering dry results to people. Generally readers only care about takeaways that apply to them, so these sorts of project by the nature of the platform tend to be skewed away from things too scientific or empirical results because these are generally hard to relate to.

Also, when you're going "oh God how do I get people to pay attention to me," you're far likely to talk a big game in the beginning to attract attention and at the end quiet down if the results are anything less than ground breaking.

[renzhe]

I wouldn't necessarily say they are connected, just that they know each other and consider each other friends. Imagine for example I described Renzhe as "my good friend and avid Chinese learner, Renzhe".

Oh dear, my e-cred has just skyrocketed

[bluetortilla]

 

I'd be fairly convinced if people sat for HSK and the oral HSK test after they did their speed learning.

At least it would be an objective measure of progress.

 

I have little doubt, however, that applying 6+ hours a day over months will achieve good progress.

It's the difficulty of keeping yourself motivated and focused (not to mention funded and not distracted) for this amount of time that is most tricky.

 

 

I agree completely. 

 

All else being equal, I wonder why there is so much interest in this. It's like watching a chess match I suppose...

 

After many years of Applied Linguistics and studying TESOL methodology I can say that while the classroom toolkit has indeed grown, the basics of good study have not changed. And as every teacher knows student motivation- for whatever reason- will be the main determinant in acquisition speed. The same principle holds true in self-study. A good student can learn a lot from poor materials but an ambivalent student will not gain much from the best of sources and environments. Some of us without a doubt have a gift for language just as some of us have a gift for music, but for most of us learning a language well means our complete devotion. There is no easier, softer way. New ideas we're always open to, but as for an overnight transformation in the way we learn I'm extremely skeptical to say the least.

[hedwards]

People want Chinese to be a lot harder than it really is, but most of the long time frames come down to incompetent pedagogy and rote learning. There's a ton of unnecessary and pointless rote learning that people employ. For example, the book I'm currently working on is a graded reader that allegedly is for people that have been studying for multiple years. I've been at it a total of 2 years, but that includes at least a year where I was doing nothing at all to further my goal of literacy. I probably only spent 6-8 months on it tops. And, I'm not special in this regards, I know for a fact that achieving this would have been faster with proper study techniques earlier on.

 

Learning the vocabulary to get to say the HSK 3 is going to take a couple months for most folks, but if you're really diligent and you're really using it, there's no reason at all that it should take more than 1 month to learn all that vocabulary. It's just that most folks aren't that serious about it. The HSK 3 only involves 600 words and a bit more characters, although I get the feeling that they're excluding particles in the word count. A brisk 10 words a day gets you that in 2 months.

 

The vocab for level 5 can be had in 6 months by most people, it's just a matter of spending time on it every day. You're talking about 4 months of study for that. And not particularly rigorous study at that. Learning 10 a day is just not that much work, if I'm really pushing myself I can do short spurts of 75 in a day, I just need to make sure that I see and use the characters enough to firmly implant them before moving on to the next set.

 

Speaking and listening are somewhat challenging, but if you're actually doing that, then the words you're learning should be coming with the grammatical structures necessary to speak.

 

So, doing it in 6 months is definitely doable, you're not going to be talking HSk 6 in most cases, but an HSK 4 is definitely possible within 6 months with appropriate study methods. And there's really no excuse not to be able to conduct the typical business of every day living within that time frame. I remember that even with minimal study, I was able to dispense with the English outside of work with only a month or two of actual effort.

[renzhe]

I found acquisition easy, but maintenance difficult.

It's the easiest thing in the world to learn 1000 words in a weekend and forget them all on Monday. Been there, done that.

Learning 1000 words in a week actually means learning 1000 words in a week, every week, for 2 years or so. You need a really good mechanism for refreshing all this knowledge constantly, because if you don't really hammer it in over several years, you will eventually forget all of it.

Good mechanisms include reading, listening, immersion, conversation. But they work well for very basic and common words and poorly for more specialised and rare vocabulary. This is the reason why people find it easy to acquire vocabulary in the beginning, but hit a wall eventually, because everything they learn after a certain point tends to be soon forgotten because it's hard to maintain exposure to relatively rare vocabulary.

This is my beef with these 3-month programmes. They go for the easy, low-hanging fruit, and then they typically forget all of it a month later. I'd be more impressive if they stuck with the language and demonstrated advanced abilities 3 years on. Cramming and forgetting is a party trick with limited real-life value. To me, "learning a language" implies acquiring a long-term ability which does not simply vanish once you take apart your fake immersion box and get a hobby

[Shelley]

It all sounds like hard work For some this is the what they want, high vocabulary levels, conversations with ease and reading and writing at a usable level.

 

For me its all about depth, character etymology, history, and correct writing. Speaking and listening to good standard.

 

I am in it for the long haul. 

I don't have any reasons to have to achieve anything within set time frames,

 

I am learning for pleasure.

 

I have in the  past taken lessons and courses and sat exams, but now its just at my own pace.

 

So I take my hat off to all who take on learning to this level.

 

I am not against the 3 or 6 monthers or any other similar efforts.

I just don't want it be seen as the only way and for people to realize that slow learning has its merits.

 

Also as others have mentioned in this topic and other similar ones, learning Chinese is not the same as learning European languages.

 

I feel I have said in this thread and the "other one" all I have to say.

 

So for me for now I shall continue to follow but not necessarily contribute.

[imron]

but most of the long time frames come down to incompetent pedagogy and rote learning

For me, I think the long time frame comes down to having to memorise 3,000-4,000 characters and have them stick long term, on top of all the other vocab learning, listening, speaking and other skills needed.

 

It's easy to gain familiarity with words a large number of words.  It's much harder to actually 'know' a word for the purposes of using or reading it.

 

For example, to comfortably be able to read in context, you basically need to be able to identify it instantly and without thinking.  So for the purposes of knowing the word in a useful way, if you don't have instant recall and recognition then you don't know the word well enough.

 

Like Renzhe said, learning a large number of words a day is pointless if you then don't do anything to maintain it.

[Shelley]

Well it didn't take long But i just had to comment on renzhe's post #187'

 

Well done - excellent, you have hit the nail on the head.

 

You have clearly expressed how i feel about it all.

 

And imron too in post #189

 

Thank you and a plus 1 to both of you.

[Lu]

Learning the vocabulary to get to say the HSK 3 is going to take a couple months for most folks, but if you're really diligent and you're really using it, there's no reason at all that it should take more than 1 month to learn all that vocabulary. It's just that most folks aren't that serious about it. The HSK 3 only involves 600 words and a bit more characters, although I get the feeling that they're excluding particles in the word count. A brisk 10 words a day gets you that in 2 months.

Not to 吹牛, but I'm a pretty intelligent person who is pretty good at language learning, and I can't see myself learning 10 words a day, let alone 20, for a sustained amount of time. Almost failed that class in my second year in uni because of the large amounts of new vocab. Like Renzhe, I have crammed and crammed only to have forgotten it the next day. No doubt there are some people can learn 1000 words in 3 months, but this is not something just anyone can do.

[bluetortilla]

 

 

Not to 吹牛, but I'm a pretty intelligent person who is pretty good at language learning, and I can't see myself learning 10 words a day, let alone 20, for a sustained amount of time.

I always feel a bit sheepish for citing my Japanese stats on the Chinese-forum, but Japan is where I learned 汉字, and 汉字 is, well, 漢字!

Regarding characters, I recall learning maybe 5 to 10 for the first few months, then maybe up to 20 a week at the end of the first year. Before passing the 1st level of the JLPT, I was learning and remembering about 30 (sometimes even 50) a week. Had I kept up on my reading, I would still know them now, but I have forgotten a lot of low frequency characters. I should stress that learning characters was on going and cumulative- they were constantly being reinforced through other material and exercises. Now I'm studying for the HSK and in the process of learning maybe 2000 that don't appear in standard Japanese, another 1000 I'm 'relearning' (which is easy enough) and the remainder (the most common) is just a matter of remembering the new phonemes, which are often similar. As you might expect, learning Chinese characters after Japanese is not that hard

I also consider myself pretty good at languages too, mostly because I find language fascinating rather than any innate talent. But anyone can cram, and anyone can forget all or most of it. We see it all the time. To really learn language takes commitment and like others are saying, you have to USE it to KEEP it. 

[hedwards]

@imron, there's a certain degree of truth to that, but that gets dangerously close to the territory of "what does learning a language mean" by that standard there's plenty of Chinese people that don't know Chinese, even though they might even be native speakers of Mandarin.

 

Learning the written form is necessary for higher levels of use of the language, but it's hardly mandatory to be able to write the characters in order to be fluent in the language. Recognition is sufficient. Anyways, a lot of the things people think about reading and writing are based upon the traditional ways of learning. And they don't work. Well, they technically work, but they're so inefficient and soul crushing that most people give up before they get very far.

 

@Lu, you're probably trying to do it the traditional way. If you make liberal use of mnemonics, you shouldn't have too much trouble learning that quickly. It's mostly the people that are trying to learn each character as if it's a completely new thing, rather than a combination of elements that are mostly in other characters. Learning the radicals properly is a bit of a challenge, but learning 10 characters a day is well within the grasp of all but the most brain addled folks out there.

 

It's just so sad to see people putting themselves through so much when there's techniques out there that make things much more convenient. There's nothing particularly magical about it.

 

I will acknowledge that I can understand the scepticism. I failed miserably to learn German and then Latin because I didn't know how to memorize vocabulary. I did eventually manage German and now I'm doing Chinese and the words stick much more effectively now than they did back then.

[imron]

by that standard there's plenty of Chinese people that don't know Chinese, even though they might even be native speakers of Mandarin.

Yes.  There are plenty of illiterate or semi-literate Chinese people, and yes you could argue that they don't know Chinese as well as their literate compatriots.  Personally, I consider literacy as a core part of 'knowing' a second language.

 

I also think it's pointless to learn thousands of characters if literacy is not one of your end goals, and presumably this is what people are aiming for when they are 'learning' 75 words a day.

 

So if you are learning thousands of characters, then I think it's fair to say you don't really know them well enough for the purpose of literacy until you have instant or near instant recognition and recall.

 

but it's hardly mandatory to be able to write the characters in order to be fluent in the language

I never mentioned writing, and I basically agree with you on this point.

[renzhe]

Perhaps you have said this somewhere and I haven't seen it, but how would you rate your Chinese level at the moment?

And could you give us some suggestions related to the techniques which make things much more convenient? I imagine that most of us are already using them.

When learning characters, I made liberal use of mnemonics, spaced repetition software, graded vocabulary lists, character decomposition, radicals, phonetic elements, text analysis tools (which I programmed myself), printed out lists containing only difficult characters, which I brought with me everywhere and refreshed all the time. And I should point out that I have really good memory; learning things by heart has never been a challenge for me.

Learning characters went like this: 1000 in the first month, 2500 in the first year, 3500 after two years. It's because of the forgetting. The more you know, the more you need to spend on maintenance because the long term memory you need takes years to develop. It's this intuitive understanding of a large number of words that marks fluency in my book.

[bluetortilla]

but they're so inefficient and soul crushing that most people give up before they get very far

 

Soul crushing? lol  However, I don't think that any of us in this day and age (well, any of us on this forum anyway- I won't count high schools in East Asia) have been exposed to that sort of education!

 

I consider literacy as a core part of 'knowing' a second language.

 

I agree with that in the sense of comprehensive knowledge or from an academic standpoint. But we have to ask then what defines bilingualism? I see traders all the time here in Guangzhou who can 'speak' Chinese pretty darn well but I doubt that many can read well, if at all.

What's interesting to me is that while writing first appeared as far back as 6000 BCE, it did not become widespread until long after that; meaning that it is a very 'new' thing for us. The literacy rate in France in 1800 was still only 30% of the population. While there is great evidence to prove that spoken language is a biological inheritance in human beings, writing is clearly an invention, an innovation derived from the symbolic power of art.

[imron]

writing is clearly an invention,

So too is clothing, knives and forks, bowls, plates, comfortable chairs, tables, computers, the Internet and just about everything you use in your daily life. The fact that it is an invention and wasn't needed by our ancestors 8,000 years ago in no way indicative it's usefulness and relevance today

[bluetortilla]

 

 

So too is clothing, knives and forks, bowls, plates, comfortable chairs, tables, computers, the Internet and just about everything you use in your daily life. The fact that it is an invention and wasn't needed by our ancestors 8,000 years ago in no way indicative it's usefulness and relevance today 

 

Well sure- no one would argue any differently. Writing must be without a doubt the most important invention in all of human development. I wouldn't care to go into a wider debate over it. In linguistics, writing skills vs. speaking ability is a salient topic. 

Chopsticks or forks...

[hedwards]

@imron, don't get me wrong, one of the main reasons that I'm learning to read is because it's quite useful, I just think it's a bit silly to tie knowing the language to specific domains of language. Right now being able to read and type Chinese is much more useful to me, but back when I was living in China, I used the spoken language almost exclusively. Then I hit Guangdong and often times couldn't express what I had been expressing because of the Cantonese influence.

 

Everybody hits a point where they absolutely need to know how to read and write before they advance any further, but in my experience, you can get quite far without literacy. And many people do manage to do just fine without it.

 

But, without knowledge of the characters there's things about the language that will probably never make sense. A lot of the grammatical conventions come from the fact that the Chinese characters don't lend themselves very well to inflection. I'm aware that in some systems you do get what are essentially characters with inflections, but that's not the system that the Chinese use.

 

@Bluetortilla, you'd be surprised. People in the West aren't typically that much better in that regards when it comes to vocab than the Chinese are. There's a lot of folks that just repeat until it sticks. I personally find the idea of spending a year of study before being able to read anything at all to be soul crushing, but to each his own, I suppose.

[kikosun]

I think it's good to show people you can make a lot of progress in a short intense study period (ie going to china in 3 months, and don't know how to say anything, help! -type of situation.)

But I dislike how long term study is never talked about in these blogger missions. I think it's fine to force study for a few months, but long term retention really relies on years of continual maintenance.

I don't know if Benny is keeping his chinese going, but I'm sure if he has stopped and moved on to another language, he will forget most of what he crammed in those 3 months.