Is it just me? Or does anyone only study low-tech?

[li3wei1]

I learned back before the internet was invented, and remember sitting in a cold room in Taipei with piles of home-made paper flashcards, and similarly wearing out my paper dictionary.

 

I still don't have a smartphone, but I think the days of paper dictionaries are over, at least for Chinese.

[roddy]

Aw man, my paper flashcards. It's true what they say though, the very process of making the flashcards is part of the learning process: explaining to the man in the shop that yes, i do actually want to buy 1,000 blank name cards; charming the receptionists into writing them for me. 

 

Kids today. We learned uphill, both ways. 

[Elizabeth_rb]

It's true that most people have electronic dictionaries, but they still sell those paper/card flashcards in Taiwan!  My hubby keeps a set in his car, another set in his trouser pocket whenever he goes somewhere and plenty more all over the place.  Mine are all in my room just now, but we do use them still.

 

Yup, making them out helps.  It also helps to decide what's worth really *learning* as well as you don't want to be bothered slogging over lists of rarely used vocab just for the sake of it!

 

I'm just in the process of putting together a blog post on applying the 80/20 rule to learning Mandarin.

[deathtrap]

I must say though, one of the more useful paper books I have is a dictionary of the top 5000 words(not characters) sorted by frequency of use, extracted from a large corpus of text, with some groupings based on topic(fruits & vegetables, weather terms...etc.).

[Elizabeth_rb]

I know the one.  I have the German one!

[Lu]

I came across my old flashcards again recently. An entire shoebox worth of Chinese, and many more stacks of smaller cards from highschool with French, German, English, Greek... Kept all these years with the vague idea that it could come in useful again? perhaps? it wasn't impossible, right? Finally threw them out a few weeks ago.

 

In Taiwan they used to sell (or do they still sell them) stacks of empty cards with a ring through them like a tiny multo map. Those were great.

 

My 現代漢語詞典 is also not in great shape, but I wonder if that perhaps is because of mediocre binding rather than intensive use... Looking up words in a paper dictionary has never done much for my retention I'm afraid, although I do know the page numbers for some of the more common radicals by heart. Perhaps I just retained the wrong thing.

[imron]

I think the difficulty in looking things up is actually a benefit in that it's part of the learning process - decomposing the character to isolate the radical, finding the radical, getting the pronunciation/page number going to that page and scanning for the word - all the while thinking about what it means, followed by the aha click when it helps the thing you were reading make sense.

It was a whole process, but it was a learning process.

The great disadvantage of an electronic dictionary and any sort of popup dictionary is that it avoids this whole learning process so you need to be careful to make sure you're getting that learning process elsewhere - see above about integrated flash cards.

[Gharial]

For fun and to keep Elizabeth's photos company, here are a couple of snaps of my main Chinese bookshelves. I had to stack things up a bit to fit everything in. I have quite a few Japanese books but only the kanji-related ones are on that shelf.

[querido]

Ha! Both Gharial and Elizabeth own "Chinese In Three Months". :-)

[Gharial]

Hi Querido! Cin3M would've been a good buy for "BL" (he whose name should not be mentioned (Bolderwart? )).

 

I prefer T'ung & Pollard, but Cin3M is still a pretty decent course for those with less time to spare. It's certainly a better stab IMHO at a "popular" course than the Kan Qian version of Colloquial Chinese, but then, T'ung did co-author it too, so no wonder! Hmm, does Elizabeth have the audio for it though? I do! -> Ker-CHING! $£ £$

 

The first person to spot ALL the other books that Elizabeth and I each both own wins a year's free membership to Chinese-forums!!!

[歐博思]

You guys have a lot of books!!

 

I have：Zhongwen popup dictionary ；爱词霸；and anything Chinese online.

 

I like streamlined.

[Elizabeth_rb]

 

I have：Zhongwen popup dictionary ；爱词霸；and anything Chinese online.

I like streamlined.

 

Tee-hee!  You and I cancel each other out then!!  You go only for digital stuff and I only go for print.

 

My kitchen is very streamlined and I'm planning to apply the same principles to my wardrobe and other areas just as soon as I can, but I confess to a weakness for books and art/textiles materials.  For the rest, minimalism is me and my gadgets are highly streamlined: I own only this 5-year old laptop and a basic smartphone.

 

The first person to spot ALL the other books that Elizabeth and I each both own wins a year's free membership to Chinese-forums!!!

 

   

 

There are 18 - but some you can't deduce as they aren't in this photo as they're in other rooms and/or sections.  

 

No, I don't have the '3 months' audio, but I know where I can borrow it from, and that's almost as good.

 

I've just taken a more up to date photo of mine and am just about to start a 'Share Your Shelves' thread, so please do re-post the pics there too.  In the meantime, I'm going to have a good look at yours and see what you own that I want to pinch!

[querido]

I admired the noble wear and tear on your books and was embarrassed that mine are so new looking. Ah, then I noticed my old language and chess books. I did once learn from them!  Like the old man in Soylent Green enjoying his last jar of strawberries I behold my old Russian book; we have an app for that, and we will soon have implants for it, you know?

 

I could be tempted to turn this thing off and go low tech, going gentle into that good metaphorical rest from it so to speak, but for most people it would be foolish to renounce some of these tools. Which ones are essential? By deciding that one could still go rationally minimalist if desired.

 

Most of my Chinese materials, computer tools and online resources were collected before I had a tutor. Now I can guess a helpful rule: The more time spent with Chinese speaking people the less essential these other things are. At the limit, one wouldn't have time to sit at the computer, and the learning could be of top quality and quantity (as that (LDS?) poster recently testified of his total immersion). This is just like playing chess with better players was almost always time more effectively spent than reading a chess book. It was hard to find better players then, but we should be able to find Chinese speaking people easily now, with these communication channels, right? Still hard to make a real friend, but the potential reward is large. So, if the rule is true, the most important tools would be the communication channels and apps, but they should lead back toward real life and so make themselves less essential.

 

There was a time when I would have said that my books were my friends. Wow, that was long ago. It wasn't really true either. Still hurts a little to lose that.

:-)

[imron]

I would have said that my books were my friends

Books are your friends, but just like friends, except for the very best ones, the ones you had yesterday won't necessarily be the ones you'll have have tomorrow due to changing needs, changing tastes and individual growth.  As you start to outgrow and discard your textbooks, just realise there's a whole world of native content books out there waiting to make friends with you   At the same time, if it wasn't for the previous books, these new books would have remained inaccessible to you...

[querido]

"Discard"? No way man. I'm stuck with all of them forever.

Here they come, a rap tap tapping on my chamber door, reminding me to review. This, and nothing more.

:-)

[imron]

Evermore :-)

[Elizabeth_rb]

I've been thinking about what I could bear to live without (generally, not just Chinese stuff) and how I would feel if someone told me my flat had burned down and I'd lost everything.  I'd be pretty shocked, of course, but to some degree, I'd be relieved to have got rid of so much dead weight (esp. things Sir won't get rid of  ) and the only things I felt a pang for were little things like my old Mothercare toy lamb.  I'd be fairly sorry to lose my embroidery thread collection too, but books'n'stuff like that?  Nah, not really.  I'd miss my laptop for contact details and photos.  The rest, it would be an interesting exercise in what was really needed in deciding what to replace in the fullness of time.

 

If you were to ask me to deliberately part with it, that would be hard...

 

Querido:  Many of my Chinese books are virtually untouched too.  I counted the whole lot (including Sir's) recently and it came to just over 100.  This morning I also counted how many I'd worked through (10 or 12 - I'm not sure if one course did the whole of the two books concerned), and how many I'd done some of (11 or 13).  I still have a lot to work through and not being able to buy more right now and possibly for the next couple of years is a bonus in a way as I can now get some value out of what I already have.  I could use the excuse that quite a number, (more than 25), were given to us or were in the 'Please help yourself' box at the uni dept I used to study, then teach in.

[querido]

Thank Elizabeth.

Most of the books I've studied I transcribed, chopped the audio as needed, and might never have opened the book again. Some are prized possessions even though I've never studied from them, like the hardcover "Cracking the Chinese Puzzles" set. I did read the easy parts. :-)

 

I just noticed how listening-speaking oriented my post #33 was, as that has been on my mind. Of course, books work well for reading and writing!