4 Months until Year Abroad

[Rai]

大家好，

 

My name is James. I am going to Taiwan at the end of Augest this year until September of next year. I have studied Mandarin for four years now, just finished intensive College Chinese level 2. We used the integrated Chinese level 2 series. So I guess I'm considered to be at the advanced level or high intermediate level. 

 

I have this big chunk of time that really be better served if I was to study the language. I suppose if anyone has any recommendations to prepare me for beginner advance level or independent learning. My oral skills still suck thus why I am going to Taiwan; Thanks for any suggestions. 

[Nathan Mao]

Check out the Text Analyser thread. It sounds like a powerful tool for learning, especially in combination with flash card study.

That aside, my opinion is you pack in as many vocabulary words into your brain as possible. You don't need to drill them to instant recall as of yet. My notion is that after you arrive in Taiwan, you will encounter extensive opportunities to model and establish/improve grammar patterns, pronunciation, etc, but your communication will sometimes be limited by your vocabulary, at least at first. Meaning, how can you understand unfamiliar grammar if you don't understand half the words in the sentence?

If you pack a bunch of words into your brain without worrying too much about recall or use, use will sort itself out as you encounter them in conversations, recall will sort itself out as you encounter the most useful/common words over and over.

Put another way, I think these 4 months are best spent pursuing quantity over quality. Quality will come when you are in Taiwan. Your purpose right now should be to do everything you can to lower obstacles for learning when you arrive. In my opinion, quantity of vocabulary is likely to be a significant limiting factor.

Others probably disagree. If they post, in between our disagreement you will probably be better able to figure out works best for you.

[陳德聰]

I think you might be well served by watching tonnes of Taiwanese TV.

 

But not passively. A certain somebody totes a fantastic way of going through dramas in a detailed and thorough way (like homework) until you can actually understand every line and why it sounds the way it does. (I don't remember if it was roddy or imron but I imagine it will come out).

 

From the short time I spent in Taiwan, despite being able to speak Mandarin, this was something I started wishing I had done. Even now, I still have trouble with Taiwanese accents due to lack of exposure (just can't bring myself to watch their dramas). Your speaking will only get better from practice, but you may not be able to find people to practice with all the time, so for now work on your listening. That way, regardless of what you can or can't say, you will come into the game in a position to understand what people are saying to you, which will probably boost your confidence times a billion when you arrive. I imagine not many things suck more than feeling like you know all the words in your textbook only to arrive and not be able to understand anyone speaking to you.

 

I don't think straight vocab is necessarily useful at this point, considering the fact that even if you know what a word is "supposed to" sound like, when it comes out of a person's mouth in natural speech, it can potentially sound very different.

Edit: What I mean by that is you can work on your passive skills now, like listening and reading, which can give you the added bonus of increasing your vocabulary, but I don't think that sitting around flashcarding vocab is useful. Learn new vocab through listening and reading, but more listening.

[imron]

If your problem is mostly oral (and presumably also aural), then rather than the Chinese Text Analyser thread, the Glossika thread is probably going to be more useful.  You could purchase either the Daily Life or the Business packs, and drill the sentences using a program like Audacity.  See my suggestions for drilling various skills here.

 

I don't remember if it was roddy or imron but I imagine it will come out

Me

[Rai]

Have you guys heard of the Taiwan drama ”我可能不會愛你“？ I've been trying to locate it online with traditional subtitles. Otherwise, I fear I will relearn simplified script I have tried so hard to forget. Yeah I think I will mostly just watch Taiwanese shows, and take the vocab from them while practicing my oral comprehension and traditional character recognition. 

[陳德聰]

THAT IS THE ONLY TAIWANESE DRAMA I HAVE EVER WATCHED AND IT WAS BRILLIANT.

 

You have discovered my weakness. 李大仁 is my weakness. The character, not the actor (陳柏霖, who I find obnoxious and annoying).

 

Here you go: http://video.gamme.com.tw/2011101622118.html

[roddy]

What about Taiwanese language exchange online - practice speaking with people with local accents, make some friends for when you arrive. Seems like a pretty good use of time to me. 

 

Also, while vocab probably shouldn't be your main focus, maybe develop good habits such as capturing and reviewing the new vocab you do come across. That'll come in very useful when you're on the ground. Pleco and Anki are popular ways of doing this. 

[Yadang]

 

If you pack a bunch of words into your brain without worrying too much about recall or use, use will sort itself out as you encounter them in conversations, recall will sort itself out as you encounter the most useful/common words over and over.

For me, I don't think this worked very well. I was in Taiwan for a year, and a lot of the vocabulary that I learned was learned with this thought in mind - quantity over quality. I thought that, because I was pretty much totally immersed (I had 3 local host families, and I attended a local school), that I would get enough exposure and context that way. And indeed, sometimes just a day or two after I had learned a word from my word list (I was using a TOCFL wordlist - a test similar to the HSK), I would hear it pop up in conversation and be glad I had just studied that word.

 

Now, however, my grammar is pretty bad. My sentence structures are usually either wrong or at least not "natural" sounding. I have since decided to basically never study words without context, to try to avoid this problem in the future. I've bought the Glossika Basic 1 after reading about it (on the thread that Imron suggested), and I've been using that to memorize sentences. They are very basic, but they are still helpful for me because I'm learning how say things that I've already known how to say, but this time around I'm learning how to say them correctly. There are some words I don't know, and I'm just learning these in the context of the sentences. For me, the advantages are that everything I'm learning I'm learning in context, I'm learning at least one potentially useful sentence for everything I learn, and studying sentences for me is a lot more fun than studying words...

 

However, I should mention that had almost zero Chinese when I went to Taiwan, so perhaps if I had had a more formal introduction to the language and the grammar patterns, I would have better grammar today...

[Nathan Mao]

To clarify, my suggestion was to do the Quantity Over Quality in these 4 months before he leaves for Taiwan.  In Taiwan, I think he should favor quality over quantity...solidifying and learning how to use all the quantity he crammed in there earlier.

[Yadang]

 

To clarify, my suggestion was to do the Quantity Over Quality in these 4 months before he leaves for Taiwan.

That is a good point... Perhaps my problem was not transitioning (until recently) to more quality over quantity... Maybe I just waited too long to make the transition.

 

Still, couldn't you cram with context pretty fast too? What I'm doing with glossika is cutting up all of the sentences and importing them into Anki. Although I am memorizing all of the sentences, if one just wanted to focus on vocab, they could use cloze deletion test to cloze out the vocab they don't know, and still get some good context and audio input at the same time... However, to be honest, it is a pain to break up every sentence and then break up the audio file... So the time spent doing that alone does certainly take away a lot of time from studying... 

[imron]

For breaking up audio, consider something like Splice Audio Splitter.  It can split audio into separate tracks based on silence longer than a specified interval.

 

For cloze sentences, I'm going to do a shameless plug for my Chinese Text Analyser software.  If you have the PDFs for glossika, you should just be able to copy/paste the sentences from the PDF in to CTA and automatically generate cloze deletion sentences for unknown words.

 

Combined, you should be able to produce cloze and audio flashcards quite quickly.

[Yadang]

Hey Imron,

 

Thanks for the suggestion. Actually - the audio isn't the slow part - I've been using the silence analyzer in audacity, and that does the job nicely and quickly (but thanks for the suggestion!). What takes me a while is the text. The PDF's have Simplified, Traditional, Pinyin, IPA, Literal Translation and English Translation. The version of acrobat reader that I use isn't the most premium, so it won't allow me to copy and paste from it, so I upload it to google docs. Then I copy and paste it from google docs into word. The time consuming part is then deleting all of the unwanted info. All I want is traditional, simplified, pinyin, and English translation, so I have to delete everything else, and in the process format it so I can then import it into Anki. I use find and replace as much as possible (like, after I have it all grouped together in groups of four lines with all of the extraneous info deleted followed by a blank line, I find and replace all of the returns with tabs, and then find and replace all of the double tabs back again with returns, so I get one line per sentence with Traditional <tab> Simplified <tab> Pinyin <tab> English), but there is still a lot I need to do manually. Even if I used your CTA, I'd still have to get rid of everything else before pasting it and then exporting it, and I don't know how much more manual deletion I can cut out at this point...

[imron]

Ah ok, I was thinking if you just wanted say the Chinese cloze sentences, then you could paste the whole thing to CTA and then export cloze sentences, in which case the exported file would have everything else stripped out.

[Aarin Cheng]

@Rai : Hi! I had been in Taiwan for a year (2012-2013). I studied Mandarin at NCCU Taipei and it was a really great experience. Which university are you going to study at btw? Based on my experience, I regularly watch TV shows, news, drama, or listen to Chinese songs, and of course dont forget to find a language partner! Those all can help you enhance your oral and listening skills. Good luck and have fun in Taiwan! ^^

[OneEye]

We used the integrated Chinese level 2 series. So I guess I'm considered to be at the advanced level or high intermediate level.

 

 

Not to put a damper on it, but this is probably low intermediate at best. You'll understand once you're in Taiwan and actually have to be functional in the language. It's a decent base though, and you can improve quickly if you work at it. But people come here all the time with 4 years of university Chinese under their belts and test into beginning-level classes (i.e., PAVC 2-3). Don't get discouraged if that happens, and remember you may progress more quickly than someone who started from scratch in Taiwan, because you already have some passive knowledge that you just have to activate.

 

 

 

I don't remember if it was roddy or imron but I imagine it will come out

Me 

 

 

Me too. 

[Yadang]

Hey, by the way, just watched your video. If you're still having trouble finding language partners to talk with, I'd look at Italki. They have tutoring as well as language exchange.

 

Also, I might suggest (based only on seeing your video), that before going to Taiwan, you work on your pronunciation. From what I could tell (and I hope some other people who know more of what they are talking about than me will back me up), is that if you really work on improving your tones and pronunciation (for example, at some point you said "ju1ran2", but instead of pronouncing the vowel of ju as "ü", it was pronounced as "u"...), you will be in a much better position once in Taiwan to start speaking more naturally. If I were you, I'd get a pinyin chart and start ironing it out before you go to Taiwan and do so much speaking that it's even harder to iron out later because your tongue and vocal chords and such get so used to saying it the wrong way that it's harder and harder to say it the correct way. When I went to Taiwan, my tones and pronunciation was ridiculously exaggerated, but once there, I started to realize how tones were really used, and what kind of shortcuts people take with pronunciation and such (although this isn't to say I don't still have pronunciation problems). I think it's much easier to start with way exaggerated tones and pronunciation and tone it down (sorry, I just had too ) than realize that your pronunciation and tones aren't accurate enough and try to make them more accurate, on top of the intensive learning you'll be doing...

 

If you want to work on your pronunciation, I'd recommend checking out this thread. Posts #6, #10 and #13 (that one's mine) all have advice about improving pronunciation...