Where to study?

[LiamK]

Hi everybody. I am really struggling to choose where I should go to learn Chinese (for 6 months to start with).

 

I have to choose either Fudan University or Zhejiang University.

 

My main goal is to improve my Chinese as fast as possible, everything else is secondary. But I would like to also have fun if possible. My current level is HSK3. Any advice much appreciated. Thank you :)

[Basil]

They are both in China. Your Chinese can still improve a lot. Either choice will do... Choose the city that has the best amenities and most beautiful countryside...

[hedwards]

If you're wanting to learn as quickly as possible, what you'll probably find is that you'll want to balance the time you spend in class wtih the time that you spend outside actually using the language with native speakers.

 

But, the real secret is to talking a lot with people, especially people that aren't professional teachers. I personally found that the teachers I was dealing with were so hopelessly bound to the traditional system of blaming the student for lack of progress that I didn't make any real progress on that front. Finding a school where the teachers know modern techniques for instruction is a huge aspect to consider when deciding on a school if you go that route.

 

Otherwise, I'd recommend taking a look at The third ear by Chris Lonsdale as he learned Chinese quickly without access to schools. In fact when he got to China taking classes wasn't even a viable option as there weren't yet any real language schools in China. http://www.the-third-ear.com/

 

School courses are great because they tend to provide structure and make it less likely that you'll be skipping over things that you should be learning. I like formal classes for that purpose, but for the actual heavy lifting, I've never found them to be particularly useful.

[imron]

I'd recommend taking a look at The third ear

I didn't look at the book, but I looked at the iPhone app.  I'm not impressed by any product that has memory hooks such as 'KNEE' for '你' or 'CHEER' for '吃'.  That's just setting you up for poor pronunciation.

[hedwards]

They have an iPhone app? I don't have an iPhone, but I'll have to see if they've got an Android app.

 

Anyways, memory hooks aren't supposed to be used literally. I'm not sure if you're misunderstanding their system or if it's really that poorly thought up, but mnemonics don't work like that. If you're lucky, there's going to be a word that approximates the sound you're wanting to use, but I'm not aware of any English word that closely approximates the sound that 吃 makes in Mandarin. At least not without adding additional phonemes onto the end which would be just as bad from a pronunciation point of view as making it cheer.

 

There's always a certain amount of mental gymnastics that goes on to try and fit the foreign word as closely to something that you can more easily remember as possible. And in a sense, we're kind of lucky in that we have more possible syllables than they do, so it's more likely we'll find something than a Chinese person will when learning English.

[imron]

They have an iPhone app?

Right there on the page you linked to - and more prominently placed than the book.  The actual iTunes page is here, where they show CHEER as their pronunciation hook for 吃.

 

Anyways, memory hooks aren't supposed to be used literally

No, they're not, but they create an association in your mind and that can tend to seep through even when you don't consciously try to use it literally.  I've seen it time and again produce bad pronunciation in both English and Chinese learners, and for language learning I am opposed in general to creating associations to similar pronunciations in another language.

[hedwards]

@imron, I'd recommend actually learning how to use one of these systems and then you'll learn why it's so silly to blame the system for these lapses.

 

This phenomenon happens in any system you might choose to use. If you haven't learned how to pronounce the word correctly and you don't monitor yourself when you say the word, you're going to mispronounce it regardless of system. But, in none of the languages that I have applied this technique to have I encountered the case where I was mispronouncing words because of confusion between the word and the English word I was representing it with. And I think I've used it with vocab from 7 or so languages to practice the techniques without anything like that happening.

 

I'm sure that it's technically possible for that to happen, but in my experience and in the experience of other folks I've been reading from, it's just not common enough to give up the method for picking up the vocabulary. Learning the vocabulary at all is generally a much bigger problem than remembering to pronounce Chinese words in Chinese, which ever variety of Chinese one might be studying.

 

As far as the OP's concern goes, it's better to have a good mnemonic system in place for learning vocabulary than to worry about these rare problems. If it starts cropping up with any regularity, it's not the mnemonic system, it's a lack of time and effort placed on learning to pronounce the language in the first place rather than memorizing incorrect pronunciations.