What level does speaking start to become encouraging?

[imron]

If you need to do this the really easy way to do this is "neige neige negie...."

This is a really easy habit to get in to, and a really hard habit to get out of.  I find myself saying neige far more than I'd like.

[AdamD]

Johnny20270:

 

AdamD: my knowledge I would say its an upper beginner. I know about ~1200 words but to be honest I can barely use them in any meaningful context. I have more text book knowledge than actual dynamic knowledge. In other words, its very hard for me to say things 'on the run' or in everyday conversation.

 

My apologies. I had misread your real world level of Chinese. In that case, you would benefit from having a language partner, and speaking only Chinese is indeed too demanding at your level.

 

My current view of language partners (happy to be disabused of this, as ever) is that language partners are great when you're at a basic level because they give you a leg up, and useful when you're advanced because they can point out the remaining mistakes you still make, but frustrating when you're intermediate because they switch you out of the language or you cop into a stalemate language battle.

 

roddy's point re the towel effect is exactly where I go wrong a lot of the time. I rattle off my terrible Chinese at a billion miles an hour, using correct tones for the most part, and the other person takes that as a cue to respond in kind. Instant death.

 

abcdefg:

 

Don't dwell on your failures; embrace your successes. You must learn to pat yourself on the back. That's the only way to avoid discouragement. As you progress, positive reinforcement will arrive in huge waves from every direction and it will feel very good, I assure you.

 

Yes, exactly. Exactly. It's so easy to beat yourself up, especially with a language like Chinese that takes so much work to master.

 

It can be hard to focus on your successes when you have, say, two unexpectedly bad days in a row. I had this exact type of meltdown last week, but a few days after that (a) I noticed myself thinking in Chinese for two days running and (b) I caught two Chinese people talking behind my back about how standard my pronunciation was. I can't tell you how much those reinforcements buoyed me.

 

Johnny20270 (again!):

 

I think this is probably a critical factor. It is very easy to just go "sod it I'll just speak English and just point".

 

The way I get around that impulse is this: Too many English speakers assume English is the world's default language, and just spurt it wherever they go. I desperately, desperately don't want to be like them. If I'm in any non-English speaking country and I know some of the language, I feel rude if I don't use it. Because of that, I guilt-trip myself into avoiding English in China at all costs.

[abcdefg]

One that I don't think anyone mentioned is to ask "你的意思是。。。。“ then repeat (or rephrase) what you understand the meaning to be.  Very useful for clarifying your "guessed" meaning.

 

Agree 100%. That's one I still use a lot, and probably always will.

[tysond]

Quote

If you need to do this the really easy way to do this is "neige neige negie...."

 

This is a really easy habit to get in to, and a really hard habit to get out of.  I find myself saying neige far more than I'd like.

 

 

I had a friend who was in Beijing for 10 years.  At the 5 year mark, he used neige a LOT, mostly to buy time while he tried to remember something.  But I noticed after 10 years, he hardly said it at all, and in fact his responses were frequently much shorter (both because he stopped saying neige, but also stopped talking around his meaning and said precisely what he wanted to say).

 

Oh, one more trick - any object (or person) you don't know the word for, but has been discussed already or is clear by context, you can just describe it a bit and then put in a 的.   想买那个红色的 could mean that red car, red envelope, red comb, red hat, red shampoo container, red switch, red thermonuclear device, etc.  I find it useful when I get overwhelmed by new vocabulary, and don't really want to ask or break the flow, so I conveniently describe something else about the object in question (新的, 最后的， 下边的， 穿黑衣服的， etc).   This is a step above pointing and saying "这个", and you can go look up the precise word later for study.

[hedwards]

@Tyson, it sounds like you didn't understand the purpose of those phrases and why they were chosen. They're all about managing the conversation and I haven't personally felt the need to really understand most of them as they tend to be rather simple. The point of them is to understand when to use them and to use them to give you a bit of breathing room while speaking.

 

I disagree with you about the notion of them being a waste of time. The amount of time to memorize them isn't really that big and if you don't do that, then you have to spend even more time trying to figure out how to manage the conversational flow. And if you're memorizing 6 different ways of saying on the other hand before learning one way of saying all those things, then you'd be doing it wrong. You'd basically one way of saying each thing before going back for the repeats.

 

It might not be one of your goals, but if you're not doing things like this then you're placing undue stress on the person you're speaking with. Even as an English teacher it's still painful at times trying to communicate with people that don't have enough language ability to keep up their end of the conversation. Yes, using these connectors are largely empty speech, but you wouldn't want to use them to completely fill the conversation.

 

@imron, I agree with you there, the problem with saying things like neige, neige is that they're so easy that you can already be saying them without realizing it. Habits like that are probably the hardest ones to break as you have to pause before it happens and adjust the behavior. I'd personally rather insert a proper thinking pause or even just try to describe what I want to say.

 

Then again, since my stroke a few years ago, I tend to have trouble finding words in English far more often than I'd like. If I let myself do the equivalent of neige in English it would probably just get worse.

[Guest realmayo]

I seem to have lost all motivation.

 

If you keep going you will find that motivation again, because your Chinese will improve. Then, at some point in the future, you'll again be dissatisfied with your progress and you'll again lose motivation. At which point, just keep going, and you'll improve. Etc etc.

 

"Just keep going" sounds like fine advice but there's no point just keeping on going if you're running into a brick wall. However, if you're doing things okay, if you're studying in a reasonably smart way, then you've got to trust that by keeping on going, you'll get there eventually.

 

When I need a bit of motivation, I always go to this link, always: http://blog.thelinguist.com/confidence-and-trust-in-language-learning

 

This guy who has learned lots of languages says:

 

But I have confidence. I have the absolute knowledge, that if I keep exposing myself to the language, it will become clearer and clearer. Things that I keep forgetting will eventually start to stick. I have done it so often before, I just trust my brain.

 

For me the key is: "I have done it so often before, I just trust my brain".

 

Most of us haven't done it before. But this guy has. So he knows that if you keep on going with language and keep exposing your brain to it, in a reasonably smart way, you'll improve, no doubt about it.

 

It's not like one of those self-help or self-improvement stuff online about "omg you are the most amazing unique wonderful person whatever you do will be great", it's simply saying that the brain is able to learn languages, it's one of the things the brain does, and continued exposure to that language will bring inevitable reward.

[abcdefg]

For me, language progress is cyclic, not linear. It varies all over the map. Now days I just roll with it, instead of fighting it. Try to take a more relaxed, long-term view.

 

There once was a time when I was more apt to try and force things. Have been through phases where my mindset was stern and military.

 

If I had a cold, I would say: "OK, you stupid body. So you want to play sick. I'll take you out for a brisk 5-mile run in the rain and teach you a lesson."

 

Did something similar with language training. Sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn't.

 

 

[hedwards]

I think the best thing is to make a habit out of it. Spend at least 10 minutes every day doing something to advance your levels. Even if it's just a couple minutes while you're waiting for a bus or for the elevator, you'll eventually make enough progress to be there. Obviously, it's better to spend more than 10 minutes, but just doing something every day to advance your levels is going to help remind your brain that you really want to learn.

[AdamD]

On that: http://dontbreakthechain.com

 

I learned about the site and technique from countless threads on this forum.

[hedwards]

I personally use Habitbull on my cellphone, but it's the same basic idea. People underestimate just how much they can accomplish by learning a couple words a day. I'm not sure what the number is for Chinese, but I believe it's about 4 words per day on average for English speakers between high school and college.

 

Doing 5 or so a day adds up to a sufficient number of words to communicate well quicker than one would imagine. Obviously, people will want to be using the language and doing a bit of study, but the vocabulary piece is more or less the sine non qua of language learning.

 

I remember when I started to buy things from street vendors it was mostly 多少钱，then it was either 多少钱一个 or 多少钱一斤 and now it's more like 多少钱那本 and such as appropriate. The point wasn't to have perfect grammar during the interaction, it was to communicate clearly. As I got better at one type of interaction, I would try and figure out how to improve the grammar and or word choice.

 

At each step along the way I got a bit of confidence and a bit of motivation. The really tough thing with this sort of learning is when you've gotten "good enough" at the things that you genuinely have to do.That's when people typically need something like a habit to push them forward or they'll just fossilize right there.

[Demonic_Duck]

@Hedwards: good advice, but one pointer: I think “多少钱那本” sounds a bit weird, I'd go with “那本多少钱”. I think it's because “多少钱[数][量]” is fine, but “多少钱[这/那][量]” is ungrammatical.

 

Other folks can correct me if I'm wrong about it being ungrammatical, I've just never heard/seen it that way.

[hedwards]

@Demonic, I should probably have looked that up, like I said the point here wasn't to be completely grammatical, but it's somewhat more effective when pointing if you use a measure word other than 个. It clears things up a bit whether you're pointing at the book or something on the shelf next to it.

 

I could be wrong, but I could have sworn that I've heard folks using other measure words in place of that ge. 

 

And in case it's not clear, feel free to correct me on this, it might just be that I haven't been in China in a while and my memory of this detail has gotten confused with the notion that one could use other measure words there.

[Demonic_Duck]

Replacing “个” with other classifiers is fine, I was talking about using “那”.

[hedwards]

Thanks, I misread that, I was more focused on that part of the sentence than the sentence as a whole. That's one of the reasons why I try to be just hard enough on myself to improve. I need to speak in order to learn.

 

Anyways, I thought that 那本 in this case would be the object rather than the subject. But, I definitely could be wrong about that, people should feel free to correct me on that. I'll just have to go consult one of my grammar references and see if I have an error in my thinking there.

 

This also reminds me that it's important to be willing to improvise a bit. You're not always going to be right and you'll probably be wrong a lot, but one of the essential bits of fluency is the ability to create language to say things that you weren't explicitly taught.

[Eszter]

I haven't read all the replies to this thread but the ones I saw did not mention TPRS. I agree that with the traditional learning method, speaking fluency takes longer. With TPRS though, fluency is attained much earlier. Total beginner students are able to tell stories after a few months of studying. Of course don't think of anything complicated, but they can talk about things they want, places they go to and things they do which is really impressive. So in my opinion, with TPRS speaking IS encouraging from the very beginning (even if it's only a couple of words at the time) while with the traditional classroom techniques it usually takes longer.

 

Disclaimer: I'm not saying that any method is better than another, just trying to point out some differences. 

[abcdefg]

This also reminds me that it's important to be willing to improvise a bit. You're not always going to be right and you'll probably be wrong a lot, but one of the essential bits of fluency is the ability to create language to say things that you weren't explicitly taught.

 

The really tough thing with this sort of learning is when you've gotten "good enough" at the things that you genuinely have to do.That's when people typically need something like a habit to push them forward or they'll just fossilize right there.

 

@Hedwards -- Well said on both points. Some green points for you!

 

I've found this latter project particularly challenging. It's really a struggle now to make myself strive to improve when the status quo *is* good enough for every day use. I must create artificial situations in which my Chinese is *not* good enough and use them as motivators.

 

One of the things I try to do now is express shades of meaning, eschewing general terms. For example I no longer just content myself with saying 漂亮 or 好吃 or 不好。Instead I will struggle to explain with better adjectives or adverbs just exactly in what way something is pretty or delicious or not good.

[AdamD]

You're not always going to be right and you'll probably be wrong a lot, but one of the essential bits of fluency is the ability to create language to say things that you weren't explicitly taught.

 

Definitely, and it can be easy to forget that kids learn their first language by doing exactly that.

 

Fear of being wrong or looking stupid has held me back heaps, but recently I've been pushing through my self-destructive instinct to be correct 100% of the time. Some people let me rip, mistakes and all, which allows me to build speed and consistency; some people correct me as I go, which helps me improve formally.

 

A crucial factor in making this work, though, is knowing when those people are of benefit and and when they're actively making things worse. There's one person I no longer speak to in Chinese because he corrected everything I said to the point that we weren't even technically having a conversation. It was super-discouraging and frankly ridiculous.

[French]

@Hedwards --

I've found this latter project particularly challenging. It's really a struggle now to make myself strive to improve when the status quo *is* good enough for every day use. I must create artificial situations in which my Chinese is *not* good enough and use them as motivators.

I second that. I find it harder to elevate my speaking skills than acquiring the basics.

At first, I was really glad I could maintain a lenghty conversation, after a while it doesn't seem that rewarding. For example, 2 weeks ago, I was taking the train from Shenzhen to Shanghai (18 hours + 1 hour from Hong Kong), I ended talking to locals for about 7 hours.

I would have been thrilled one month ago, I felt like hitting a real hard barrier. Not being able to express nuances when it comes to feelings, descriptions. Over time, it is just becoming frustrating. It's been like this the last weeks.

The hardest part is to push new expressions into your daily vocabulary.

On the other hand, like some of you, I'm at a point where I feel a bit wash out. I guess it's a good thing that I'm going back to France next week for a month or so before returning to Shanghai to finish my course.

I feel like a need a break to absorb all the information that I learned, but really absorb. Too many times, I understand expressions that I can't reuse.

[imron]

The hardest part is to push new expressions into your daily vocabulary.

See here.

[roddy]

Johnny, a month or so later - how are you getting on? Was any of the advice useful?