Whats your biggest mistake when learning Chinese?

[Johnny20270]

I have been think of where I am going wrong in learning Chinese as I am still really struggling to form all but the most basic sentences. My level of grammar is not bad at the stage but ineffective, as I can't make the passage from brain to speach. 

 

I have taken a bit of timeout to think about what I am doing wrong. In no particular order ...

 

 

Not taking note of the environment around me.

Its like I am living in my home country and not china. I seem to blank characters on the street and when people speak. i don't listen&read. I just see& hear. For example, I just look at the back of a packet of Jiaozi to see how to cook. I was surprised as I got the general idea. I would never do this before. 

I don't revise anything like I should.

I seem to be just covering ground. I think its better to know one book well rather than two books halfheartedly. I am trying to race to the finish

I don't see the wood from the trees.

I pay more attention to details  and break down sentences rather than glance at a simple one. Essentially I cannot form simple sentences which should be easy by now

Learning far too many words. 

I have suspended new words from ANKI. I am convinced now its far far better to know simple sentence patterns and a few hundred words than amass a pile of info. When I see a word (ignoring nouns), I try to "say a sentence with it". I am surprised how often the perplexes me even on simple words!

I don't test myself.

My teacher has a great habit of asking me the difference between words and i fumble with an answer. i.e. I struggle to explain the difference in 能，会，可以. I should question myself

Spend too long looking for exact translations

With a technical background I am never satisfied with inexact translations. Its better to just get the general idea and 'come back to it'. 

I don't look for sentence patterns

I have recently taken time to type out our lesson dialogue and start to use colors in MS Word to show patterns. It helps a lot!

 

 

Thoughts?

[Lu]

Spend too long looking for exact translations: With a technical background I am never satisfied with inexact translations. Its better to just get the general idea and 'come back to it'.

I can see how this is a danger and I agree that you should stop doing this. Chinese doesn't map one-to-one, or even one-to-ten, to English. Words have a range of meanings that is different from the English range of meanings. As you say, it's better to get the general idea and then feel out where you encounter that word, than to try and delineate exactly what it means.

In the book I'm currently translating, everyone is 急了 all the time. We've quickly abandoned any plans to translate this consistently. It means anything from being annoyed, getting angry, getting defensive, etc etc etc.

Also agreed that you should know the things you know before moving on.

These are good insights, and now you know what's going wrong you can start fixing it. Good luck!

[anonymoose]

It sounds like you more or less know what you should be doing, it's just that you're not doing it.

 

Forming sentences takes time and practice. Just write out lots of sentences that you wish you could say, and have them checked over by a native speaker. Then try to pay attention to what you got correct and what you got wrong. Keep on doing this and you'll get faster and more proficient at creating sentences.

 

At the same time, you can try creating sentences orally. I guess most people would suggest that you learn spoken Chinese before worrying about written Chinese, but personally I think learning to write out sentences, for which you can take your time, is a good stepping stone to the more demanding skill of creating sentences orally. (Just to clarify, by "written Chinese", I mean constructing sentences on paper - whether you use characters or pinyin is irrelevant - though personally I would use characters. But I'm not saying you should delay learning to speak until you can write characters by hand.)

 

Keep doing this, stretching yourself by creating more and more complicated sentences. This is a long process though. You should be prepared to take months over it. You won't see great progress on a timescale of just a few days.

[jobm]

My biggest regret is when I was learning Chinese in my home country, I did not put stress too much on tones and did not study Chinese very well. I was lax with my tones and vocabulary words -- I ignored the basics like the terms for color, body parts, measure words, prepositions, etc. and focused more on the words I am interested on. Now that I am in China, I realized how important tones are and those words are actually the ones I would be needing the most.

 

It is hard to unlearn bad habits especially in pronunciation and relearn everything while at the same time attending higher Chinese classes.

 

If I would also go back to my first semester in Chinese, I would also spend more of my time listening to Chinese. I just did not like listening to Chinese during those times. I thought my skills were already enough and I am more of a visual learner so I prefer reading books. But now, I can say, listening to learn Chinese just does wonders.

[Johnny20270]

@anonymoose

Yeah I agree, I can see the benefit of forming my own sentences and not just copying textbook sentences and regurgitating them. Its much harder than it appears in fact. I need to do a lot more of that. I don't hand write but do type a lot. I like electronic type notes. easier to find alternative examples, rearrange notes and the act of doing it is learning in itself

[Mr John]

I have one simple suggestion.

 

Try to force yourself to finish sentences. Don't stop because you think you're going to be wrong, or because you don't know a word. Throw an English word in if you have to, but force yourself to form whole sentences. If you're lucky, some kind soul will take those turgid words and turn them into something more respectable. Once they do that, repeat the improved sentence a few times. Try to burn it into your aural memory. With enough feedback, I'm sure it'll get easier over time. Obviously I'm still at a low level myself, but I've been pushing myself to do this simple thing and it's definitely helping.

 

P.S - My biggest mistake was constantly thinking in the language but rarely speaking while in China. I missed out on a lot of useful feedback because of this shortcoming.

[ChTTay]

 

I am still really struggling to form all but the most basic sentences.

 

Glossika sentences. It's workin for me. Check out the beastly thread on this forum for more info.

[889]

Yes: tones, pronunciation, and the proper rhythm of a Chinese sentence. Those polite but blank stares you got when you tried to say even the simplest things are unforgettable. Not to mention having a six-year old mock your Chinese.

[abcdefg]

When I see a word (ignoring nouns), I try to "say a sentence with it". I am surprised how often the perplexes me even on simple words!

 

I found doing this to be very helpful.

[Shelley]

I think my biggest mistake was lack of sentence building. Changed that now and am doing the same kind of thing

I try to "say a sentence with it".

 

I wonder around muttering to my self in Chinese, people must think I have gone quite mad.

[abcdefg]

I wander around muttering to my self in Chinese, people must think I have gone quite mad.

 

Buy a dummy bluetooth-type earpiece and they will consider it normal.

[Shelley]

Haha excellent idea abcdefg, have one lying around somewhere I never used.

[ZhangKaiRong]

My biggest mistake was that I started to learn this language, instead of learning something more useful 

 

Actually, I guess I wasted a lot of time in my first year, when "learning Chinese" meant a lot of handwriting. I wrote endless rows of 汉字, but now I think handwriting is not that important, however I can't really tell whether it had helped me read/recognize characters faster or not.

Another issue is that in the first year our 听力 was mainly comprehending what our teacher told us (no CDs or other audio material was included during classes)

[mikelove]

I didn't take tones nearly seriously enough until I arrived in Beijing (5 years into studying Mandarin!) and finally realized that with the wrong tones I was basically talking incomprehensible gibberish as far as most native speakers were concerned.

[geraldc]

According to my dad (Chinese), my biggest mistake was that I didn't read Chinese out loud enough (as in a rarely did it, not that I did it with insufficient volume). Chinese schools are full of kids reading out loud en masse. This is something that is rarely done in the west. A Chinese lesson in China, full of kids reading out loud. A Chinese lesson in the west, full of people doing role plays quietly. Apparently if I'd read out loud more, I wouldn't have had any problems reading or talking.

[Flickserve]

I am learning from this thread!

 

a) Working on tone practice.

 

b) I haven't been obsessed about learning new words. Just trying to get a better handle on the ones I know (or should know) already. i.e. articulating sentences.

[abcdefg]

Chinese schools are full of kids reading out loud en masse.

 

The windows of my Kunming living room are directly across from a middle school, and when I'm home, sitting on the couch studying, I hear them reciting so many things in groups. Seems to be a popular teaching method, even today. I've grown to kind of like hearing it. Would have to say that when I'm back in the US, it's too altogether too quiet.

 

On Sundays the school rents space to two different amateur music groups. So, when the weather is nice, I open the windows and get serenaded. In the morning it's usually instrumental and in the afternoon it is usually singing. What a fine bonus to living in an old part of the city!

[Johnny20270]

@flickserve

a) Working on tone practice.

b) I haven't been obsessed about learning new words. Just trying to get a better handle on the ones I know (or should know) already. i.e. articulating sentences.

 

 

 

You have to experience mistakes before you take in on board. As for tones, I am the same, I subconsciously don't put enough effort into it and often get people just staring at me blankly, think about it and  then say ahh "..." and dramatically enforce the tone to vocally, to confirm what I just said. I'm thinking to myself "well, I just said that!...." Obviously not!

 

as regards learning new words. I think a lot of this comes from people wanting to amass new words and language schools / teaching materially using it as a sales point. Look at amazon and the criticisms of Pimsleur. Often the criticisms are around the low word count and people looking  "cost per word" Totally wrong. 

[mackie1402]

For me there were a few issues.

 

1. I would do far too much research in how to study Chinese, what resources to use, spends hours in book shops getting different books. I have a huge collection of Chinese learning materials sitting next to me in my office, most of which I've not touched since I bought them. Wish I spent more time actually reading these books than reading about them.

 

Therefore, now I am going through all my old books that I've never studied properly. Just did a lesson a day with the workbook from NPCR lesson 1-38. I didn't really need to do the first book but I told myself I will finish them no matter what! Great review!

 

I'm continuing with NPCR 4 now and in my free time will be adding lessons from Boya which I bought but never studied!

 

2. My second issue was when I did study by myself I wanted to make sure I knew everything before I moved on. I thought I should understand perfectly what everything was, every character, how they were written etc. This was quite a slow progress and wasn't that rewarding. Then at Uni we would go through some new material very quickly! The Uni lessons were too quick to really get a great understanding of what we were learning, but I did notice that the quicker we went through, the easier it was to pick up some of the characters I'd learnt before as they were constanly brought up in the future lessons. More situations with the same words was really helping.

 

Now I've found my comfort zone for my speed.

 

3. Finally, speaking. I never speak. My girlfriend of 4 years if Chinese and we just always use English (apart from the occasional Chinese thrown in to be cute). When we go out, I kind of rely on her to do the communicating, although its easy enough for me to do.

 

To solve this? Well I'm still working on it. Hoping I can get some Chinese students as a 'teacher' just to practice spoken Chinese with a lot of drilling and question and answers.

[French]

Definitely not properly learning tones, or a the very least not putting enough effort into it.

I thought, at first, that I should expand quickly my vocabulary. Dunno if it was the wrong way to go since I got some others skills on this road.

For example, I'm convinced that my listening skill has greatly improved due to learning a large quantity of vocabulary.

Now I'm trying to correct my prononciation, so I've reduced my speaking speed when I remember that I need to pay attention of how I'm talking.