My 2-Year Journey to Mandarin Native Pronunciation (Part 4) - How I use Anki

[David Ma]

This is part 4 of my 2-Year Journey to Mandarin Native Pronunciation – How I Use Anki/Audacity

 

Part 3 is Here

 

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Original article has been deleted and is now hosted externally on blogger.

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This format is a bit hard to edit/maintain. So I am switching over to external links to a pretty generic blog for now. My intention is not to sell a blog. Lord knows I have more than enough to do than start a freelance writing career. ;p

 

The blog will have four posts and that's it. I won't be updating again until the 2-year mark.

[David Ma]

This whole post looks a lot better in blog form here: http://2years2native.blogspot.com/2015/10/how-i-use-ankiaudacity-part-4.html

[ChTTay]

The way this is written... I feel like you're trying to "sell" ANKI to me. Do you want to discuss anything or just a nice link to your own blog post?

Don't you find ANKI has downsides? I mean if I were to make flashcards as you detail above I would feel like I spend way too much time making flashcards for what I'm getting out of it. Less time sat at my computer, more time using Chinese. I prefer Pleco as you just add the word straight to a deck. It also works for sentences and adds pinyin automatically. The main drawback of flashcards after 2+ years is I find them incredibly dull.

I'm not sure Anki is a great way to improve your pronunciation. You mention listening to the recording here but do you record yourself and compare as well? Shadowing?

50 characters a week seems really light to me too. That's 10 a day with the weekend off. When I studied at Tsinghua you'd be getting about 50-70 new characters a day. Sometimes more if a discussion went off on a tangent or if you had chatty teacher. Up to your neck in characters everyday.

[David Ma]

Yeah, I agree. Gonna take this down and do a few edits. Is there a way to delete a post? My intention is not at all to sell anything except for good ole' hard work and effort.

 

The biggest downside to this method is it not being that interesting. If you are taking classes it is easy to stay motivated with this method. The upside is that it lets you cram a lot of new words into your long-term memory with minimal effort (which is still quite a bit of studying).

 

I just shadow/mimic, compare, and retry. There is a video coming of my pronunciation and many people will probably come to this post after first watching the vid and deciding if my pronunciation is worth anything.

 

50 characters a week is the first month, starting at zero level Chinese. As you might know, that number increases with each week/month/semester the longer you study Chinese.

[Shelley]

Hmm, more preparing to study than studying. Got add my thumbs up for Pleco here too.

[Shelley]

You can delete it but I wouldn't be so quick to back down, leave it, see what happens. Someone may benefit from your efforts.

 

If you still want to remove it click edit and just delete the content and leave a blank post, an admin will come along eventually and take it down.

[Shelley]

My 2 earlier posts #5 and #6 refer to text the OP has removed from the first post.

[Flickserve]

I found flash cards incredibly dull. I used Anki for 2 weeks in all, and after all the hype around them, it was quite disappointing.

I do have to admit my incentives are different; not studying full time and just for leisure. Knowing how different people use Anki successfully is interesting. There must be some other external circumstances to its successful use e.g. daily exposure in the environment either by classmates or external dialogue.

I am quite interested in the book 发展汉语. Couldn't find any reviews in English on it. What does it offer?

[stapler]

 

I am quite interested in the book 发展汉语. Couldn't find any reviews in English on it. What does it offer?

 

If it's the book I'm thinking of (this series: http://www.amazon.cn/%E5%8F%91%E5%B1%95%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD%E2%80%A2%E4%B8%AD%E7%BA%A7%E5%90%AC%E5%8A%9B2-%E5%82%85%E7%94%B1/dp/B007IQ1CT2 ) it's pretty decent though pricey (I got people to buy it in China and bring it back to me). No way worth spending so much money (I think it's around $25 USD!) for a Chinese textbook of this size.

 

I only have the some of the listening textbooks and I think they're a great complement to more standard 'comprehensive' textbooks like NPCR, etc - which I believe never give anywhere near enough listening material and overemphasis writing and reading (which for me, as someone outside of China, is particularly important - all too easy to just read,write and never listen)

 

The listening books are sets of around 30 lessons IIRC. Each lesson starts of with a list of vocabulary related to a topic (a sister and brother fighting over music, people trying to coordinate what food goes in a fridge when another person is away, real estate, all sorts). Afterwards there are 4 recordings. Two conversations then two dialogues. After listening to each recording you have to answer a bunch of comprehension questions. Some of these questions are traditionally bad Chinese textbook style questions (fill in the missing the character - which you can often guess from the context of the sentence without even listening to the recording). But some are good questions which quiz you about the dialogue to see if you understood its smaller details. I spent most of my time listening to the recordings til I understood as much as I could then did the questions to help me work out the gaps. Overall I think the listening books are really good for people like myself who are beginners and cannot use native listening materials yet or have easy access to daily Chinese

[abcdefg]

6) For the Pinyin, I am lazy and use numbers so 你好 is ni3hao3 instead of Nǐ hǎo.

 

Why not just use the marks instead of the number? Really doesn't require much additional effort.

 

Also, you refer to this as being a 2-year project. Are you one year along, or did I read that wrong?

[imron]

50 characters a week seems really light to me too.

I disagree strongly.  In fact, 10 a day with the weekend off is quite close to what I consider an optimal amount to learn (5-10 a day).

 

If you can maintain that rate continually, in two years you'll know over 5,000 characters, (50 chars * 52 weeks/year * 2 years = 5,200), which is probably more than you'll ever need (you'll still need to learn plenty more *words* though).

 

The problem with 'learning' 50-70 characters a day, is that you aren't really *learning* those words - at least not the majority of them in the context of long-term learning and understanding (which is surely the end goal), and it's also an impossible rate to maintain for any significant length of time, and 'time spent continuously learning' is a more important factor in my opinion than 'characters learnt per day'.  Learning that much is just spinning wheels and gives the impression of hard work and learning, without much learning actually taking place.

 

10 words a day is a far more manageable and sustainable rate.  @OP, don't be in a rush, and don't compare your rate to the rate of other people.  Just make sure you go at a rate that is sustainable and that you can keep up with *every* day.  Use a tool like Don't Break the Chain or my own 100% to measure and keep track of progress.

 

If you can do it every day, within 2 years, you'll have passed everyone else who was learning at crazy rates per day who then burnt out and stopped and who end up forgetting most of what they learnt anyway.

[imron]

For the Pinyin, I am lazy and use numbers so 你好 is ni3hao3 instead of Nǐ hǎo.

Seeing as you're using windows, you should check out Pinyinput (disclaimer: I wrote it).  Then you can be lazy, *and* have tone marks, because typing ni3hao3 will give you nǐhǎo

[ChTTay]

Actually , I said "getting" 50-70 characters a day, rather than "learning". :-)

[imron]

:-)

[David Ma]

Pleco and Anki are by no means mutually exclusive. I use both on a daily basis (more like hourly ). I've never used the Pleco flashcards though and think the work in making your own is what really helps.

 

The Fazhan Hanyu books seem to be really popular here in China but almost impossible to find in the States. Each of the levels are divided into Comprehensive, Listening, and Speaking classes. There is also a reading/writing class that students can take as an elective but studying full-time is already pretty demanding as it is.

 

A big goof: I meant 50 WORDS per week not characters. So we were usually learning 80-100 characters a week. When you first start learning Chinese, almost every character is new so you end up learning 100 characters or so. (The more words you learn, the more the same characters keep popping up.) And then there are some grammar flashcards in there as well.

 

Yes, I am one year in so far. My goal is to have really good pronunciation by the end of two years. This is part 4 so I am posting my whole experience a bit out of order. The other posts coming are "1 Year Reflections on the Learning Process", "Timeline of Major Aha! Moments" and "Stuff I experimented with before even coming to china". I did a lot of reading on learning Chinese before starting (as I think most people do) to see how much time I would be committing every day, how many years it would take out of my life , etc.

 

It was difficult to find a timeline of where people hit milestones. Even studying full time here in China, it can feel like no progress is being made. It was also difficult to find any foreigners with native pronunciation (which i think all language learners should aspire to) so these posts are hopefully to shine a little light into these areas where I had a lot of questions starting out. Essentially giving my former self a glimpse one year into the future of what worked and what didn't.

 

I was really hoping to post the article here, but I couldn't embed the youtube video or pictures and so now it's external. Sorry for any confusion of the original post disappearing. A more well-written version is slowly being updated on the external link.

[David Ma]

In terms of using pinyin marks vs. numbers. This method is all about speed. So if you are creating thirty new flashcards, any extra effort in copying the tone marks from google translate, or buying a program (I'm not only lazy but cheap ) make things just a little bit slower.

 

I don't really look at the pinyin often and try to listen and train the ears as much as possible, so it's not a big deal for me. If someone knows of a free program that effortlessly produces pinyin tone marks, definitely post here and and I will update.

[abcdefg]

If someone knows of a free program that effortlessly produces pinyin tone marks, definitely post here and and I will update.

 

I think Pinyinput is free, with a suggested donation of $5 or $10. Plus it's fast and easy. I've used it for years.

 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pinyinput/

 

http://www.pinyinput.net/

[imron]

Pinyinput is pay what you want, with a suggested donation of $5.  You're welcome to just put $0 if you don't want to pay.  It's more or less effortless to use.

[Flickserve]

@Stapler

Thanks for the comprehensive review.

@David Ma

Can you confirm it's the same series of books that you mentioned?

The anki way for tone marks is to download the Chinese language add on and as you add the Chinese characters in the card, the pinyin with tone mark is automatically generated in the pinyin field with one extra button push. Mac and PC have slight differences.

[David Ma]

Yes, the amazon link posted up above is the correct series. As I mentioned in my previous post, finding them outside China seems to be pretty difficult. A book usually costs like 40-50元  and you buy the listening, speaking and comprehensive (each comes with an Audio CD). The listening book comes with an answers manual to check yourself which is quite handy.

 

I will definitely add this nifty program to the blog post.

 

And to clarify, the reason I posted part 4 first is that it was the easiest and quickest of the four parts to finish. I really want to just get at least a part of it out into the public so I would feel pushed to quickly finish the other parts. Otherwise, I could easily see myself pushing off putting down anything for at least another month or two or not at all. And then it wouldn't be a 1-year update but a 1-year 3 month update .