Weekly Intermediate Study Updates - join in!

[mackie1402]

Yeah I signed up at Dalarna University! 

5 hours ago, fabiothebest said:

Did you have to provide a certificate or are you an English native speaker? How are you tested in order to pass an exam?

 

I'm a native speaker, so I assumed the copy of my passport would be sufficient. However I got a message saying I still need to prove my English ability like you would in the UK and had to send in GCSE/A level documents of my English results. 

 

I read online that for the exams you need to set up a webcam pointed at you and your computer screen so they can see who is doing the test and that it's only the test on the screen. I'm not a 100% sure as it's all still pretty new to me, too.

 

After passing HSK4 they suggested I start their 'Chinese 4' course, but I decided to sign up for 'Chinese 3' plus an extra Business Chinese class. I'm running a business and didn't want to have to spend all of my free time studying too much. I'm hoping it'll be a good review, I'll learn some new vocabulary, consolidate my grammar, and prepare me for Chinese 4 next semester. 

[sekkar]

6 hours ago, mackie1402 said:

After passing HSK4 they suggested I start their 'Chinese 4' course, but I decided to sign up for 'Chinese 3' plus an extra Business Chinese class. I'm running a business and didn't want to have to spend all of my free time studying too much. I'm hoping it'll be a good review, I'll learn some new vocabulary, consolidate my grammar, and prepare me for Chinese 4 next semester

 

I'm also signing up for Chinese 3:

• Chinese in Speech and Writing III (15 credits)
• Chinese Translation (7.5 credits)
• Chinese Practical Writing (7.5 credits)

Which business class did you sign up for? Seems like the Chinese 3 business class Chinese for Business: Professional Communication is an autumn class.

 

Are you hoping to get a degree in the end or are you just doing this to learn?

[mackie1402]

I signed up for Chinese for Business: Daily Communication. It's a 15 credit course I believe. 

It'd be nice to get enough credits over the years to have a degree in Chinese. Seems like a nice aim!

[roddy]

Mackie, can I strongly encourage you to start a new topic about this? I think there'd be a lot of interest. 

[stapler]

In early December I went for a brief holiday around Hunan and Guangdong. It was a lot of fun and I found the opportunity to speak a lot of Chinese really enjoyable. As before, I'm slowly getting better at understanding the accents from southern China, but the northern accents still cause me a lot of trouble.

 

I largely tried to stay out of the cities. This meant I had innumerable opportunities to speak to people given how much novelty being a foreigner is in the countryside. The downside is the vast majority of the language around me was some variety of Xiang, Hakka, or Cantonese (well not really a downside, as I love trying to learn about these languages too).

 

I managed to spend some time with some people traveling from Dongbei too, which was a lot fun despite the fact that they can be harder to understand.

 

I got some strong encouragement from seeing how all the different Chinese people had so much trouble speaking with each other. The highlight being watching an old man speak to a group of young adults who all look perplexed. I asked what dialect he was speaking and was surprised to find out it was Mandarin (well, Chongqinghua). It's heartening to be reminded that (Mandarin speaking) Chinese people not only don't understand me, but frequently each other!

 

The trip has inspired me to try to do some more formal Mandarin practice. This will be even more important now that I've moved into an area with few local Chinese and my contact with my Chinese speaking friends and acquaintances in the big cities weakened... At least until I can build some new social networks.

 

As before I'm mainly sticking to listening to sentences or dialogues in Anki, marking them both for understanding and my ability to reproduce them. That is to say, I'll only make a card correctly if I understand everything that is said in the sentence/dialogue and can reproduce by speaking and recording myself. This is kind of heavy rote learning and memorisation I have found the most effective for developing 'automaticity' in a non-Chinese language environment.

 

Also as before, I'm watching Chinese dramas in my downtime/tired time. I've found that there are many dramas on Netflix and borrowed a friend's account to watch them. The beauty of the Netflix shows is that I can turn off the subtitles. Whenever there are hardsubs I just found myself automatically drawn to reading the characters rather than listening to the audio.

 

[Publius]

1 hour ago, stapler said:

It's heartening to be reminded that (Mandarin speaking) Chinese people not only don't understand me, but frequently each other!

Haha, so true. I was briefly hospitalized last October. In hospital you hear all sorts of dialects. The father of a wardmate talked exclusively in 邯郸话. We all had great difficulty understanding him, despite Handan being in the neighboring Hebei province (about 400 km from Beijing). Very awkward when people try to chat with you and the only thing you can do is smile back blankly.

[Flickserve]

28 minutes ago, Publius said:

Very awkward when people try to chat with you and the only thing you can do is smile back blankly.

 

Now that is something I am very experienced at.

 

Once, when I recorded a lesson, I sent many of the incompletely understood sentences back to the teacher. She replied OMG, I didn’t realise you didn’t understand so much. I guess I can fool a lot of people.

[stapler]

I've had some spare time this week so I'm going through all my cards again, reviewing them, and making sure that I can nail them all. I've stopped adding new cards to do this and will delete all the cards after my review.

 

As always I'm trying something little new/different in order to keep my study habits mildly interesting and writing them up here in case anyone wants to try anything different.

 

My flashcards are sentences/monologues of varying length. Rather than just listen and repeat then mark according to whether 1) heard it correctly and 2) can repeat it verbatim without reading anything, I've made my process a little more involved.

 

For sentences which have vocabulary that I can't spontaneously recall I record myself reading and memorise the dictionary entries for the words.

 

Here are some examples from the Foden 8000 sentence audio I've been using:

 

湖上的結冰不是很平滑.

 

The sentence is very easy but it occurred to me that I probably wouldn't think to use 平滑 in every day speech (even if I could understand it). So I then go to the Taiwan MOE dictionary, read the definition, then record myself speaking it until I can reproduce it without reading the definition and at a natural pace. In this case I record myself saying:
 

平整光滑。例: 住家的地板應避免過於平滑，否則很容易跌倒摔跤。

 

I'll do this 3-4 times, or however long it takes me to commit it to my short term memory.

 

Here's another example of a very simple sentence but with some vocabulary that would stump me if I had to find the word on the fly:

 

我正想在我的肩膀上刺一朵玫瑰的刺青

 

So again I went to the MOE dictionary and recorded myself saying:

 

在皮膚上刺染各種圖案。例: 現代的原住民已少有刺青的習俗了。

 

I do this as a kind of warm up. These short sentences are not mentally taxing.

 

note: I've also discovered that the louder and more dramatically I speak, the easier time I have remembering the sentences and words. Sometimes I also 'riff' on the sentence and walk around the room modifying the existing sentence in some way while still using the grammar and/or word I want to practice.

 

Afterwards I move on to my Chinesepod Upper Intermediate deck and keep recording myself speaking sentences/paragraphs from the lesson audio. This is a much slower process given the increased grammatical complexity of the sentences in addition to the new vocabulary. Often I may record a sentence/dialogue and play it back up to 30 times until I'm convinced that I can reproduce it spontaneously and 'fluently' without prompt.

 

This has been good for slowly developing my intuitive understanding of grammar/phrasing as well as how and when to use new vocabulary.

 

Over the next few days I'm going to try and finish the new version of Meteor Garden. I would like next to watch 大江大河 but it's still above my ability so I;m thinking just to grind out another simple romance drama. Most likely it's going to be 就要你你愛上我. Maybe I'll turn 大江大河 into study material and go through it line by line.... but then it won't really count as my "relaxation" learning material.

 

[Publius]

Looks like you're doing great @stapler. It's a positive sign that a bilingual dictionary is no longer satisfactory.

[Wurstmann]

@stapler

[Wurstmann]

@stapler

[Wurstmann]

@stapler

[Wurstmann]

@stapler

[Wurstmann]

@stapler

[Wurstmann]

@stapler

What the hell happened there? oO Sorry!

[edelweis]

1 hour ago, Wurstmann said:

What the hell happened there?

dunno but it was hilarious

[roddy]

Stapler's now standing in Wurstmann's living room, wondering how the hell he got there. 

[roddy]

This topic's an excellent idea, but I think it needs a regular weekly bump to help people remember it. Would anyone like to take on this important role? Or should I see if I can set up some kind of automated weekly post to refresh everyone's memory?

[AdamD]

I’m not willing to be The Bumper but I can update:

 

My Chinese has gone to crap in the last year, so it’s just about regaining my groove. This week I’m doing a load of online chats and trying to find a book I can read relatively easily without too much dictionary checking.

 

I’m not doing listening or speaking at all right now, because I am perennially terrible at it and don’t want to deflate my newly recovered enthusiasm.

[Balthazar]

5 hours ago, AdamD said:

trying to find a book I can read relatively easily without too much dictionary checking. 

 

Do let us know if you find something!