What Chinese Study Resource Do You Wish You Had NOW?

[fabiothebest]

12 hours ago, roddy said:

back-chaining

I didn't know exactly what back-chaining is without looking it up, but once I saw an example at the link @roddy provided, I realized that it's used in Pimsleur and it's something that can be useful I think.

[Flickserve]

16 hours ago, Shelley said:

 

I listen to my NPCR lessons as many times as it takes to feel I fully comprehend. I also listen to selected Slow Chinese podcasts several times.

 

I have listened to and watched some of the NCPR. I find it a bit 'dry'. Slow Chinese I haven't used much.

 

You haven't detailed the exact process of listening 'several times' but I suspect it may be too little. For difficult sentences, you may need to do repeat 40 to 50 times or even more in isolation. You might even have to separate phrases out in isolation. I have been puzzling over this for a while as some people seem to get a lot of progress by just watching TV and others, such as me, get limited benefit. So, I have just started experimenting with repeating some sentences or words in an automatic loop, a single sentence at a time. After listening about 15-20 times, then try to mimic the word/sentence. You can even try transcribing. Because you now you have heard it so often, your own vocal imperfections are heard by yourself more distinctly. My initial results are quite encouraging.

 

It's incredibly tedious but what did they say about learning Chinese being a lesson of learning patience? 

[Guest realmayo]

I know it's not at all new to talk about "intensive" and "extensive" studying methods, but recently I've found that a very intensive or drilled-down approach to 听力 seems to have made my "extensive" work way more successful. (Intensive would be doggedly looping through audio, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, even word by word, with a transcript as a last resort.)

 

I suppose this google translate, word by word method, can be seen as an equivalent drilled-down approach for speaking. I can see the benefit of being rock-solid confident in one's ability to pronounce words in isolation. Most textbooks with audio have new vocabulary lists spoken in isolation at the start of each chapter, followed by the words used in conversation in the main text or dialogue, so that's an alternative to google translate, although perhaps more fiddly.

 

Now I think about it, I remember Imron advocating what could be cast as "intensive" or drilled-down reading, as a way to improve reading speed. I don't know what the equivalent for writing would be. But I increasingly feel the split between intensive and extensive to be a useful one for me, so maybe I should try to find out.

[Flickserve]

23 hours ago, roddy said:

I'm afraid I don't see any advantage of focusing on Google Translate over, say, any native speaker content and Audacity.

 

Maybe some people have an affinity for anything Google? Is it easier to ask a computer than a person? Also, less steps to get the content you want? For instance, if I want to say 我喝了热可乐，I would not be able to find a native speaker saying that sentence straight away.

[Shelley]

@Flickserve Your method probably works for you and many other people.

I will attempt to try your method of "looping" but I don't like adding another layer of things to do to study ie prepare the loops. How do you do this without it getting in the way?

 

[Publius]

"prepare the loops"

Some media players have a "A-B repeat" function. For example, in my favorite PotPlayer, press [ to mark the beginning, press ] to mark the end, and the player will loop through that segment endlessly. No need to do any extra "prepare the loops" thing.

[Shelley]

Oh I see, you do it as you go along, I was thinking you got a whole bunch of loops ready and went through them. I understand now, feel a bit dumb

[imron]

 

3 hours ago, realmayo said:

I remember Imron advocating what could be cast as "intensive" or drilled-down reading, as a way to improve reading speed.

 

Not just for reading speed.  For basically everything.  I first realised the effectiveness after reading this post (from 11 years ago).

So many people are focused on trying to learn smarter that they avoid methods such as rote drilling.  I used to feel the same way until reading that post and trying it out for myself seeing great results, because it's precisely this kind of drilling that gives you automatic reflexes for many basic skills.

 

3 hours ago, realmayo said:

I don't know what the equivalent for writing would be

I haven't done anything similar for writing, but if I were looking to do that I would take a piece of audio in a style similar to the type of writing I was trying to do, then listen to sentences at a time and then try to transcribe them without looking at transcripts or a dictionary (i.e. dictation), leaving blanks for words I couldn't get.

 

Then I'd go back, and look up blanks and mistaken words in a dictionary (but not writing them down) and then listen and write again until I can get it correct, and then move on to the next sentence.

 

I'd make sure I was doing whole sentences at a time also, and not just stopping and pausing after a word or two.

[艾墨本]

One tool I always wished existed was a GOOD tone training software. I used rosetta stone early on almost entirely for the drawn lines of tones so I could practice getting mine to look like the native content in rosetta stone. I wish there was something that could take a phrase and map the tone visually, then allow me to try to mimic them and see what my tones look like. The visual feedback helps me a lot. A lot of the software the does something like this sticks to one or two characters when I need phrases. Practicing tones outside of isolation is very different. For example, three third tones can be 2-2-3 or (half 3)-2-3 depending on what characters get paired. 

 

All the other tools I want already exist (The Chairman's Bao, Chinese Text Analyser, Chinese Breeze (esp. the audio files), Anki/Pleco for notecards, and Pleco dictionary now with detailed descriptions from outlier, Hacking Chinese for advice, and early on the popup Chinese podcasts).

 

Now i just want resources:

List of native books, graded by difficulty and sorted by type of vocabulary (tech, military, political, etc)

List of audio content in the same way

Money to pay for tools...

 

All these discussions on methods/tools, while I have found them useful, now I'm just at the point that I need to focus on doing a method, whether or not it is the most effective. Even the most effective method is useless if I only understand how to use it but never use it.

[gato]

What about this pronunciation training software?  It seems to have tone graphs.

 

http://speakgoodchinese.org/

[Flickserve]

16 hours ago, 艾墨本 said:

I wish there was something that could take a phrase and map the tone visually, then allow me to try to mimic them and see what my tones look like

Doesn't praat do this?

 

Granted, if there was a less cumbersome app that could do the same.....

[Flickserve]

23 hours ago, Shelley said:

I see, you do it as you go along, I was thinking you got a whole bunch of loops ready and went through them. I understand now

 

Try it out for a few sentences. You can use audacity or workaudio book. The disadvantage of WAB is that you have to press the space bar each time to listen.  *edit WAB does have a loop function.  With a loop setup, a 3 second phrase/sentence will give you 20 repetitions in one minute or 100 in five minutes etc. If you still cannot quite catch it, play for another five minutes. No native speaker Chinese teacher can keep that sort of rate up for long!

 

I prefer to listen initially, then refer to the written word. Then back to the listen again, quick reference to the pinyin, listen and then mimic. Repeat the same sentence an hour later or the next day but not too big a delay.

 

 

[艾墨本]

12 hours ago, gato said:

 

What about this pronunciation training software?  It seems to have tone graphs.

 

http://speakgoodchinese.org/

 

 

 

I tried this toward the end of last year. It was horribly buggy on my Mac and gave for inconsistent tone-graphs. Rosetta did it so much better. 

 

4 hours ago, Flickserve said:

Doesn't praat do this?

 

Granted, if there was a less cumbersome app that could do the same.....

 

 

I'm not familiar with Praat. Not-cumbersome is an important feature, though.

[Shelley]

I am feeling rather guilty that I have derailed the OP's original question. Maybe the OP should try again with a new topic? I don't know what the best solution to my question is but I have had a lot very good info. Thank you.

[艾墨本]

14 minutes ago, Shelley said:

 

I am feeling rather guilty that I have derailed the OP's original question. Maybe the OP should try again with a new topic? I don't know what the best solution to my question is but I have had a lot very good info. Thank you.

 

 

 

Doesn't seem derailed to me.

[Shelley]

1 minute ago, 艾墨本 said:

Doesn't seem derailed to me.

Nobody else has made any other suggestion in reply to the original question, all the posts seem to related to my question and not the OP's.

[querido]

"What Chinese Study Resource Do You Wish You Had NOW?"

 

A spoken language chatbot whose vocabulary I could provide and manage. I imagine a controllable supervisory layer between myself and Siri, for example.

*

An audio mode analog of Chinese Text Analyser.

[Luxi]

For people who prefer human voices to Google or Hui Hui, Arch Chinese has a good tone-listening drill.  It includes multi-syllable drills as well as single ones, and all their recordings are by humans. I'm not 100% sure whether this is free to all registered users or only to paid members, but it might be - or it may become available to individual students if they ask. The site seems to be mainly for teachers and institutions. They also have many example sentences with human audio that can be downloaded as mp3s for offline practice.

 

 

[mlescano]

Reply to original post:

 

A daily short video with transcript/subtitles would be awesome. There are tons of hard/soft subtitled videos on YouTube, but when you're just starting to scratch the surface of a new culture, the interesting/fun stuff is hard to find. So posting a daily "I found this short video interesting" would be cool.

[Mati1]

Is there something similiar to Fluentu but less advanced and for free? Basically a collection of materials, let's say (linked) online videos, with good transcripts and sorted by difficulty. It's frustrating that 99.9 % of random material is either too difficult or too easy; at least that's my impression.