I've hit a Beginner's Plateau

[rn1rnl]

Hello, This is actually my first time making a post on here so bear with me. I have been passively learning chinese for about 6 months now. Not too many sit down study sessions except my pronunciation is very good. I have lived in Shanghai for about 4 months. I am back in the USA learning Chinese while I finish my BA. I have kind of come into a rut in independant study. I'm starting to over think everything in how to learn. I divided each category: Speaking, Listening, Reading, Writing, Vocabulary. I know I can speak somewhat okay for a beginner, but my big problem is Vocabulary. I only know about 300 words, and probably only 100 characters. This present a big problem for Reading. I am starting to learn to write to help learn Vocabulary words. I was wondering if you guys could share wisdom in how you learn new Chinese Vocabulary? I do have Anki and Pleco. Which one do you guys prefer? Thank you!

[fabiothebest]

If you know about 300 words, you *might* be at HSK 2 level. Have you taken the test? Even if  it's not necessary you may take it in order to assess yourself. I think that a good textbook can be useful for you in order to learn in an organized way. About Anki and Pleco everyone has a personal preference. I find Pleco easier to use and you can use the definitions from the dictionaries directly, anyway Anki is more customizable. I also like Memrise to be honest. Since Chinese language uses characters rather than letters, it feels harder to memorize words and Memrise allows you to associate images or sentences that provide a hint for remembering the characters. The association may be based on the "shape" of the character, an association of 2 characters together (i.e. their meaning) in a peculiar way that makes it easier to remember. There are courses already available for all HSK levels, courses based on words contained in textbooks, but the good thing is that you also can create your own courses. Let's say you are reading a book and you find there are words you don't know, you can create flashcards for studying them. Well, you can do this also with Pleco and Anki but I find Memrise's "visual" extra help useful. You can insert images also in Anki but I find Memrise easier. Pleco doesn't allow that as far as I know, it's a great app anyway.

[Shelley]

I am in the Pleco camp for sure. Its just so much easier to use, It is designed for chinese and chinese only. Anki is a flashcard system for learning nearly anything you want. Pleco also does much more than just flashcards, it also a dictionary with a choice of many dictionaries, it has a Clip reader, file reader, Screen Reader, OCR, and more. The paid version of Pleco flashcards is much better than the "free/demo" version. IMHO no student of chinese should be without it. For what you get its not that expensive. You can get a "basic" package and add things as you decide you need them.

 

I strongly suggest taking up writing with a pen and paper, I find this is very good for memorising characters, it helps with "muscle memory" which I find is a very good way for me to remember characters and how to write them. I use Hanzi Grids to print out practice sheets for each of my lesson's new vocabulary. https://www.hanzigrids.com/

 

I also suggest using a text book, I like New Practical Chinese Reader. Have a look at my blog to see how I use it and other things to aid my studies. https://www.chinese-forums.com/blogs/blog/108-my-chinese-learning-blog/

 

Finding chinese forums is also good step You will find lots of friendly help and answers to questions. Welcome.

[Xiao Kui]

 

Quote

 

strongly suggest taking up writing with a pen and paper, I find this is very good for memorising characters, it helps with "muscle memory" which I find is a very good way for me to remember characters and how to write them. I use Hanzi Grids to print out practice sheets for each of my lesson's new vocabulary. https://www.hanzigrids.com/

 

I also suggest using a text book, I like New Practical Chinese Reader. Have a look at my blog to see how I use it and other things to aid my studies. https://www.chinese-forums.com/blogs/blog/108-my-chinese-learning-blog/

 

 

I agree. I think these are the missing elements for a lot of language learners nowadays. There are so many high-tech, convenient ways to learn, so the cumbersome yet tried and true old school methods get overlooked.  i started learning in 1998 ( i know, decrepit, right?)  , and didn't get an electronic dictionary till 2004. Looking words up by radical and stroke order was a PITA, and I don't really miss making flash cards by hand, but I did cultivate some good habits which have since served me well, such as writing new characters and words 5 times each. 

[Mati1]

This sounds familiar. Also, the beginner's plateau is a lie haha.

 

I started with Chinesepod. They introduce you to the pronounciation and give you comparisons, backround infos and such in the lessons. But progress is very slow as a beginner. Funny thing, while I was still learning by listening to the lowest level podcasts I really wanted to hear some real Chinese, so I've opened the CCTV webpage and watched a series for advanced learners which was of course Chinese only, I guess native level.

I was too lazy to learn from the written Chinesepod material and therefore made no progress with my reading. So I bought a character book and studied it (realistically remembering maybe 30 % of the 800 characters well), before reading my first book: Chinese Breeze (at the 300 words level). When I read it I was annoyed that most of the characters I had learned didn't even show up haha. So I only read one of those before choosing the 500 words level.

 

That's how I like to do it. It's easy enough to pick up words the first time you encounter them in a story. The real problem is knowing the characters to be able to read at all. So, not seeing any real progress, I've recently started to learn characters again. Paper SRS style this time, so I can really nail them down haha.

 

I like being able to read Chinese but started doing it too late. Definetely give Chinese Breeze or the other beginner series of graded readers a try!

 

I've many textbooks too but they are all (exception below) Chinese textbook style, meaning not really beginner friendly without a teacher translating for you. After having read books already I didn't want to pick up a textbook series like NPCR. The textbooks I like best are also the last ones I bought, the DeFrancis series of textbooks with accompanying readers, which give you a massive amount of reading material. They are not for everyone though, because they use traditional characters and are from the sixties.

[LiMo]

I think memrise is a good option as well. I started off with it and I found it quite useful because it helped me familiarise myself with the radicals, after that get used to stroke order and you'll find it much easier to remember characters because you can correctly deconstruct them and assign meaning (or not) to their constituent parts (assuming that's a problem you have). I've never really been one for writing out characters much, but I know I did some of this in the beginning too and if you can cultivate nice Chinese handwriting as well as literacy then so much the better. Pleco, as always, is a must.

 

I also found TV shows very useful, I started watching them quite early on, getting an ear for the language, and eventually bumbled my way through an entire series just with the Chinese subtitles (can't remember how long in this was so use your judgement). It wasn't pretty and I was mostly using facial expressions and following along with the rough outline of the plot, but it was actually very useful for improving my reading and listening skills at the same time. Find something simple and fun like 家有儿女 (a family sitcom)  and see how you like it, there are lots of shows available at viki.com, or you can go to a Chinese site like Youku.com.

 

Personally, I found it most beneficial to get out of the textbooks/scripted podcasts as soon as possible, but it all depends not just on your best performance but also on your worst, as in how much you can stomach on those bad days when you don't wanna do anything. Perseverance is key as I'm sure you already know. There are a great many good and insightful articles about how to study Chinese on hackingchinese.com and I recommend you take a look. It really helped me when I was starting out and the study advice is probably applicable to most other things you'll try to learn in life, it could even help with your BA 

[Mati1]

Hmm ... I wonder, is there a site like HackingYourBaIn3Months.com? I'm sure it would draw some traffic

[Shelley]

1 minute ago, Mati1 said:

HackingYourBaIn3Months.com

 

?? Bain=Brain ??

[Mati1]

If you have to ask ... haha

[Shelley]

Ok haha you got me

[shuoshuo]

Learn the 5000 or so words on the HSK 6 list. It might not make a lot of sense why, just do it. After that, you will realize you understand a lot more and it helps with your reading, listening and speaking. I thought I was stuck too, at some point.

[Flickserve]

DeFrancis Beginning Chinese reader.

 

Then learn something useful and practical like your favourite dishes in a Chinese restaurant so that you can order by saying the dish and drinks when you look in the menu.

 

The number of people that I have impressed by reading and marking the dim sum order sheet is endless.

[Shelley]

7 hours ago, shuoshuo said:

Learn the 5000 or so words on the HSK 6 list.

 

I am not a big fan of learning lists of words, context is the key. You need to learn words as they will be used not just as some memory trick that you can rattle off with out much use.

DeFrancis is good if you are learning traditional characters.

 

I find NPCR is actually quite good for self study, the explanations are in English and a teacher/answer book is available. The videos for the lessons are on YouTube and you can get the audio on CDs.

 

Each person will have their own ways of getting the best out of their study time, I offer my experiences and methods merely to show what is available, you will have to decide what fits your style of learning and what your end results need to be.

[Mati1]

8 hours ago, shuoshuo said:

Learn the 5000 or so words on the HSK 6 list.

Would that be after learning the 4000 most common Chinese characters, or at the same time?

Knowing them would be very useful of course.

However, over time I'm more and more under the impression that learning Chinese is more about learning how to learn Chinese than about actually learning Chinese, if you know what I mean

Therefore, telling someone to best learn Chinese by learning Chinese may not be the most useful approach. Teachers and more experienced learners can offer less experienced learners some guidance and show them different options. At some point, whatever options the learner used himself / herself, he / she will realize that there's no shortcut, it's just a lot of work. If the learner decides to continue then the most important test has been passed.

Thoughts?

[rn1rnl]

Thanks for the great advice! I have not taken the HSK 2 yet due to the closest test site about 4 hours away. It doesn't help that I overanalze everything for learning Chinese haha. Ive been hearing a lot of things about the NPCR text books. I do have the BOYA and Integrated Chinese textbook. (My chinese class is using Integrated Chinese).

 

I have both the paid versions of Pleco and Anki flashcards, and I really like Pleco's live reader. One thing I like about Anki is I can add sentences/phrasee. With Pleco, I can practice Listening + Character learning by passively studying characters with Audio+Characters or actively learn by just the character. 

 

I have a tutor 1x a week for an hr a day, and she has taught chinese for 20+ years at a Beijing university. She has me learning the 256 single character components and learning how to write them, which I am starting to think is very vital to learning Characters. I can write 看 by knowing the two single components that make up the word. 手和目... The biggest issue is being my own teacher. I don't really know how I best learn (even in school) and even less about studying Chinese. One thing I learned is that in a language, you gotta be dedicated to consuming vocabulary/characters. The problem with that is its sometimes not in context. Which of course would change once you start reading..

 

Hopefully you guys can relate to this! 

[Publius]

I call it the Beginner's Paradox. You need to read a lot to build vocabulary. But you don't have the vocabulary to do meaningful reading. How to break out of it, I'm no expert.

And I fully appreciate the uniqueness of the Chinese writing system and what a tremendous challenge it presents to anyone learning the language.

Yet at some level I can relate.

I'm learning a language. And I positively hate textbooks. (For one thing, why are all Japanese textbooks divided into 50 lessons? I'd rather they be 30 lessons, or 60, to better fit into my, you know, calendar. Why this magic number of 50? Is it because the Japanese syllabary is called 五十音? Anyways, I've never been able to finish a textbook.)

Oh and there's another beginner's trap -- the quest to find the perfect textbook, the perfect method.

So many people end up becoming experts of learning methods while their language skills remain ___ (choose your adjective).

In this era of information and technology and multimedia and smartphone, people want to learn smarter. They shun the tried and true method which is blood, toil, tears, and sweat.

When it comes to vocabulary they want to know how useful a word is before they even consider learning it, in spite of the fact that every word is useful if you want to reach a native-like level.

OK /rant.

What I did with my Japanese learning is basically this:

I used a website that teaches grammar in an unorthodox way (starting from the nitty-gritty that most textbooks carefully hide from the beginners so they can converse right off the bat).

Downloaded a pack of Anki decks of 2000 core vocab items with sentences and audios and pics and forged right away. (Not ideal but a necessary evil I can live with.)

After three months of Pimsleur (30 lessons per level, yay!) I decided to tackle real word Japanese, transcribing daily some short video footage from various news agencies. (Turned out to be much easier than English, because of the existence of IME.)

I did anime too, with various degrees of success. (Transcribing is my tried and true method. I know it will works, only when and how much effort I'm willing to put into it.)

I read graded readers and materials geared towards native kids but... Let's face it, fairies and talking animals are great, they have my full respect, but our adult minds crave for something more mature and sophisticated.

So after a long hiatus I picked up grammar books again, JLPT preparation books from N3 to N1. I typed out all the example sentences. I even studied classical grammar, picking up useful and useless vocabs alike along the way. Meanwhile the Anki drudge evolved from 2000 to 6000.

And now I'm confident to be ready to say sayonara to the plateau/wall/paradox/whatever you call it. Reading novel is still no easy task but at least it starts to become enjoyable.

Well, long rambling post. Pick whichever bit you think might be useful (or none) and ignore the rest (or all). And have a nice weekend.

[Mati1]

1 hour ago, Publius said:

So many people end up becoming experts of learning methods while their language skills remain ___

The first word that came into my mind was a noun.

 

1 hour ago, Publius said:

In this era of information and technology and multimedia and smartphone, people want to learn smarter. They shun the tried and true method which is blood, toil, tears, and sweat.

The one who has been forged has walked through fire.

 

1 hour ago, Publius said:

When it comes to vocabulary they want to know how useful a word is before they even consider learning it, in spite of the fact that every word is useful if you want to reach a native-like level.

I get the feeling that many polyglots are so successful because they can (or have learnt to) simply appreciate languages without overthinking the learning process.

 

2 hours ago, Publius said:

Japanese, transcribing daily some short video footage from various news agencies. (Turned out to be much easier than English, because of the existence of IME.)

I guess you are refering to exact English spelling.

 

2 hours ago, Publius said:

talking animals are great, they have my full respect

Respect for all talking animals!

 

2 hours ago, Publius said:

And now I'm confident to be ready to say sayonara to the plateau/wall/paradox/whatever you call it. Reading novel is still no easy task but at least it starts to become enjoyable.

I agree that the best way to defeat the "beginners paradox" is to reach the intermediate level.

[mlescano]

Get some graded readers. You can find Level 1 of both Chinese Breeze and Mandarin Companion on Amazon's Kindle store. They're $5-$7 each and totally worth it. Each Level 1 reader uses only 300 characters or 300 words, so reading one at your current level is a very reachable goal.

 

The advantage of the Kindle versions vs. paper versions is: You can copy and paste difficult words to Pleco clipboard reader. You can even select portions in the Kindle reader itself and translate them with Bing.

 

If you go with the Mandarin Companion ones, they have free wordlists in each book's page. You could download and print these wordlists for study, or just add new words to Pleco flashcards. The best thing about these readers is that they repeat the same words again and again.

[shuoshuo]

@Shelley @Mati1

 

Sorry, I'm on my phone so it won't let me quote.

 

I think learning the 5000 words on the HSK list is one of the first few VERY VERY basic thing on any beginner's to-do list. Everyone who wants to learn a foreign language should definitely try different methods, and eventually choose the one of several method that works best for them. Either way however, knowing the 5000 words are useful.

 

Personally, I don't believe these 5000 words are even enough to graduate from beginner level. But that's just me.

 

It also depends on one's objective. In my case, my Chinese level only needs to be advanced in reading and writing. I don't need to speak Chinese like a native speaker. Other people require their oral Chinese to be better than their ability in reading and writing. So to the OP: try anything and everything, and choose the one that works for you.

[rn1rnl]

Sorry guys, its not allowing me to quote, probably because I am new to the forums maybe. I will definately look into those recommendations for graded readers. I guess I should tell you my goal in learning Chinese. I want to be fluent in Chinese and I mean by understand pretty much all Oral Conversation in daily life as well as literate in reading and writing. Basically I want to learn the whole language, and I know its a life long process. This is my first language studied. My biggest Dilemna is Overanalazying. Its the way my mind is wired. For instance, I am doing Pomodora sessions now to help focus, and the time went by so fast doing my textbook. ( I am using my Chinese class text book Integrated Chinese.) However, I started to think okay, do I read through this, go over the chapter vocab, listen to the dialogue, then go over the grammer, and write down the sentences I come across in the grammer, as well as add all the characters into one pleco deck for review? Or maybe I should start creating my own sentences by changing the verbs/nouns in the grammer section.  That is some examples how I make my learning much difficult then it needs to be. How do you guys work on building your language routine?