I've hit a Beginner's Plateau

[roddy]

Hi rn1rnl, and welcome to the site. You should be able to quote, but for historical reasons we don't have the traditional quote button. All you need to do is select the text you want to quote and a 'quote this' button should appear. It's possible it may not work on some browsers or something - if you can't manage drop me a pm and we'll diagnose. 

 

[Lu]

On 25-2-2017 at 5:53 PM, Publius said:

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.

Isn't that what good textbooks are for? Any language I've learned started every chapter with a little story, introducing new vocabulary and grammar points in context and at a level we could understand. We'd read the story, then learn the words, discuss the grammar, and eventually read the story again, now with full understanding. You do that for at least two or so textbooks, and then you should have enough vocab and grammar under your belt to start tackling the easier native materials (or graded readers).

 

It's very nice to try and dive into native material right away, and there certainly is some value in doing a little of that (hey look, I know that one! That's 人! *gets back to textbook with renewed vigour because efforts are clearly starting to pay off*), but trying to learn Chinese from scratch by reading the newspaper is like learning to swim by being dropped in the middle of the Pacific. It might work great for minority of people, but most people just get nowhere despite their best efforts and soon give up.

[abcdefg]

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

 

That is a great trick! I am in awe of you and it would surely impress me.

 

When I'm in Hong Kong or Macau, I've learned to manage three or four of my favorite things, but when I want to get adventurous, then I must call the waitress over and ask for help. Especially daunting task since the menu is always in 繁体字 and the server speaks mostly Cantonese.

 

One of my small tricks it to always pick up one of these tear-off, check-box menus to take home and study. If I anticipate returning to the same restaurant, I will even annotate such a menu with hints and clues, plus a few scribbled translations in the margins.

[Mati1]

@Lu

Yes, you're right too!

 

I did it kind of backwards. Of course I didn't dive into advanced material as a newbie, that should be much easier with a simple alphabet.

Not everyone likes textbooks. I even bought several of the wrong kind (too much Chinese). I don't like it when there is a very short text and several pages of other stuff, when I want to do more reading, so I much prefer to read graded readers. After listening intensely to Chinesepod material the jump isn't that big, just have to learn the characters first.

So yeah, it's possible to avoid textbooks. However, the last books I bought are the DeFrancis series and they are exactly how I wanted textbooks and beginner readers to be like. (If I had known three years earlier ...) I just need to figure out how to integrate the traditional characters into my learning.

Reading graded readers is still more interesting to me when one gets a longer storyline. I am currently reading “嫦娥奔月”, 500 characters level from this series.

[Shelley]

1 minute ago, Mati1 said:

need to figure out how to integrate the traditional characters into my learning

 

I decided awhile ago to add traditional characters to my learning, I started using DeFrancis and the traditional version of NPCR. After I short while I decided that my strategy would be to learn to read traditional but concentrate on writing simplified. I feel I would benefit from recognising and understanding traditional but not for me to learn to write traditional.

So far it has been going well. I enjoy the information and etymology of traditional characters.

[rn1rnl]

5 hours ago, roddy said:

 

Hi rn1rnl, and welcome to the site. You should be able to quote, but for historical reasons we don't have the traditional quote button. All you need to do is select the text you want to quote and a 'quote this' button should appear. It's possible it may not work on some browsers or something - if you can't manage drop me a pm and we'll diagnose. 

 

Thank you Roddy. I appreciate it! I figured out how to quote.

 

3 hours ago, Lu said:

Isn't that what good textbooks are for? Any language I've learned started every chapter with a little story, introducing new vocabulary and grammar points in context and at a level we could understand.

What did your study routine look like when you first started to learn Chinese and how did it change as you learned more and more characters? I am interested to know how others study a language.

 

1 hour ago, Shelley said:

I feel I would benefit from recognising and understanding traditional but not for me to learn to write traditional.

Ah! I need to start doing this as I will be going to Taiwan in 3 months!

[Lu]

2 minutes ago, rn1rnl said:

What did your study routine look like when you first started to learn Chinese and how did it change as you learned more and more characters? I am interested to know how others study a language.

I started in 2000, so it's been a while... This was when an electronic dictionary was the height of technical study aids, so no Pleco or Anki or ChinesePod or what have you (if it existed, I wasn't aware of it). I studied in university, from textbooks. We started with DeFrancis, learning grammar and words from one book and characters from another. I think it might be better if one can coordinate this and learn the characters right away when learning the words (and I think my university actually does that now). I was pretty diligent in going to the language lab and listening to the tapes with the stories and sentences of that chapter, repeating after everything etc. I also diligently studied words and characters, using paper flashcards, and during the first year I kept up quite well. I wrote out the words again and again and again until they stuck.

 

In the second year we used a different book, more text, more new words and characters each week, and I soon fell behind. Made a last-ditch effort in the summer and only just passed that year.

 

The third year I spent in Beijing. We studied from textbooks but also some native material: short stories, newspaper articles. I made my own vocab lists for these stories and we discussed them in class to the tiniest detail, so you really had to know every word. This class I really enjoyed, since we discussed both the language itself and the content of the literature.

 

The fourth year we used the textbook Oh China in one class and read a lot of native material in another. I was elated to find that I could read, I no longer had to plough through looking up every word, I could just read on.

 

The fifth year I spent in Taiwan, studying first from textbooks (very good, learned lots of words and grammar again). I again spent a lot of time writing out characters again and again and found that the process of learning new characters was much faster now, I could remember them after only writing them twice or so. I also took a class in short story reading and during this year I read my first and second real book in Chinese.

 

I hope this is of some use!

[imron]

11 hours ago, shuoshuo said:

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

This is actually the most inefficient way to build vocabulary to read the things you are interested in.

 

The reason is that the HSK covers a little bit of this and a little bit of that from a broad range of topics and fields and genres.  By contrast, things that you are reading at a given point in time usually have a fixed topic, field and genre, and the total set of topics, fields and genres each person is interested in is relatively small.

 

Chinese has such a long tail that once you get to the intermediate level, if you are learning from HSK lists, you'll be learning a little bit of words that are going to be useful to you (based on your reading patterns) and then a lot of other words that are mostly not going to be in material you're reading.  Sure, you'll want to learn these words eventually, but at a given point in time there is usually other vocabulary that will give you a greater increase in understanding of the material you are interested in.

 

Say for example you are at HSK4 and have decided to read a novel such as 活着.  Learning the extra 3,300 words from HSK4-6 will give you an increase in understanding of roughly 7% (stats gathered from CTA).  By contrast, learning the top 300 most frequently occurring unknown words in the novel (from a base of HSK4) will give you an increase in understanding of ~20%, and if you had learnt the 3,300 most frequently occurring unknown words (i.e. the same number of words to get from HSK4 to HSK6), you would have 98% comprehension of the text.

 

Learning from context is orders of magnitude more efficient than learning from general word lists.

[Flickserve]

3 hours ago, abcdefg said:

One of my small tricks it to always pick up one of these tear-off, check-box menus to take home and study

 

This is exactly what I did. Writing out those characters and reading them was a survival skill in ordering food! After doing that, it so happened I was able to read some of the local tea house (茶餐厅）menu. So food did not have to be so limited.

[rn1rnl]

1 hour ago, imron said:

This is actually the most inefficient way to build vocabulary to read the things you are interested in.

 

This is one of the hard parts for me. I add a lot of vocabulary from textbooks into Pleco, but am unable to add in a sentence for the context, however it does help me learn the characters. A hard part for me is forming sentences right now. I get the grammer all mixed up.

 

 

[Flickserve]

1 hour ago, rn1rnl said:

Ah! I need to start doing this as I will be going to Taiwan in 3 months

 

You need survival skills. I don't what the others are going to say but here's what is going to happen. You will arrive in Taipei and not have a clue how to ask for the toilet, burst and wet yourself.

 

If you learn the most frequent 400 words, that is going to help a lot. However, you will need to read to reinforce them. The trouble with going further with more words is that the more you learn, the more you  travel into not whether it will be immediately useful.

 

If I had my time again at the end of the first year, I would do a lot more repetitive listening of dialogue with a script. Actually, now I record my lessons, send the MP3 to the tutor who then writes the script out and sends in back to me. Now, I can identify all the unknown vocabulary. Next, I setup a loop to listen to the sentences repeatedly - 50 or 60 times and I try to mimic. Your listening and spoken skills will improve.

[Lu]

@rn1rnl, please use the quoting function sparingly. Just quote the bits that you really need, leave out the rest. In this case for example, there was no need to quote my post at all.

Quoting too much makes the forum look cluttered, and also, if this quoting function gets abused, @roddy might remove it again, which would be a pity.

 

More on topic, I'm glad my experiences were helpful. I don't agree, by the way, that fewer resources are better. I do think it's better to just pick something and dive in, and not get distracted searching for the perfect app.

[rn1rnl]

@Lu Thanks I edited the previous post. I am still trying to figure out how the forums operate so bare with me.  A big problem that I have is I have SO many resources that its hard to pick one and dive in. My brain wants to overcomplicate even the simplest resource. 

18 minutes ago, Flickserve said:

You need survival skills. I don't what the others are going to say but here's what is going to happen. You will arrive in Taipei and not have a clue how to ask for the toilet, burst and wet yourself.

 

As long as most can speak mandarin, I will be set. I have lived in Shanghai for 6 months so I have survival and basic conversation skills. I'd say and my Chinese teacher even thinks that I can easily pass HSK 2 ( I don't take it cause its 4 hours from where I live). It's more so progressing from the stage I am at. My Chinese teacher is having me learn the Single Component Characters, and how to write them. (256 Characters). I can write 40 of them so far by memory. Some days are easier than others though

[fabiothebest]

@rn1rnl if you need to start from the basics and need some survival Chinese I can only recommend https://www.edx.org/course/tsinghua-chinese-start-talking-1-3-tsinghuax-tm01x . You'll be able to introduce yourself, order food, take public transport. I took the course when I already knew these things but I found it very well made.

[fabiothebest]

@rn1rnl Some courses on Coursera that can be useful for you:

HSK1 (you may skip it and start with HSK 2 if you think HSK1 is too easy) https://www.coursera.org/learn/hsk-1

HSK2 https://www.coursera.org/learn/hsk-2

HSK3 https://www.coursera.org/learn/hsk-3 https://www.coursera.org/learn/hsk-3-part2

[Flickserve]

8 hours ago, rn1rnl said:

As long as most can speak mandarin, I will be set. I have lived in Shanghai for 6 months so I have survival and basic conversation skills. I'd say and my Chinese teacher even thinks that I can easily pass HSK 2

 

Fair enough. Personally, I get tripped up by local accents, euphemisms or slang due to lack of experience. Would be interested to know of your initial experiences because I mostly try to interact with north China 普通话. I watched some Taiwan based footage of people walking around the streets and some are mixing in taiwanese.

[rn1rnl]

10 hours ago, fabiothebest said:

if you need to start from the basics and need some survival Chinese

I actually have really good survival Chinese. I think my speaking ability is way better then all my other skills. My pronunciation is very good since I practiced that a lot. I am aiming to become more well rounded off in my Chinese learning. Ie. Character learning, wanting to start reading, as well as even writing. I believe that all aspects of these play a vital importance in learning the language as a whole. 

 

2 hours ago, Flickserve said:

Fair enough. Personally, I get tripped up by local accents, euphemisms or slang due to lack of experience. Would be interested to know of your initial experiences

You know, when I was in Shanghai, there were a few things that threw me off at first. I always asked a tutor or friend and learned real quick what the problem was. Most of the taxi drivers were shanghainese so they were unable to say any "sh" word. They pronounce it same as "S". So at first I wanted to go to my house near Zhongshan Park. He kept on saying ZhongSan and I was like No ZhongShan hah. After that I never really had problems with being tripped up by accents. If I didn't understand I could use intuition to figure out what they were saying to me. I think a lot of Chinese speakers overestimate my usage of Chinese since I can speak fairly well- atleast get my meaning across creatively.

 

I am thinking about adding in Italki Sessions 3x-5x a week for 30 minutes.I had a 30 minute session today, and I learned a lot of good vocabulary from free talking that otherwise I may not learn for a long time. 

[Flickserve]

24 minutes ago, rn1rnl said:

I think a lot of Chinese speakers overestimate my usage of Chinese since I can speak fairly well- atleast get my meaning across creatively.

 

I am thinking about adding in Italki Sessions 3x-5x a week for 30 minutes.I had a 30 minute session today, and I learned a lot of good vocabulary from free talking that otherwise I may not learn for a long time. 

 

I get the same difficulty about overestimation of my listening skills. I record my italki sessions. I find when the person on the other side just types out the word, it doesn't help me for future reference. A recording allows me to review and tease out things I didn't hear first time round.

[rn1rnl]

54 minutes ago, Flickserve said:

I find when the person on the other side just types out the word, it doesn't help me for future reference

Its funny how we all differ from each other in terms of learning. I prefer them to type the word out during conversation, and at the end to give the definitions and go over them. I learned that to make it "stick" I gotta independently study it otherwise I won't remember it.

[LiMo]

On 27/02/2017 at 4:01 PM, rn1rnl said:

This is one of the hard parts for me. I add a lot of vocabulary from textbooks into Pleco, but am unable to add in a sentence for the context

 

There is now a function which allows you to create your own cards quite easily. If you type a sentence into the dictionary all the words will appear below, but just above those words there are blue option buttons: a plus sign, an audio sign, an envelope and an arrow in a box. The plus sign is for creating a new card using all the words you've just put in. If you click on this you'll be taken to a new screen where you can edit the flashcard directly before saving it to your decks as usual. It's quite simple and intuitive, probably not as versatile as Anki but still very useful. I've only just started using this so I can practice more complex and unusual collocations for essay writing but it sounds like it's exactly what you need.