What's Your Story on Progressing From Beginner Stage's

[rn1rnl]

Hello, I am relatively new to this forum, however I have been really going through the forums to gain as much info as I can.Chinese is my only second language that I have tried to learn. With that being said, many of us probably has googled How we should learn Chinese and spend our time figuring out "how" to study then actual studying. This is a big issue that I have. I scour the forums hours and hours or listen to polyglots, and not find a satisfying answer. It's not like if you spend "1 hour a day" learning Chinese you will be able to learn "x" amount of words. You may spend an hour writing out characters on hanzi grid's only to forget how to write 2-4 of them the next day. Learning a Language, especially at a beginner's stage, is particularly hard. You cannot keep up on Native Conversations, so listening to Tv Shows or reading native books isn't particularly useful yet. Some may disagree, as you get exposure, I mean simply "Active Learning". Its always good to listen to the language at native speech. 

 

At the beginning stages after you understand pronunciation, tones, and learning some characters, you get to a place where many others including I feel frusturated and stuck. It seems like a grind to progressing, because you may know 500+ words, but you only know 250 or so characters. Sitting down with a textbook, lets admit that it is very hard to do as most of the time it isn't all that fun. Yet essential as it contains rich vocabulary.

 

Hopefully, you can get a gauge to my proficiency in Chinese (in my beginner Chinese 102 at Uni, I ace nearly every exam all in Chinese- Not hard as I can type). I want to know your experience on how you first got through these stages into going deeper into the language as well as if you can give advice/guide me into right direction of studying. 

 

Right now my focus is this:

-Integrated Chinese Textbook (I have to use this book for class. Not a big fan of it compared to my Boya Series.) 

-Paid Version of Pleco (I input Integrated Vocab into this as well as any other vocab I learn through outside sources)

-ChineseClass101- Absolute beginner Podcasts( except I know much of Vocab- but no very little of the "Beginner" vocab.)

-Chinese Tutor- 1x a week ( She has me learning 独体字 Ex... 口日目木丈干王.. She has 256 of these for me to learn and know how to write.) I am on about the 45th. I get 10 per week to learn/write while keeping up with others.

-Skritter- Although I am not too much of a fan of it.

 

 

[Shelley]

I will start by saying there is no one way to learn chinese as you have discovered You will find things that work for you.

 

I don't know if you have had a read of my blog, there is one about my learning methods and the resources I use. https://www.chinese-forums.com/blogs/blog/108-my-chinese-learning-blog/

 

What do you not like about Skritter? You might like to try HelloChinese, it has a writing practise section similar but not the same as Skritter, it also has lots of other things, I did a review of it on LTL  http://www.livethelanguage.cn/review-hello-chinese/

It is very good, there are speaking, reading, writing and listening exercises. There are also videos and extra speaking tuition and much more and its all free. Recently they have added some extra paid games, which are good but not necessary.

 

26 minutes ago, rn1rnl said:

She has me learning 独体字 Ex... 口日目木丈干王.. She has 256 of these for me to learn and know how to write.) I am on about the 45th. I get 10 per week to learn/write while keeping up with others.

This is good, you are learning the radicals, the component parts characters are made from. Useful to know.

 

I think you are making a good start, keep with it, you can fine tune it as you learn about and try out new things.

 

The one thing you will find out is that it takes hard work, practise, more practise and then practise some more to learn chinese. But for me that is part of the joy, I feel I will never come to the end of studying chinese so I always have something new and interesting to learn.

 

[Mati1]

There's some good info in your other thread.

 

It's very easy (natural?) to be overmotivated and very frustrated as a beginner. Happened to me several times.

In the end it's about perseverence and if you have something in the language that you enjoy. For me that is being able to read texts on my own (well, hopefully one day without dictionary hehe).

Even if you only use one good source, like Integrated Chinese (it's said to be good right?), if you can put in more than an hour every day you will get your progress.

Then once you can read enough characters (you might use a character book in addition if you're not overwhelmed by the daily dose of new characters) you can start with graded readers in addition to your textbook. To me they are more reading than learning, but it definitely boosts your reading skills and you will pick up new expressions on the way. Some graded readers, the Sinolingua series comes to mind, also use Pinyin, which makes looking up unknown characters much easier.

 

EDIT:

However, if your priority is speaking and you have limited time to prepare, you should focus more on spoken dialouges and such, instead of characters and reading.

EDIT2:

Also, if you really don't enjoy software flashcards for learning characters, give paper SRS a chance!

[NotChinese]

A Chinese friend recommended this to me a long time ago: http://english.cntv.cn/program/learnchinese/20100803/100891.shtml 

 

It's an old CNTV website for teaching Chinese. I never bothered with it because I was in China already so I was immersed enough alongside my course, but for someone learning outside of China I think these videos are really good. 

 

The page I've linked to is the first video in the series. There are 100 or maybe many more now. The videos are good because they strategically show English, Chinese, subtitles etc and introduce the language via real life scenarios filmed in China, so you get an idea of the culture too. The presenter is an American who moved to China as a kid, so she's bilingual, and she does a really good job of teaching the content she's presenting. The videos all very step-by-step and demonstrative, a lot like the sort of educational programs you might have been shown in school when the TV was feeling lazy. Oh and they're only about 15 minutes long, so a perfect bite-size lesson.

 

I don't know if it's what your after, but it may help to get a better sense of immersion. I think that's the absolute most important thing for learning Chinese. I took up a Chinese class when I was at uni in London, but I couldn't relate to the content at all and ended up dropping out (even though I'd paid a fortune for it!). I then gained a scholarship to learn in China and it was ssssoooooooooo much better. So yeah, you need to simulate the sense of immersion as best you can. I think the videos I've shown do a good job of it.

 

EDIT: Sorry I've just re-read your post and it seems you're mainly talking about character memorisation? If so, I would recommend rote memorisation, the horrible old fashioned way, then make use of the words you've learned via: www.lang-8.com , the hellotalk app, or sign up to the Baidu forums and just write random stuff to people on there (use the Zhongwen dictionary addon for your internet browser if available, too). That's how I practised my written conversational Chinese, and still do, primarily on hellotalk now.

[Publius]

You may find these (additional) links useful when learning characters:

http://www.thn21.com/xiao/liux/25218.html

This is a list of 2500 characters that Chinese primary school students are expected to know after each grade. (not to study but to gauge your progress)

http://www.zdic.net/

This is more advanced, but a beginner can also make use of it. It gives you some useful information about a character, such as stroke order, pronunciation, radical, words that use the character. But most importantly, click on the "字源字形" tab and you can see how the character was written (or rather drawn) thousands of years ago, how it evolved over time -- often gives you an insight into why it means what it means.

They are all in Chinese. Get a browser extension to help you read -- Zhongwen for Chrome, Perapera for Firefox -- and I recommend Firefox, because Chrome extensions by default do not work on local files, and Zhongwen doesn't seem to work on .pdf files, local or remote.

 

For more general tips and learning strategies http://www.hackingchinese.com/ is a good place to visit.

And remember, learning a language requires motivation and dedication. There is no silver bullet. If anyone tells you Chinese is easy, they are after your money. If you believe 7 minutes a day is the way to learn a foreign language, I have a "get rich quick" plan for ya... (just wanted to warn you against a product without mentioning its name)

Edited March 4, 2017 at 10:51 AM by Publius

[Lumbering Ox]

4 hours ago, NotChinese said:

EDIT: Sorry I've just re-read your post and it seems you're mainly talking about character memorisation?

 

Remembering the Hanzi. Doesn't seem nearly as popular as the Kanji version in the Japanese learning world though.

 

I went through the Kanji version. It works very well. If you don't keep at it, you will forget almost all of it but I didn't do the full version.

 

Combine it with ANKI or something similar and it should work out well.

 

I never bothered making up long winded stories for RTK nor did I bother with visuals.

I usually just created a sentence that had all the elements there. Mr T would have made "Chief" if he was white

Or "white" being a drop of sun.

I did Keyword to Kanji and wrote out the Kanji every time.

Before I started I'd come up with a sentence, write out the Kanji and sentence and run it through 3 learning steps on ANKI

I found that this combined with Anki ended up shoving 1930 Kanji into my skull at about an 85% recall rate. That is with no other Japanese work.

 

I see no reason why it wouldn't work with Hanzi.

 

I should not that there are a lot of English keywords that either overlap or are bizarre. Dealing with the former, I usually put a clue next to the English key word as I'd be able to remember the Kanji for all the similar keywords. More exactly I'd have as a keyword wombat not the one with the person radical. Just as a made up example.

 

I find most Remembering the Kanji complaints seem to involve things that the system is not meant to do or those who are irked  by some aspect of another. Just use it so you get used to the Hanzi and how to write them. Everything will come up via other methods.

 

I think I'd rather stab myself in the eye with a very hot french Fry if I had to rote memorize everything. I'd rather read Mein Kampf. I'd almost rather go to a Justin Beiber concert.

 

 

[eion_padraig]

I found reading graded readers helped me a lot with solidifying my recognition of Chinese characters. I'm a pretty big fan of Chinese Breeze (汉语风) as readable, if not overly exciting, and inexpensive options when it comes to graded readers. Many of these are offered in ebook format on Amazon. They're easy to get on Taobao if you are in China.

 

 I also bought "The Sixty Year Dream" by Mandarin Companion and it was decent, though it was more expensive. They have several titles out now with a few at level 2.

After finishing those I've moved onto the Sinolingua series, Graded Chinese Reader, http://en.sinolingua.com.cn/list.php?catid=131, which I also found to be affordable. They're about 40 - 50 RMB in China. It might be harder to find outside of China or more expensive.

The FLTRP Graded Readers are alright, but they're set up more like textbooks and the reading passages are much shorter. They are not too much either. They seem to introduce more new vocabulary words when I would rather see the words I know in actual usage.

 

Maybe you can find some of these titles in libraries. I don't know.

Good luck.

 

Eion

[戴 睿]

I firmly believe that the most commonly overlooked element in a language study plan is social interaction. It's never too early to start making Chinese friends, and doing so will only have a positive effect on your language progression. After all, the purpose of learning any language is to build and maintain relationships. 

[imron]

8 hours ago, Mati1 said:

It's very easy (natural?) to be overmotivated and very frustrated as a beginner. Happened to me several times.

In the end it's about perseverence

 

This is the key.

 

[Flickserve]

Referring back to the original title of the thread, I have thought of writing a summary as I reckon my level is on the border of A1 B2. A blog doesn't suit me.