Help with study in China

[emuboy]

So I'm currently up in the Northeast studying Chinese. I think my listening has improved a fair bit and my speaking is coming along, albeit a little slowly. I made a post a few months ago about sounding like a 'robot' though and I can confirm that I've progressed beyond that desperate stage of learning, although apparently I still speak too slowly :P. I want to try and optimise my approach to learning here as I think I'm still struggling to adapt. Basically my goal for this year was to get my speaking and listening up to a pretty decent level, I don't care about writing at all as it's not going to help with communication.

 

 

My current approach is this:

- Every day I obviously go to all my classes, I see this as good listening practice and a bit of speaking/tone drilling practice too. This ranges from 1.5-4.5 hours.

- I do all my Pleco flashcards (I have it split into 3 sets - listening, reading, speaking or something like that so I have a variety of different cards) where I do a revision set and add 10 new words. When I am working on flashcards I always have the sound on and try to mimic the exact pronunciation.

- I spend half an hour talking to my friend in a live call on Wechat to work on my conversation skills.

- I spend about 30-45 minutes on listening practice - Popup Chinese podcasts and also my Tingli workbook, which I've just been working through at my own pace.

 

That's about it. I've stopped working through my graded readers here because there's just too much new vocab. Currently when I'm out and about when people talk to me my listening skills are still too bad to pick up on what they're saying most of the time (apart from really easy stuff), and I'm just picking out key words and running with them. I have met a few Chinese people on campus, and I asked them if they were down to do language exchange however they didn't seem to understand what I meant - is it uncommon here? 

Basically I want to increase the frequency of my speaking/listening interactions here, but currently my Chinese is not good enough to just walk up to people and start chatting; so outside of random interactions with girls/curious old people on the street I'm not getting thatttt much practice.

 

What are your thoughts on my current method and what my course of action should be?

 

Cheers!

[Flickserve]

Choose sentences you commonly use. Not too many just yet. 

 

Get a native speaker to record it. 

 

Practice shadowing it. 50 to 200 times gradually moving up to near native speed. 

[Wippen (inactive)]

5 hours ago, Flickserve said:

Choose sentences you commonly use. Not too many just yet

Agree with this piece of advice. Please check the phrases are exactly like a native would say it and choose the one with the highest frequency. So if you have a context of xyz, make sure that you chose the common sentence natives use.

 

what kind of learner are you: visual (you need to read things to remember) aural (need to hear) etc. This will dictate what will work for you.

 

[imron]

1 hour ago, Tøsen said:

This will dictate what will work for you.

It doesn't have to.  Those are both skills you can learn with practice.

[Wippen (inactive)]

14 minutes ago, imron said:

t doesn't have to.  Those are both skills you can learn with practice.

so what would your advice to this user then be?

[imron]

The same advice I give to everyone - train what you want to learn. 

 

This post has my thoughts on training specific skills. 

 

 

 

 

[Wippen (inactive)]

18 minutes ago, imron said:

The same advice I give to everyone - train what you want to learn. 

I really like the way these articles are written. Logical, well-explained and to the point. Hopefully lots of students of Chinese will find it.

[GregO]

I agree with Imron's philosophy of train what you want to learn. To quote from the advice in his link :

 

"Yes, there will always be some degree of crossover with other skills, so the vocabulary and grammar you learn when reading newspapers will help you watching T.V. dramas, and watching T.V. dramas will help you with conversation, and so on, but there is no substitute for actually doing the thing you want to learn in order to learn it."

 

In my opinion, when it comes to speaking, this idea of crossover cannot be overstated. What I mean is that boat loads of listening is as important, in building speaking skills as speaking itself. I do not want to diminish the importance of actually speaking and having conversations but I think many newer learners invest more time on productive skills than they ought. 

 

 

[emuboy]

Thanks. So I'll work on drilling common phrases to sound more like a native, seems like a good idea.

 

@FlickserveI currently only have a very small list of phrases that I use commonly and hear commonly but this is a good idea as a lot of the time I have to repeat myself as they don't understand. Do you recommend just taking a list of frequently used phrases and getting someone to record for me or should I just stick to ones I know?

 

In terms of other stuff to practice with using this technique (link below) does anyone know of a super conversational podcast or something akin to that like a talkshow where the stuff I'd be working on would be pretty similar to what you might hear in a normal convo? Using the technique Imron runs through here: https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/19910-post-a-sample-of-your-pronunciation-here/?page=2&tab=comments#comment-160804

 

Thanks

[Flickserve]

8 hours ago, emuboy said:

but this is a good idea as a lot of the time I have to repeat myself as they don't understand. Do you recommend just taking a list of frequently used phrases and getting someone to record for me or should I just stick to ones I know?

 

The best phrases are the most useful ones that you use frequently in daily life. So, best to make a note of what you hear or want to say in a notebook. I think it is important not to overload practice with too many sentences at one go. Usually sentences that you know are easier as you don't have to go through an additional process of learning the meaning or grammar - start off simple and build up a good base.

 

I started with very short sentences like 不好意思，好久不见，多少钱。I copied these off a couple of short videos because I don't live in a Mandarin speaking environment. When I used them during some language exchanges, the other party said, "wow, that sounds so native" as opposed to saying "your Chinese is so good"

 

First, check if you have the pronunciation correct, Second check do you have the tone correct. Thirdly, do you have the rhythm and intonation correct? Fourthly, be careful of drift. I.e. You  know perfectly what you want to say, have practiced it perfectly but it just doesn't come out right. That's just a calibration issue and gets better over time with the practice.

 

You can use audacity like Imron described.

 

I used vlc, or ripped the mp3 from a video using subs2srs, and the opened the mp3 with workaudio book.

 

Since my emphasis is on listening and speaking, it doesn't matter to me if the text is in front of my eyes. I also found certain words more difficult. For example 差不多, I would always drop the tone for the 多and when I tried to correct it, it would always sound a bit strained. Yet in other sentences , I would pronounce 多 quite satisfactorily. I must have practiced 差不多 a few hundred times. Luckily it's only a short sentence. 

 

If you can get somebody to record the sentences on to mp3, that just makes it more convenient for you to manipulate. 

[ChTTay]

Agreed. My speaking is at its best ever because I speak every day, multiple times a day. In person and on  Wechat. 

 

My my vocabulary isn’t that great but because I mostly encounter day to day situations and conversations then I’m essentially fluent in these. I seem a lot more advanced than I actually am. 

[Wippen (inactive)]

9 hours ago, ChTTay said:

I seem a lot more advanced than I actually am. 

This can also happen when natives ask you the same question all the time, Where are you from, how long have you been in China, how long studied Chinese. The answers are then automatic and Sound really fluent but some students then do not get that much beyond that (I don't mean you here - the fact that you are on a forum shows that you are dilligent)

[ChTTay]

I can see what you mean. I am a terrible student actually. 

 

Luckily I’m not confined to a few topics! Lucky for my life here anyway 

[abcdefg]

On 3/18/2018 at 11:53 AM, emuboy said:

I have met a few Chinese people on campus, and I asked them if they were down to do language exchange however they didn't seem to understand what I meant - is it uncommon here? 

 

Language exchange is not really uncommon. I'm assuming you are asking in Chinese. Maybe you are asking the wrong question. How are you going about it? 

[ChTTay]

At University I’d say exchanges are very common! If you’re an English speaking foreigner, should be plenty who want a chat...

mostly in English though so not necessarily good for your Chinese!

[emuboy]

@abcdefg I met them and got their Wechat and then sent them a message asking if they were down to meet and talk for half an hour in Chinese, half an hour in English. I think I used 交换语言, not sure if that's strictly correct or not lol.

 

@ChTTay yeah pretty much lol. I'm happy to do 50-50, the issue is when there's a big discrepancy in skill level I think one language tends to get favoured over the other.

[abcdefg]

 

38 minutes ago, emuboy said:

I met them and got their Wechat and then sent them a message asking if they were down to meet and talk for half an hour in Chinese, half an hour in English. I think I used 交换语言, not sure if that's strictly correct or not lol.

 

That should work, though I've usually said 语言交流 for language exchange. 

 

Sounds like you are making a good effort in the right direction. Don't be discouraged. Maybe pretty soon it will work out. 

 

My personal experience is that it's easier to find native speakers to talk with if one looks for shared interests. Then instead of just rehashing the usual stuff like where are you from and how is the weather, you can talk about something that you both care about. Maybe a hobby or some such. I've done that with tea, cooking and travel. 

[emuboy]

@abcdefg Thanks mate, I'll keep at it. By the way, any tips on where to start with Chinese cooking? I've recently got myself a rice cooker and a fry pan in the dorm here and I want to start learning some new stuff.

[abcdefg]

14 hours ago, emuboy said:

I've recently got myself a rice cooker and a fry pan in the dorm here and I want to start learning some new stuff.

 

Try this rice cooker method @emuboy. Lots of tasty variations are possible for an easy one-pot dorm meal. Won't even need the wok or fry pan for these. Minimum smells, minimum cleanup. 

 

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/54552-when-its-too-hot-to-cook-小瓜蒸红椒/ 

 

The advantage of putting the vegetables in the steamer basket is that you can give them less cooking time than the rice. This allows them to keeps a pleasant texture instead of turning into mush, like they would if just added to the main rice pot and cooked the whole time. 

[Flickserve]

16 hours ago, emuboy said:

By the way, any tips on where to start with Chinese cooking?

 

Find a cooking class, and learn the vocabulary by interaction. There's your common interest which you can use for language exchange.