My attempt at discussing the FTX crypto collapse in Chinese. Any advice on using presentation as study technique?

[Badger]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zxdcSLUqV4

 

Ok, a few thoughts.

1) Process: I first read 5 or so articles on the topic in Chinese, writing down any useful sentences/vocab （ie. 挤兑，垮台， 奸情，冠名权，利他主义，麻省理工学院，交易员，套利，等等）. Then I went straight to ppt and created the presentation, with notes for what I was going to say for each slide. 

 

2) Difficulty: This was WAY harder than I expected. The hard part was actually recording and "memorizing" the speech without reading. If I read through the presentation, total time of making and doing the presentation would have been ~5 hours. But I decided to "memorize" like a real speech should be. I did a million takes, and in total took another ~7 hours. Even with all that time, it came out way worse than I hoped, and as you can see I had to split it up into sections. I ended up not even finishing the presentation since it was taking so long and quite frustrating/stressful. Also...presenting a topic, rather than telling stories of my own life is so much harder.

 

3) Is this a good learning technique? I'd like to hear others thoughts about this. I certainty learned quite a bit. I think doing something that intensive will make the material, vocab, etc stick in my brain more than just casually chatting once about the subject. But are there ways I can adjust my process to make it less frustrating/more effective?

 

4) It was a great exercise to hear myself speak. Although it was sometimes frustrating realizing how awful my Chinese is sometimes (listening to it helps you realize mistakes, bad habits).

 

5) I currently live in Bangkok (not China anymore). I have no Chinese friends here (but recently using Hellotalk to meet some). Most of my chinese speaking is calling with Chinese friends. But much of the time the conversation will not be very useful for improving my Chinese at this point, or we don't know what to talk about. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[sanchuan]

You're too hard on yourself - you sound lovely. Will this improve your Chinese? It can, especially if delivering presentations is what you want to improve.

 

I noticed my understanding was often impaired by the fact that you seemed to be swallowing syllables a lot, but that's probably because you were going fast on a piece of rehearsed speech. Memorising speeches and presentations is actually very helpful, but you might want to practice speaking them out at a deliberately slower pace when you do. (Like you would in English when you're doing a presentation as opposed to when you're mumbling on the phone to your friends. Maybe if you were to stand up at a lecturn of sorts...?) So if it's formal presentation skills you need to practice then doing this more slowly could certainly be useful.

 

From a general language practice point of view, you do say you found it hard and intensive work, what with new vocab and the like, so it's definitely helpful. My advice though would be to be much less ambitious in terms of how much you tackle because a. it won't be sustainable in the long run (and one-offs don't count as practice, do they) and b. you end up doing too much in only one sitting so you don't take advantage of the spacing repetition effect you would have if you did, say, 10 different smaller presentations on the same topic for a few weeks. 

 

So in terms of how to use this as a study technique, I suggest turning it into a more regular/sustainable form of exercise where you practice delivering 5-min presentations based on well-crafted but very short pieces of text. It might even be better to reduce the workload further by spreading the exercise over several days: days when you practice free-writing on the subject, days when you practice editing your text down to a couple paragraphs of excellent prose, and days when you practice formal delivery.

 

PS I'd completely do away with the ppt, especially if it just means wasting time collating images from the internet. Unless you're working your way towards actual YouTubing and video-editing, that's just extra homework that's not gonna help with anything language-wise.

 

 

 

[Badger]

@sanchuan Appreciate the suggestions! Yeah the ppt was more used for myself more than anything to organize my thoughts, didn't take much time (as you can see how bad it is haha). But in the future I'll probably get rid of it like you suggest.

 

You make a good point, I was going to fast. I guess I was kind of modeling it how up zhu on Bilibili talk so fast. But in reality, I'd like to work more on calm, relaxed conversation style.  Getting rid of the ppt could help with that too, pretend I was just chatting with someone and not giving a formal presentation. 

 

I will try to continue (but not at such a stressful rate) and break it down like you mentioned. I will go over my video with a Chinese friend later because they said they wanted to help me ”分析问题“， so that should be nice. Not looking to be a youtuber really, but would be a kind of cool goal to get to that level where I could be.

 

 

[sanchuan]

On 11/28/2022 at 12:54 PM, Badger said:

they wanted to help me ”分析问题“， so that should be nice

Nice indeed ? Feel free to leave a record of their feedback here for us. Might be instructive all round!

[becky82]

Wow, your pronunciation is quite crisp!  Nice!

  

On 11/27/2022 at 12:24 PM, Badger said:

3) Is this a good learning technique? I'd like to hear others thoughts about this. I certainty learned quite a bit. I think doing something that intensive will make the material, vocab, etc stick in my brain more than just casually chatting once about the subject. But are there ways I can adjust my process to make it less frustrating/more effective?

 

I'm finding making YouTube videos effective for improving my oral fluency.  The main advantages are (a) I'm not dependent on someone else (e.g. a teacher or language exchange partner) for oral practice, and (b) nobody interrupts me, so I need to complete my own sentences.  (Also, the things I point out in my videos are precisely the things I'm going to forget in a month's time---it's good revision material.)

 

But I don't rehearse my videos for the reasons you encountered: it takes far too long.  For my early videos, I clicked "random" on Wikimedia and described the images in Chinese, or answered random questions from here, or just narrate whatever I'm studying or interested in at the time.

 

Hahaha, I remember hiding in the corner in my first videos, now I'm like "See this? This is my side of the screen!"

[Badger]

I went through the video with my Chinese friend. After relistening very closely, I realized I messed up tones more than I thought. It is quite interesting, as my Chinese friend says in normal chat (with no preparation) I rarely mess up tones. But in this very rehearsed video, I mess up a lot (go figure). I assume this is partly due to speed of speech in the video.

 

Also a lot of the feedback was regarding the actually delivery (ie. you should pause between these two words longer), to make it more like a native speaker and easier to understand. Other feedback was just on some things I said wrong/or too wordy.

 

 

@becky82

 

I like your method of just describing random pics. I find myself often not sure what to talk about in Chinese. That method allows you to always have something to talk about. 

 

Currently I am just watching some youtubers (ie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ3C62kmPAo) and prepare my own thoughts on their topic, pretend I am responding to some of their thoughts, and writing down any interest sentences/words he uses.

[Tomsima]

On 11/30/2022 at 12:27 PM, Badger said:

I realized I messed up tones more than I thought

Your tones are sounding great. I would say it's a trade off, the reason why you're finding it so difficult is because of the congitive stress of not hitting perfect target trajectories in your tones as you try to discuss a complex topic. I've asked Chinese friends to deliver my speech for me and I then record and mimic their delivery to resolve this. That's because at this level it's not actually about your tones, but about the prosody and the way in which your tones truncate slightly differently to a native speakers. But your study technique sounds on point, nothing better than drilling if you ask me.