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About this blog

Documenting a learning progress.

 

Usually I update my efforts in the Weekly intermediate study thread. However, it is anything but weekly and I decided that I could really be a bit more organised about practicing listening skills and adding vocabulary. Doing a blog hopefully will give a better overall view of the progress. 

 

One is supposed to study what's interesting to oneself, but that does mean I get frequently bogged down into new material that's too advanced and overloading. Combined with a short attention span, little progress is made. When I talk with native speaker well-intentioned language partners, they always over estimate my ability. 

 

Finding native material at basic/advanced beginner level is a bit difficult. In this thread, there are links to cartoons at a slower pace of delivery. Bite sized pieces of simpler material sounds like a good start. 

 

Documentation :

 

Vocabulary can be classified into A) learnt before and now reinforced, B) can guess from context, C) need to look up. 

 

Number of difficult sentences. I. e. Know the words but listening was hard.

Entries in this blog

Flickserve

3Q 2023

By Flickserve,


3Q 2022

Nice to see Chinese forums back on line.

 

it coincides with me taking online lessons again.

 

I found HSK4 standard book quite uninteresting and went back to italki and found another community teacher. 
 

I think this one actually hits the right technique for me. Lots of simple sentences in English which I have to translate into Chinese. I might have to use a certain sentence structure. She then asks me the same questions again in a subsequent lesson so it’s like a SRS style but no stories. 
 

I quite like it. It tests my speed of translation and the faster I can say the translation, the more I feel I have really absorbed the language actively. You find you have a sense of achievement doing simple things better rather than trying to crunch on overwhelming oneself with new vocabulary or new grammar. You also know how good you are if you can pull out a translation smoothly. It is a bit like the glossika technique but at least with a teacher, they can pause, give some hints, give a bit of explanation and crucially, if you’re unsure, immediately give you another similar sentence structure to practice (unlike SRS apps ).
 

 

I asked a language partner to do the same thing as practice but she said I was good in all sentences. However, I wasn’t because some of the sentences I hesitated when saying the translation. I.e. there was a slightly longer delay where I had to use more time to think. -As a consequence, she didn’t repeat asking me any of the sentences. I need to teach her better. 
 

The sentences are in Anki for my own practice. I even got a different language partner on Hellotalk to say the sentences. Using iPad and Mac, the sound file can be downloaded into as a .WAV into iPad, then airdropped into Mac where I manipulated it the file in audacity. I saved the WAV file and transferred the file over to my PC. Oddly enough, I couldn’t open the WAV file in adobe audition. Not to worry - I used the PC version of audacity to turn it into an mp3 file. From this I created a .srt file using workaudiobook app, used subs2SRS to create individual MP3 of each sentence and create the tsv file to be imported into anki. 
 

Next week is a trip to Chengdu. I definitely feel my accent has gotten a bit better. Even after not really nor practicing the language, I am pulling out the words and flow better albeit with the Cantonese accent. I believe I am getting better. Another italki teacher who knows Cantonese and Mandarin said certainly my pronunciation is better than a lot of HK people trying to speak Mandarin. 
 

Back to practicing with anki. 
 

edit. Just noticed this blog has had 687k + views! What’s so interesting?? LOL. 

 

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