Things you wish you had known when you started

[linkailong]

Many characters have multiple meanings / uses / pronunciations. One example of the top of my head is 的; think about 我的书 and 目的.

Also, some characters that are written differently with traditional characters are written the same way using simplified characters, i.e. 发 for both 發 and 髮.

[linkailong]

oops... that's supposed to read "off the top of my head," hahah

[bchew]

Like Roddy said, get a teacher. There's no substitute for a good teacher helping you correct your pronunciation and grammar, and helping you practice in a "safe" environment.

Practice saying things out loud. You may feel like an idiot doing it, but practicing pronunciation and tones in your head isn't the same thing (whispering doesn't count either!). And don't just practice individual vocabulary words, say full sentences so you get used to the changing of tones and hearing where the word is in a sentence. Then take advantage of opportunities when you can actually use it.

Laugh with others when you make a mistake, which will be very, very frequent. You're learning one of the hardest languages in the world, so give yourself a break.

[abcdefg]

I guess one thing that I wish I had known when I started learning Chinese is that there actually ARE some good reasons for learning traditional characters as well as simplified ones.

That's a truly frightening concept. I can barely wrap my head around the simplified ones. What led you to that conclulsion? Do you study in Taiwan?

[renzhe]

No need to be frightened. Once you actually do wrap your head around simplified characters, the rest is not that hard. Have a look at this thread (especially from page 3 onward).

[sukitc]

I have been using Pleco dictionary program on my mobile for the past few weeks. I wish I had known that there was such a great tool when I started learning Chinese seriously in April last year. Don't know how many hours I had wasted unproductively (and not always successfully) looking up characters in paper dictionaries over the past 12 months.

[wushijiao]

I agree about Pleco. It's especially helpful when making the transition from smp to trad, or vice versa. If you see a new character, you use your hand to write it on your PDA, recognize, and boom, in 5-10 seconds you've looked up the new character, compared to a minute or two on a dictionary.

Otherwise, I basically made a huge breakthrough a fews years ago (after about two-three years of studying), and wrote about it here:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/510-phoenix-tv7&highlight=recent+studying+methods

[putonghua73]

Like Roddy said' date=' get a teacher. There's no substitute for a good teacher helping you correct your pronunciation and grammar, and helping you practice in a "safe" environment.

Practice saying things out loud. You may feel like an idiot doing it, but practising pronunciation and tones in your head isn't the same thing (whispering doesn't count either!). And don't just practice individual vocabulary words, say full sentences so you get used to the changing of tones and hearing where the word is in a sentence. Then take advantage of opportunities when you can actually use it.

Laugh with others when you make a mistake, which will be very, very frequent. You're learning one of the hardest languages in the world, so give yourself a break.[/quote']

Agree with all the above, but especially tutor / class-based programme at the very beginning. I went to International House and SOAS, but switched over a year ago to self-study due to ostensibly time-difficulties. Big mistake. My Chinese has not moved on in the last 18 months. I knew more - much more - back then than I do now!

Most can be attributed to laziness and lack of revision and frequency. I cannot stress frequency (even if 30 minutes per day) and revision enough that focuses on all 4 skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing.

I've found that the reading and writing come pretty easily - much more easily than speaking and listening. One of my former Chinese teachers commented that it he found it so commonplace that all of his students could read and write at a much higher level than their linguistic fluency because the natural tendency is always to focus on the areas where you feel comfortable and perform well - the actual opposite to what one should be doing i.e. focusing and practising on the areas where one needs a LOT more work!

I need to evaluate my Chinese learning structure (or lack thereof) and put together a study schedule that allows me to focus on all 4 skills, as well as look at online study and even hiring a Chinese tutor.

However, all of the above is moot if I do not put in the required study, focus and determination to succeed. I can schedule, plan, use a whole variety of material and spend a lot of money, and none of it will make a shred of difference without genuine determination, focus and a willingness to succeed - whether I'm based in London or China.

Since dating in London is tiring, complicated and provides so little reward for so much effort, my time would be MUCH better spent focusing on my Chinese studies. It will also be mutually beneficial to my language exchanges with my language exchange partners ;)

Cheers!

[querido]

...my original single-character-only approach was counterproductive... I had "learned" all of the characters in an elementary textbook, with their pinyin. Then for some reason turning my attention to ... the text's recording, I discovered too many (tone mutations and other deviations) ... to categorize, to keep track of, shattering my "perfect system".

Six months later, looking back...

I then added whole-sentences with audio to my flashcard system. How much doing these every day has helped me is too hard to fathom, so I won't dismiss that. Yet, I now (1OCT09) have proof enough for me that this has not been good enough, or not as good as it could have been. I'll try to explain briefly and give my (current) conclusion.

My flashcard routine was consuming all of my study time and energy, the listening-comprehension cards above all. After a period of agonizing over a principle, or a system, that would resolve this (perhaps building up to including whole lessons *in* the flashcard program), I finally accepted the "minimum information principle" and removed the listening-comprehension cards, to replace them with a program of listening to and reading whole lessons or volumes in bulk. Then, trying to do this for the first time in some months, I found that even volumes one and two were unacceptably hard. (I'm now in volume seven.) Whole-sentence flashcards with audio had not built up, or even preserved, the modest degree of *automatization* I had had. (Which I should quickly regain but that's beside the point.) This goal, of automatizing this material into real language, is elusive (at least to a mind like mine), and is of a different nature from the seductive (to me) promise of a certain, math-like hold on facts offered by flashcards. Right here, flashcarding is looking like the continuous refinement of a mathematical model of how a bike should be ridden, or better, how to juggle, as though I've been studying "Learn How to Juggle 4500 Chinese Symbols without the Risk".

My updated reply to the original poster: Every stage of my studies has been dominated by an absurd overestimation of what the flashcard system was doing for me. I wish I had known (or I wish I had chosen to accept) that jumping in head first might be the shorter route to whatever degree of automaticity is ultimately possible for me, *possibly* rendering flashcards superfluous, or demoting them to an inventorying aid, a mere inventory verification tool. At the very beginning (which I can't remember perfectly) is it necessary to chop everything into tiny bits for flashcarding? It can't be *necessary*, but is it a smart strategy to get started? I'm not sure. Maybe it would be sufficient to always keep in mind that flashcarding is building an internal dictionary- a great convenience, but not in itself useable language. Or, the flashcard program could be viewed as a useful game- an automatic quizzing dictionary. I like that idea. But don't forget to actually study the language.

[xianhua]

Things you wish you had known when you started?

That 'your Chinese is very good' means 'I'm impressed that you bothered to take the time to learn our language'. It does not mean your Chinese is good. This lulled me into a false sense of security, when really, much more work was needed to get anywhere near 'good'.

[imron]

Haha, this is something that all of us realise sooner or later. I always laugh inside when I hear someone saying that Chinese people tell them their Chinese is good.

@querido, so you went from single characters to whole sentences?

For me, words have always been the most practical unit.

[querido]

Reply to imron: Sorry what I wrote above was a little gnarly. What I said was: Yes, I went to sentences, and now back to just words. And furthermore, I've reinterpreted the flashcard system as being just a very special dictionary; it shouldn't dominate one's study time.

[HarryCallahan]

I'm a year off and on, part school.

I've found that learning the characters is a major b*tch and you really need an adequate number under your belt before you can concentrate on the other more rewarding aspects of the language. The good news is you can cover 90 % of text with 1000 characters known, the bad news is you need about another 1500-2000 to get to 99 %. I would advise beginners to learn a few hundred before they start.

It's really what sets the written language apart from say english, the ability to simply read it correctly without knowing the meaning is hard going in itself.

Tones aren't that hard to recognize in isolation.

[realmayo]

it shouldn't dominate one's study time.

I now spend at least a couple of hours a day using Anki, if not three or four, because I'm learning lots of new vocab, and once it's learned, I stick it into Anki, to make sure I don't forget it. It can be pretty tedious at times, but it works for me. However I certainly don't rely on it to help me with grammar or anything like that.

After using basically the same method for the last 1.5 years, I've just made some big changes, by adding audio. Wherever possible (ie where I can find them) I add an audio file to my words and characters: after being asked to recognise, or produce, a word or character, I am shown the answer and hear the audio. For new vocab, this means that after a while, as soon as I see a character or word, in Anki or on a page, I immediately 'hear' it in my head ... very helpful for a language like chinese where of course the script gives little help with sounds, and even less with tones.

Also, until now, I've never really seen how I'd benefit from using sentences in an SRS. But now I realise, that even if I can write a word, and can say it, often I can't recognise if I hear it in speech -- assuming it's not a particularly common word. So now I have a deck full of sentences and their audio which I downloaded from smart.fm: all I do is listen and test myself on if I understand each sentences: I only include sentences which I ought to understand if I saw them written down (ie none of the words are new). To a large extent, it's basically a listening rather than an 'understanding' exercise, but I'm finding it very helpful.

EDIT: so, given the title of the thread,I wish I'd have known when I started putting together my Anki deck ... that hearing a word at the same time as seeing it (its answer) in a SRS programme would help me remember its sound, its tones, so magically!

Edited October 2, 2009 at 07:31 AM by realmayo

[renzhe]

Haha, this is something that all of us realise sooner or later. I always laugh inside when I hear someone saying that Chinese people tell them their Chinese is good.

The great moment is when Chinese people STOP telling you that your Chinese is good.

At that point, they've accepted you as someone they can actually talk to, and not some exotic specimen. They also concentrate on what you're saying instead of the "laowai messing up tones, how cute"

[zhouhaochen]

Definitely Tones. At the beginning there was so much new staff to learn and it was all so tough, that I thought "ah lets learn those later and try to get around first".

Oh, did I regret that when I noticed after half a year that people still thought I am a bloody beginner, because my tones were really horrible and once you have the bad habit, it is almost impossible to get rid of it.

I took one on one tone pronounciation classes with a private tutor, who would correct every single wrong tone I said, which drove me and her almost to insanity, but in the end managed to get me up to a decent level.

So, from my experience: get the tones right at the beginning, however annoying it might be!

[trisha2766]

I wish I had known that the grammar is more complex than many people make it out to be. At least for me it is. 了的地得过把, etc. I really starting to doubt whether I will ever be able to use these properly. Word order confuses me too.

an order of magnitude more effort to memorize tones

Most definitely, the meaning and pronunciation otherwise I can remember pretty easily, but the tones take me much longer to remember.

Way back when, when I first starting learning, I used flashcards a lot. Made from index cards. They are useful, but lately I'm finding I'm not using them much at all. It doesn't seem to be causing me any problems. I just keep reviewing by reading through the dialog text of the NPCR books over and over again. I end up memorizing them in context first. Then usually they are repeated again in another chapter. Once I start using the flash cards again, I hope it will be much easier to recognize the characters. Or maybe I'm making a big mistake.

If I can afford it I would love to get a tutor next summer to help with my speaking skills.

[Etwood]

The usefulness of 不好意思。