How is his Chinese?

[Music&MeForever]

他的中文好得让人吃惊！

A bit clumsy with all the formal language, but still ok.

However, I think his choice of words like 发觉 in: 我发觉了一个特别的网站 or the formal 购买 in 我购买了汉语课文书 etc is a bit inappropriate.

His progress in such short time is amazing, but at this point I think he should switch to easier reading, like fiction, 明星八卦 and such, get a grasp of the colloquial

There's one thing that puzzles me though: how on earth did he manage to learn to recognize hanzi in such a short time? It just can't be done. Or perhaps the guy is playing down a couple of years, showing off actually and we all fell for it?

[renzhe]

There's one thing that puzzles me though: how on earth did he manage to learn to recognize hanzi in such a short time?

1.5 years is plenty of time to learn at least 2000 characters (passively) at a basic level.

Learning so many bookish words in the same time is the difficult part.

[xiaocai]

Whenever I listen to mainland chinese participants of an english debate I am often baffled by the extensive use of fairly big words in their speech.

If you ever had a chance to take a look into the English education system of mainland China, you will not be surprised why all of them are so fond in showing off their English by piling up the big words (well, most of the time, inappropriately) anymore.

[xiaocai]

For example, 非凡 threw me off. It's not in the HSK vocabulary, and I don't know any textbooks that teach it. Its meaning is obvious, but it's not something you'd use in writing, unless you had a good command of more than 10,000 words.

Well, you don't have to use it if you don't really know it. It doesn't sound so great after all. Like skylee said, I feel it is quite a "commercial" word and the whole thing will just be the same, if not better, to me even if you take it out.

[Music&MeForever]

1.5 years is plenty of time to learn at least 2000 characters (passively) at a basic level.

If you say so, but I don't know really...:

Anyway what I meant is it's learning to apply them in proper context that's what puzzles me

Funny though that so far the native speakers rate him better than the language learners.

This is very interesting!

[yersi]

Funny though that so far the native speakers rate him better than the language learners.

I think that's because native speakers just see the output by itself while other Chinese learners have more insight into and tend to focus more on the process that produced that output.

Take, for example, this part of a mini-essay I wrote in Portuguese:

Nota: a gramática neste post e mais complexa do que no diário anterior, e os erros provavelmente são muitos.

Escrevi o meu primeiro post ontem, e as respostas calorosas dos membros brasileiros do lang-8 foram muito inspiradoras. Antes de eu dormir, com o meu livro de gramática e o meu dicionário li alguns blogs do Brasil. Foi surpreendente! Eu pude compreender a maior parte dos conteúdos!

There are no grammatical mistakes in this that I'm aware of and the usage of the words is almost completely idiomatic. I have had several native Portuguese speakers look at it and all have said that my Portuguese level is astounding for the time I've studied (about six months). What is not obvious here however is that this part alone took me 45 minutes to write, with liberal use of a bilingual corpus and an electronic dictionary with automatic verb conjugation, in addition to having been corrected by other native speakers (mainly small mistakes, but still). It alone tells you nothing about my level in Portuguese, as is the case with the essay posted by lz.

[Music&MeForever]

Hi yersi,

so basically what you're saying is if we take into account his "liberal usage of a bilingual corpus and an electronic dictionary with automatic verb conjugation" and similar aides, a show off like this is plausible. Right? Still quite amazing

Ehem one more thing: I'd suppose that Portuguese is a lot easier than Chinese.

I've done a bit of Spanish as a hobby, so I know Spanish is

[chrix]

that and a good grasp of grammar helps too

but in any language I use, native or not, I find myself asking google at times, if a particular expression is natural or not... it's an indispensable tool

(now guess which phrase I checked )

*) of course this doesn't conclusively answer the question of naturalness, as is evidenced by the text we are discussing as well

[Music&MeForever]

Oh, I see...<^_^;

[calibre2001]

If you ever had a chance to take a look into the English education system of mainland China, you will not be surprised why all of them are so fond in showing off their English by piling up the big words (well, most of the time, inappropriately) anymore.

That's exactly what I'm trying to say. I'm wondering whether in chinese writing, the ability to use idiomatic and big words/phrases (i.e. those that tend towards classical chinese) is kind of seen as a 'good' in the eyes of the chinese. Hence the situation mentioned above. In English on the other hand, such writing would be considered rather cliche'

[yersi]

Hi yersi,

so basically what you're saying is if we take into account his "liberal usage of a bilingual corpus and an electronic dictionary with automatic verb conjugation" and similar aides, a show off like this is plausible. Right? Still quite amazing

What's amazing about it? That he has enough free time to spend 5 hours searching Jukuu and string together 20 sentences?

[Music&MeForever]

May I ask for some enlightening on Jukuu please?

(ehem, a while later) Many heartfelt thx to the search button :mrgreen:

Edited June 6, 2009 at 09:08 PM by Music&MeForever

[imron]

@yersi, here's a quick portugese test for you.

[yersi]

@yersi, here's a quick portugese test for you.

Looks like it's written in legalese but I'll try to translate it. Thanks for notifying me.

[wang's]

To: Lu

在我详细描述了我如何着手学习中文的计划之后，我就将它付诸于行动。我购买了汉语课文书阅读，这是一本由牛津出版的相对简易的课文书。很快，我积累了一些词汇。不久之后.我用这本书的学习一些核心基础课程，比如发音，但是所提供的词汇量和课题太少，对于一个想精通这门语言的人来说，肯定是不够的。于是，我就在网上搜寻有中文以及中国文化课程的网站，正凑巧，我发现了一个特别的网站，zhongwen.com（这个网站是繁体中文，建议你学习简体中文），这个网站除了有为想学习中文和中国文化准备的丰富资料外，也为那些有意练习中文的人提供了一个非常有益的聊天室，而且，还为这个聊天室提供了一本很棒的字典。就有效性来说，这是个不错的网站，我觉得，比任何其它语言学习网站都要好。(并且 no need)这个网站，就学习中文全方面内容赢得了最高分（最高分：这个太绝对了）。当然，这个网站也有它的缺点，特别是它的聊天，因为有人克隆（复制）别人在聊天室里的名字来妨碍别人。长话短说，不管怎样，我遇见并交了一些很好的朋友，最后，我把他们加到了我的MSN信使上，MSN是一种在线即时通讯服务。从此，我确定寻找在线的中国朋友并与他们相互交流就是学习这门语言最有效的的方法，当他们发现我，一个老外，着迷于学习他们的语言的时候，我感到他们非常友善，并且永远那么乐于助人。

这是我对你的这段中文的一点修改，希望有所帮助！

[Lu]

Wang, 谢谢你的修改。其实，这篇中文不是我写的。在另一个网站有人说他的中文很好，都是自己学的，上课的话一定不会学得那么好。这篇文章是他写的，我想问问这里的人他的中文怎么样(how good is his Chinese)。

[williams]

Yeah,

imo,it's a perfect article.

especially for it's conjunctions.

I don't know whether there's paragraph in this article.

I think the unique small fault is paragraph.

if there's paragraph in it.

it's a wonderful article.

Maybe,just maybe I can find some fault in it.

but I don't want do it.

it will spend a lot of my energy.

I know what's it mean exactly.

It's the core of a language.

My name is Williams,I said this.

[skylee]

My name is Williams,I said this.

Noted.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

[Music&MeForever]

(^-^)//

和撒那 ！ (Hosanna!)