Hitting a wall

[Melanie1989]

Well i try to spend as long as possible studying at the laptop, but times like now where i'm alone with my toddler daughter, i can't give it my all. Usually it will switch between about 6 hours a day of this kind of learning (interrupted, loud, but long), or i'll study when she's in bed and spend between 2-3 hours. But this is everyday.

 

I have just signed up to FluentU so i watch a few new videos a day and keep going over it until i have "mastered" 100% of the video, then move on. There's also regular checks and reviews by the site on my progress and i remember most of it. I love Chinese songs actually so i listen to those a lot. A song by Matzka i understand nearly all of it. I watch the Happy Chinese series on CCTV10 but sometimes i just can't deal with Susan, that makes it harder to learn. But i mostly pick up a fair bit. I watch learning videos on youtube. There is a 10min video on there by FluentU that i can understand about 70% of but it has no subtitles, not even Chinese. I love WWII and China's side so i watch lots of Nanjing movies etc, but i find them incredibly hard to understand. Two movies i have found helpful are New Perfect Two and Happy Times, if anyone happens to be looking for films.

 

Everything i learn, i copy down in to a folder i have dedicated to Chinese, along with useful words and phrases from the Dictionary. i write everything out 2 or 3 times, then move on to another word/phrase. But i don't really know why i have that folder cos i just write in it and never look.

 

Maybe i have answered my own question.

 

As i say, i have made no efforts to memorise the Hanzi as i wasn't sure how to.

I guess there's not much structure here. 

[Melanie1989]

AdamD thanks!

[Lu]

Yeah, i do feel very disappointed in myself that i only know so many characters. But i just don't know HOW to memorise them. Plus, i made the big mistake of thinking "well, i won't learn them yet, i'll learn to talk first'' Can anyone recommend an effective way of learning them please? I will definitely make it a habit of learning related characters, but how? Is it worth, in your opinion, to learn the Chinese way, by writing drawing them over and over again? There seems to be mixed feelings on this technique.

It helps if you have some kind of structured list. I learned this stuff with a textbook with dialogues, which worked well (and is used in many textbooks, so I suppose it works for others too).

- Read through the dialogue and see how much you understand.

- Go over the vocab list of that dialogue, all the words and characters and their meaning.

- Now read the dialogue again. You should be able to understand all of it or almost all of it now. Go over each sentence and figure out what each word means and does.

- Now learn the characters/words, both ways. First Chinese-English. Look at the character(s), write them down a few times, try to recall pronunciation and meaning. Do this for 5-10 new characters per day.

- Then the same characters/words English-Chinese. Look at the English (no need to write it down), try to recall pronunciation and say it out loud, and write down the character. Check if you got it right and say it and write it down a few more times.

- Repeat a few hours later, and the next day, and the next, ad infinitum. You can use a program like Anki, which will make you repeat the ones you know less often and the ones you forget more often. Repetition is key. You will start forgetting the more difficult ones as soon as you stop using them. The good news is that this happens even to Chinese people; the bad news is that it happens.

Learning characters gets easier once you know a certain number. You start seeing patterns, the radicals and other elements get more meaning for you and you can almost learn a new character by just noting its elements to yourself.

And speaking of radicals: if you haven't yet, go over a list of radicals. No need to learn them all by heart, but go over them so you have seen them all and can recognise the common ones when you encounter them.

Perhaps you are already doing all this; if not, I hope it's helpful.

 

A language exchange partner that's nearby seems like a long shot, but i guess there's nothing stopping me from putting an ad in the paper or something.

Not the paper, I'd suggest a local university if you have one, or one of those boards in a supermarket or library or sth where people put up notes about looking for cleaning ladies or bass players or putting up their fridge for sale. There's a thread currently of someone asking for help on editing their looking-for-a-language-partner note, you can use that for inspiration (that is, copy the parts you need :-) ). Good luck!

[Melanie1989]

Lu -thanks you, that is helpful. I will try that soon for definite. I have a list of radicals and have started to copy them down too, but one thing there seems to be misunderstanding on is the meaning and purpose. Sometimes i read that the radicals are just there for index purposes, other times people say that they do tell you what the characters are relating to. 口 means mouth, so something like 吃 which has a little one shows it relates to mouth, "eat". I explain things like an idiot, i know, but that's the impression lots of people give but then others seem to argue that it's just coincidence.

 

I mostly know radicals but am not completely sure on what they're for. 

 

Wow, i'm reading back on everything i've said and am wondering how on earth i have even got the this point at all. 

[Lu]

Every character contains a radical, and most characters contain additional elements as well. Generally, radicals roughly indicate the meaning of the character, and they are used to look up characters in a (paper) dictionary. So, both meaning and index purposes. Sometimes the radical is unclear, sometimes the radical does different things in different characters, sometimes the meaning of the character has shifted over time so that now it means something entirely different than the radical seems to indicate, sometimes the radical seems rather arbitrary.

If I were you, I'd write all the radicals down once for now, just so you have seen them and got to know them a little bit. This way, when you see them in the characters you learn, you'll realise that hey, that part is probably the radical (and sometimes you'll be wrong, and that's okay, it gets better with practice). Some radicals are rare and you'll rarely if ever see them again, so you'll likely forget them and that's fine. Some you'll see all the time and you'll get to know them well, and this is just a first introduction.

[Melanie1989]

Thanks a lot, i will do that now. I will also take the advice of learning at least 10 characters a day. I have checked to see how many characters i know for sure, meaning i remember the pronunciation, tones, meaning etc, and i'm a bit more relieved to know that number is actually 149. Still rather poor by any means, but better than 60. I will learn 10 a day and regularly review them. 

 

Thanks again for everyone's help, suggestions and honestly. It is so appreciated!

[Ruben von Zwack]

If you have a little kid, you could watch Boonie Bears together, a cartoon in Chinese. It's on Youtube, Chinese with Chinese subtitles. No English, but you don't need to understand the words because the action is so obvious: two bears and a squirrel giving a logger a hard time.

You will hear lots of repeated expressions - stop! ouch! I'll show you, hideous bears! - and learn words like honey, fish, chili, etc. because it really is sooo obvious. And did I mention, it's kind of cute.

You may also like Xiyangyang, but I don't know why, I can't stand it and I find their squeaky voices difficult to understand.

[Lugubert]

Plateaus, I've had a few...

 

Learning how to learn is crucial.

 

Generally, that's a huge problem in itself. I've started on a fair number of languages quite different from my native Swedish. Not "just" to learn to read, or communicate, but to get a grip on a) how I learn, and b) to understand what happens in me when I translate (my profession). I normally always end up with being more fascinated by the language than on my a) and b) goals.

 

Then, after a few years (or less...) there's that wall or plateau or mire from which you can't continue and/or feel no progress. If you don't need the language for urgent plans, don't despair though. If you've got the time and are anything like me, leaving the language a year or two might do wonders. Your subconscious will have done huge amounts of processing, and when you return, you might find that your reading understanding suddenly is at least what you wished it were when you made that pause.

 

Five years ago I was horrified at the thought of learning 60 characters in a fortnight. Now that I know how to learn characters it's quite an easy goal.

 

I find that a bit optimistic, but if you're 1/3 my age and have some kind of heartfelt motivation, I suppose it's possible. Which in a way boils down to

 

Melanie1989, you would find it helpful to focus on learning related characters. It's one thing to learn and retain five random characters in just an hour of study, but it's quite another to learn this five in half the time: 青, 请, 清, 情, 晴. All those characters contain 青, so by building on that one block you can retain them all very quickly.

 

Learning to identify possible sound and meaning parts like that will help, even if there are no infallible rules. The qing example is quite nice when you link the phonetic 青 to the radical like in radical 'speech' in 请 'ask, request', radical 'heart' (for emotions etc.) in 情 'feeling, emotion' or the fairly long shot but perhaps useful for mnemonics, 晴 with the sun to make 'clear, the weather'.

 

When rehearsing my 2nd semester reader today, I came across 忘 wàng 'forget', which I remembered (something possibly with the heart helped, of course). Then appeared 望.  At first, no idea. Then, I tried thinking wang because of the upper left thing, and remembered 希望 xīwàng 'hope'.

 

The more you work on characters, the more (more or less) useful associations you'll develop. The most insane links you yorself invent will be to characters you'll never ever forget. Mnemonics are personal. I much prefer to create my own, like 休: a man 'resting' beside a tree, even though it gives no hint of the xiū pronunciation. So, I myself am next to allergic to efforts like the Heisig: Remembering the Hanzi, but especially for beginners, that might be useful for starters in Chinese or Japanese.

[Melanie1989]

Thank you, still great advice coming. I have looked on youtube for Boonie Bears and have saved it to "watch later". After dinner, i will watch it with my daughter, i think she will love it and will hopefully keep her quiet, hehe. So thanks a lot for that suggestion! I also stumbled across a few other things for kids entertainment in Chinese (ni wawa, three little pigs etc) so that really was a great suggestion. It's solved the problem of how to learn while keeping my child entertained. They're also good for someone like me whose listening skills aren't up to much, usually. So Ruben, thank you!!

 

Lugubert, i agree with your suggestion that maybe a break could be helpful, however, though i have no real need for urgency, i would like to get to a certain degree of fluency before risking letting anything slide. I do have a sort of translator job in mind, but mostly for the job itself is something i would happily work at full time for free! I will shamefully admit however, that a small part of me is desperate to go to China for authentic Shanghainese food (包子), hehe. I like your suggestion of making my own kind of pictographs, i guess. That may be extremely helpful for someone like myself. 

 

Tonight after watching a few Boonie Bears, i will study my ten characters! 

Thanks for your suggestions again!

[imron]

Can anyone recommend an effective way of learning them please?

How are you studying characters?  Do you use any flashcarding/SRS software?

[tysond]

Five years ago I was horrified at the thought of learning 60 characters in a fortnight. Now that I know how to learn characters it's quite an easy goal.

 

I find that a bit optimistic, but if you're 1/3 my age and have some kind of heartfelt motivation, I suppose it's possible. Which in a way boils down to

 

 

Hehehe, I'm nearly 40, and I don't think 60 in a fortnight is ridiculous - it's 4.25 a day... The trick is good mnemonics and ongoing revision.  And, as you very correctly say - motivation!  

 

Mnemonics are personal. I much prefer to create my own, like 休: a man 'resting' beside a tree, even though it gives no hint of the xiū pronunciation.

 

 

I followed Heisig, it quite quickly gives you reign to use your own menomics after teaching you how to make good ones.  

 

My mnemonic for 休 is Chuck Norris (not just a man, but the man) on the left, and the tree is resting against him.  The absurdity of it, and the memorable image of Chuck supporting the resting tree, makes an ever better mnemonic than just using the components.  望 is a king, gazing across a battlefield full of corpses for a month. I find it easier to recall the pronunciation from common words if possible (e.g. 休息， 希望). , phonetic components supply hints too...   

 

It is very worthwhile learning to build great mnemonics.  Many of the mnemonics I built 18 months ago are still useful and easy to recall.  

[Melanie1989]

Imron i have been looking at online flashcards but the ones i seem to find are all Traditional characters. I do want to learn them eventually, but i plan to spend most time in the mainland so right now i'm more focused on Simplified. I made some of my own flashcards and also make little post-its with characters and pinyin and stuck them all over the furniture, hehe. It seems to be pretty effective so far, even my partner (who is more into Japanese) is picking up little words and phrases. If anyone's reading this thread cos they're having the same problems as me, i would recommend it.

 

TysonD, i love the whole Chuck Norris thing. I will also check out Heisig. Thank you.

 

I have looked at everyone's recommendations on the thread and, while some more helpful than others, i have found quite a lot to help. I do think i need more structure which i am working on today. Boonie Bears, for example, i found quite easy to understand so i will be sticking with that for a while. I will happily aim for 60 characters in a fortnight, it sounded scary to me too at first but when you think about it, as others said, it is actually very achievable. Ten a day will equal much more than that and i managed that last night! So thanks everyone, you have all helped a lot.

 

This forum itself is also very helpful, just looking around and picking up lots of tips along the way.

[Melanie1989]

Also, with Boonie Bears i happily picked up the phrase 大笨熊 which is what i called my partner anyway

[Lu]

I have been looking at online flashcards but the ones i seem to find are all Traditional characters. I do want to learn them eventually, but i plan to spend most time in the mainland so right now i'm more focused on Simplified. I made some of my own flashcards

Making your own flashcards works at least as well. First, because you learn exactly the words you want to learn, and second, because in the process of making the flashcard, you already learn the words for the first time, making them easier to remember.

[anonymoose]

Just to clarify my previous post, I advise learning words rather than individual characters. I don't recommend learning characters in isolation, unless they are usually used in isolation (which is the minority).

 

The reason is that you want what you learn to be useful. You will find it much easier to use words that you can actually use and ascribe a definite meaning to, as opposed to individual characters which you cannot use in isolation, and often have a nebulous meaning in isolation.

 

If you want to boost your character count, that is fine. But choose a common word that incorporates the character you want to learn, and then learn that word rather than just the character.

[Melanie1989]

Anonymoose, i have been doing that as often as possible, but when i've searched for common characters on line, they seldom say when they are used in conjunction with other characters. i have copied out almost a thousand today already from a list i found and it struck me that, as you said, singular characters aren't that big a help. If i were the type to use *facepalm* i'd be using it now.  Does anybody know of any sites that show you words of two or more characters? I'be had a look myself but the only one i found was the Chineasy site -very helpful and easy, but also very limited.

[Lu]

Do you have any system in your studies? If you don't have a textbook, I think it might be very helpful to get one. That way, you'll learn words and grammar in context, and with some systematic, gradual build-up. Just learning separate words has its uses, but you can learn separate words till the cows come home without that ever resulting in knowing Chinese.

And where do you generally find the characters you're learning? If it's from a list, that's not much use, since it doesn't give you any context. If it's from a text: most texts consist of words not characters, so instead of looking up the characters in the text, try looking up pairs of characters. They will often be words.

[Melanie1989]

Lu -not particularly. i have an Oxford Dictionary which i thought would be a big help as i looked through it, but when i've tried out sentences, my (come-and-go-as-she-pleases) language exchange partner didn't have a clue what i was talking about. Apparently lots of things in dictionaries are outdated or extremely formal. 

 

When i first started with characters, i typed in 'most common characters' so now i have like six bookmarks with between 2,500 and 3,000 singular character words each. Recently, i have been picking up new ones from watching youtube videos with sentences, FluentU and some others but while i find it helpful to memorise certain things, it's still quite limited as far as actual progress is concerned. 

[Melanie1989]

For example *sigh*, i just found this now http://www.commonchinesecharacters.com/Lists/MostCommon2500ChineseCharacters It's got examples of character pairs but doesn't tell you what they mean. This seems to be the best i can find, bad answers are usually the results of bad questions so i might try again but it's literally giving me a headache.

[renzhe]

So you have a dictionary, an on-and-off language partner, and some random youtube videos, and that's it? No wonder you're hitting a wall. With the amount of time you're investing, you should be much further along than you are, and the problem is that you are trying random things instead of following a reasonable language-learning plan.

You need a good textbook and an organised approach. Get a textbook and/or a tutor, and work your way through the textbook, lesson by lesson. Buy a textbook series. It was written by language teachers. It's a must. You might want to get a good beginner-level grammar book and work your way through that too. I understand that getting a teacher or attending a class is not a realistic option for everyone, but language learning is hard, especially if you don't have much prior experience.

Character and vocabulary learning, as well as listening and speaking practice comes on top of that. Some of that will be covered by the textbook and corresponding DVDs, CDs etc, but you'll need more. If you want to supplement the vocabulary in your textbook with more vocabulary work, look up HSK lists, they are as good as anything you will find.

Randomly learning characters from internet lists will not get you anywhere. Chinese is difficult enough as it is, you should use all the resources you can get your hands on!