Resources for advanced heritage learners?

[adeliepingu]

I'm in an awkward position where I'm very embarrassed in my lack of Chinese skill, but most resources I can find are too easy (and boring) for me.

I'm ABC, but grew up speaking English to my parents. I'd consider myself near-fluent in listening and reading, but my ability to actually construct sentences is quite questionable. I can watch most TV dramas with ease and recently read 三体 with a little help on technical and historical concepts. I've done a lot of Chinese -> English translations - mostly articles, conversations, and forum posts.

However, my actual Chinese skills are atrocious. I can hold a conversation, but I put together words in a very 'English' fashion that shows my lack of proficiency. I also have very little formal grammar training (AP Chinese in high school + two semesters of college Chinese, neither of which taught me much), so things like HSK6's 'which one of these sentences is wrong?' questions are completely lost to me.

I'm not really sure what to do to improve, apart from just more exposure. I'd like to try more novels, but I read frustratingly slowly in Chinese (compared to my usual English-reading speed) and there doesn't seem to be a good middle-ground between stories for children (too easy) and literature (too hard). Please don't recommend webnovels - if I try reading another shitty xianxia I'm going to lose braincells.

Also, my accent makes me want to cry.

[Lu]

For reading: search the forums for 'first book' and such terms, there are many recommendations for literature that is not too hard to read. If you can read 三体, your reading level is pretty decent. Some books will still be too hard for you (don't try Jin Yong just yet), but many won't.

 

For pronunciation, consider just starting from scratch and drilling, just like other new learners do. It will be somewhat boring and you will be frustrated, but keep at it and you'll make progress. By that point, it will still be somewhat boring, but less frustrating, and you'll have less reason to cry about your accent.

 

For speaking, I don't think it's exposure you need. You can already read and watch tv series, you can translate, so if you continue to do some of that for fun, you're fine on the exposure front. What you need is opening your mouth and practicing, and then being corrected, and then practicing some more. This will be painful at times, but it's the way to make progress. If your parents speak Mandarin, you could start speaking it with them.

 

Good luck!

 

 

[LinZhenPu]

I think the best resource for you would be a good 1-on-1 Chinese teacher. Maybe you could even find your future husband

[imron]

8 hours ago, adeliepingu said:

and there doesn't seem to be a good middle-ground between stories for children (too easy) and literature (too hard).

Try something like 《活着》by 余华.  It is significantly easier to read than 三体.

 

If that's still a struggle, you might find graded readers by Mandarin Companion suitable.

 

Finally, if you'll excuse the shameless plug, I wrote a program called Chinese Text Analyser.  It keeps track of your vocabulary over time and allows to analyse a piece of Chinese text and will tell you approximately how well you'll be able to read it.  Therefore if you have the electronic text of several different novels, but you don't know which one is most suited to your current level, you can load them all in CTA and by looking at the various statistics you can figure out which one will be the most appropriate.

[eddyf]

If you can read 三体, then your skills are already well beyond most ABCs that I know, so you don't have anything to be embarrassed about  I think that if you visited China and stayed there for a few months or even as short as a few weeks, in an immersive language environment, your speaking skills would pick up very quickly. You have a lot of passive language knowledge and all that's needed to make it active is a little bit of practice.

 

That said, although practicing in an immersive environment is ideal, there are ways to practice by yourself as well. Have you tried Glossika? It's basically an audio program that drills you on translating (interpreting?) sentences from English to Chinese. There's 3000 sentences total but I'm guessing you could easily skip through the first 1500 of them at least. It worked pretty well for me (not a heritage learner though).

 

For reading, I think your way forward is pretty clear. Just keep reading more native content. Not just novels but also short online articles and stuff like that. It helps to read it in an app with a pop-up dictionary that lets you easily pull up pinyin + English definitions. I use Pleco for that. It makes a lot more content accessible which would otherwise be above my level.

[imron]

5 minutes ago, eddyf said:

It helps to read it in an app with a pop-up dictionary that lets you easily pull up pinyin + English definitions

Nah, that's actually one of the worst things for long-term retention.  Your brain will seek the path of least resistance and outsource the remembering to the app.  With English definitions, it will also reinforce the English centric nature of the OPs Chinese.

 

If you must use a popup dictionary, make sure it is Chinese-Chinese (Pleco has these too), and make sure you are going back and revising words that you have previously looked up.

 

Any word you need to lookup (even if it's just to check if you're correct), is a word that you don't know well enough to read yet and a word you need to spend time on learning more thoroughly.

[eddyf]

The fact of the matter is, I've already SRSed some 5000 words and for the time being I don't feel like adding any more. I spend too much time revising vocab as it is and I just want to get on with consuming more content so I can see words in context. Maybe I'm not learning the unfamiliar words as efficiently as I would if I gave them more attention. But I'm reinforcing my knowledge of all the words that I don't look up, by seeing them in context. As for the unfamiliar words I'm just trying to get them out of the way so it doesn't impede understanding.

 

Besides, I find that by the time I've looked up the same word 3-4 times, I actually remember it after that. So I'm still picking up new vocab, just at a slower rate.

 

As for "reinforcing the English centric nature of your Chinese", the same thing happens if you use English definitions/translations at all when doing SRS. It's not ideal but I think it's inevitable. You have to be at a very advanced level to only use C-C dictionaries. I don't know how high that level is but I know I haven't reached it yet. Of course, the OP is free to give it a try.

[imron]

22 minutes ago, eddyf said:

I spend too much time revising vocab as it is and I just want to get on with consuming more content so I can see words in context.

I agree that consuming content is more important than revising vocab.  So much so that as long as you are regularly consuming content you can delete your flashcards and not worry about forgetting things.

 

This is because either you know the word well so it doesn't matter if you no longer revise it with SRS (plus you'll probably be seeing those words often enough in context anyway), or you don't know the word well enough so you can add it back to your empty deck the next time you encounter it.  If you never encounter the word again, that's not a word you need to worry about so it doesn't matter if you forget it (see here for more discussion on this flashcard strategy).

 

This helps keep your revision time short, and more importantly, it prioritizes words that are directly relevant to what you are reading.

 

28 minutes ago, eddyf said:

As for the unfamiliar words I'm just trying to get them out of the way so it doesn't impede understanding.

This is like the worst thing to do for long term learning and will train your brain to ignore words it doesn't understand, and confirms exactly what I said above about your brain taking the path of least resistance.  These are the words that should be receiving the most attention.

 

31 minutes ago, eddyf said:

You have to be at a very advanced level to only use C-C dictionaries. I don't know how high that level is but I know I haven't reached it yet.

With a 5,000 word vocabulary, C-C dictionaries should definitely be usable, and if you're reading native content in Chinese you should be able to read native dictionaries in Chinese.  The problem is it will always appear difficult at first and it's only through practice that it gets easier.  You could add another 5,000 words to your vocabulary and it will still feel difficult - but that's mostly due to lack of practice reading a C-C dictionary rather than a lack of vocabulary.  It takes a bit of time until you can feel comfortable learning a word entirely in Chinese - and some times you have to go several definitions deep to finally reach understanding, i.e. you look up a definition but it contains a word you don't understand, so you look up that word and the definition contains a word you don't understand, so you look up that definition and you understand it, and then you can slowly work back through the definitions until you get back to the original word.  It's much more effort to do this, but ultimately much more rewarding for your Chinese.

[Moa]

Hi! I'm not quite at your level yet, despite learning Chinese for many years now, but I hope my suggestions can still help you.

Have you tried audiobooks? You can find a lot by searching for 有声书 or 听书. One of the main advantages of audiobooks is that the pace is set by someone else and you just have to follow along.

If you're really committed to reading with your eyes, I would recommend a) short stories and b) learn about speedreading. To read fast, it's usually not enough to read a lot, you must also practise how to read faster.

As for putting together sentences, have you tried to read about Chinese grammar? Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I actually like to read books like that, even though I don't understand half of it. In the same vein, you can try to find articles or books aimed at teachers of Chinese, instead of students (preferably written in Chinese, not English).

 

[eddyf]

I do think there's a place for deleting flashcards, and I already deleted the first 2500 words from my deck a while back. But deleting everything kind of defeats the point of SRS, which is that it tries to keep track of how well you know a word so that you can revisit it the least number of times necessary to keep it in memory. By deleting everything, you're throwing away all that personalized history. But I don't want to do that because I still feel like that history has value. Right now my flashcard reviews are talking a long time because a lot of words are coming up after a 1 year gap. At this point I still think it's worthwhile to go through them but I'll probably consider them completely learned after this iteration. As for the ones I get wrong, I'll decide on a case by case basis whether to delete them now or not.

 

Back to the reading issue, I think you're completely disregarding the motivation/fun element. The way you're saying to read things takes all the fun out of it and makes it into an activity that requires an expenditure of willpower, instead of being something that you can look forward to. Sometimes I don't want to study, I just want to read. I'm honestly not that worried about "training my brain" the wrong way--the worst thing that can happen is that I give up the chance to learn any of the unfamiliar words that I rush through. But it's okay because I'm not really looking to pick up more vocab right now, I'm just looking to get more exposure to complete sentences and paragraphs. I'll run into these same words again some other time when my priorities shift again.

 

C-C dictionaries are usable but only sometimes. There are still a lot of words whose definition is just a list of synonyms and the synonyms are less common words than the headword. And when you drill down further you just get into a loop. Other times, the word is the name of some kind of animal or plant and you're better off just seeing the English name instead of trying to figure out from the Chinese what thing it's describing. So while I do consult C-C definitions when I'm learning new vocab, I feel like it's still going to be some time before I can put away the C-E dictionaries for good.

 

In the end, though, the right way to study is always going to be highly dependent on your level, what skills you want to prioritize, and how much time and willpower you have to dedicate. I can only speak for myself. But the OP didn't mention wanting to acquire more vocab, but did mention wanting to get better at putting sentences together. So I think extensive reading without undue focus on vocab acquisition is a sensible study plan.

[snowflake]

These are audio books for kids 6-12 yo.  The accompanying book matches the audio....order from Amazon in mainland China

海底两万里(5CD); 20000 Leagues Under the Sea
八十天环游世界(5CD); Around the World in 80 Days
福尔摩斯探案故事(5CD): Sherlock Holmes stories (Arthur Conan Doyle)   

 

I have the same problem with spoken Mandarin.  My reading and listening comprehension are far better than my speech though certainly not as good as yours.  

 

Good luck!

[realmayo]

This is like the worst thing to do for long term learning and will train your brain to ignore words it doesn't understand, and confirms exactly what I said above about your brain taking the path of least resistance.  These are the words that should be receiving the most attention.

 

I'm not really convinced by this : it would mean that, for instance, listening in to conversations around you is harmful to your listening ability if people are using words you're not sure of and you don't have time to look up. 

 

Extensive reading has its role to play. But you're right, it's a slightly different activity than intensive reading, so an amount of intensive reading should probably accompany the extensive sort too

 

Reminds me of the MMA topic : posts there suggested that you need experience in the ring to be good in the ring. OK, but I don't think anyone would say that any time spent training outside the ring was actually harmful... 

 

Regularly skipping common words that you keep forgetting - I agree that's not ideal. But I have no problem skipping unfamiliar and possibly unique words while breezing through a novel.  

[Lu]

11 hours ago, eddyf said:

C-C dictionaries are usable but only sometimes. There are still a lot of words whose definition is just a list of synonyms and the synonyms are less common words than the headword.

This is true, and I also agree about the animals and plants point. Still, there are a lot of words you can at least try to look up in a C-C dictionary first.

 

All in all I don't think anyone is saying you should only SRS, or only read. The best approach is to do both. The SRS will help you read better and the reading will help you retain words and keep the fun in it. Same for extensive vs intensive reading: it's best to do a bit of both. Intensive when you're up for it, extensive if you just want to sit back for a bit.

[imron]

16 minutes ago, realmayo said:

listening in to conversations around you is harmful to your listening ability if people are using words you're not sure of and you don't have time to look up. 

It's different though, because what you are doing when reading with a popup English dictionary is essentially substituting the Chinese word with an English word in order to 'get them out of the way so as not to impede understanding', and not paying so much attention to the Chinese word, that's not great for your Chinese in the long run.  You're trading off long-term improvement for convenience in understanding in the moment.  And that's ok in some situations, but it's important to be aware that this is the trade off you are making.

 

11 hours ago, eddyf said:

But I don't want to do that because I still feel like that history has value.

It's far less value than you imagine, but I know it's hard to let go (it was hard for me the first time) because the allure of remembering everything forever is very seductive.  The thing is though, it's ok to forget - especially if the words are not relevant to you at the moment, and once you embrace that it frees up time and energy to devote to actually using the language.

 

11 hours ago, eddyf said:

Right now my flashcard reviews are talking a long time because a lot of words are coming up after a 1 year gap

Ok, but like I said before, those flashcards will generally fall in to 3 categories - words you know well enough and would never forget them, words you don't know and that are relevant to what you want to read, and words you don't know that aren't relevant to what you want to read.

 

Of these three types of words, only the second type is worth devoting time to.  The first type are words you'll never forget (你、我、他、的 etc) so reviewing them is a waste of time.  The third type is also a waste of time because why bother learning words that aren't relevant to you.  Perhaps you could argue that they will be relevant to you at some indeterminate time in the future, but if so, you can learn them then instead and concentrate your current effort on to words that are relevant to you now.

 

How many of the words coming up after a 1 year gap are going to be relevant to you in the next month?  You could cut down reviews significantly if you can figure that out, and spend the time saved on other more productive activities.

 

The only way to sort out the words that are or aren't relevant is to consume Chinese content.  Words that appear are relevant, words that don't appear aren't relevant to you at the current point in time.

 

I know, I know, the algorithm, but the algorithm is not perfect and neither is it infallible.  In my experience, once you've got a sizeable vocabulary base (and 5,000 words is sizeable), you'll get better bang for your buck from using regular reading to get your revisions of long-term words, rather than using an SRS algorithm.

 

12 hours ago, eddyf said:

The way you're saying to read things takes all the fun out of it and makes it into an activity that requires an expenditure of willpower, instead of being something that you can look forward to

If that's the case, and you're looking up so many words that it becomes a mental drain, then I would suspect you are trying to read things too far outside your current level.  There's sometimes benefit in doing that, but it's much more productive to read easier content (even though that might require taking a hit to the ego).

 

Anyway, I also don't recommend always looking up everything as you go (that is tiring), just that you need to make sure you are learning a portion of the new words that you are coming across.  I wrote more about my strategy here.

 

44 minutes ago, realmayo said:

OK, but I don't think anyone would say that any time spent training outside the ring was actually harmful... 

Not all outside training no, but if you started to devote the majority of your time to training outside the ring, at the expense of training inside the ring, and sometimes so much so that you get little to no practice inside the ring, then maybe it's worth considering your training practices.

[realmayo]

Indeed, balance in all things, I don't know whether intensive = 阴 and extensive = 阳 or vice versa but getting these two in the right balance for me and my current circumstances is something I now try to keep in mind when thinking about what next to read or listen to, like reaching for the chrysanthemum tea after a spicy hotpot. 

 

In the interests of balance, then, I ought to counter Imron's suggestion about deleting decks with my own more modest 'suspend-on-failure' approach but... another time maybe 

[imron]

For those interested, the thread I linked to earlier (and the various threads linked to within) have posts from realmayo outlining his approach.

[somethingfunny]

On 5/8/2017 at 7:04 PM, imron said:

If you must use a popup dictionary, make sure it is Chinese-Chinese (Pleco has these too)

 

Out of interest, what do you use?

[imron]

I use and wholeheartedly recommend the Guifan dictionary.

 

The notes provided for many words are invaluable for learners looking to understand subtle differences in nuance and meaning between similar words.

[Flickserve]

On 8 May 2017 at 0:14 PM, adeliepingu said:

However, my actual Chinese skills are atrocious. I can hold a conversation, but I put together words in a very 'English' fashion that shows my lack of proficiency. I also have very little formal grammar training (AP Chinese in high school + two semesters of college Chinese, neither of which taught me much), so things like HSK6's 'which one of these sentences is wrong?' questions are completely lost to me.

 

May I suggest that you go through Chinese textbooks at an 'accelerated pace' but slowing down at the grammar sections practicing with a teacher. The textbooks will give context to the grammar exercises.

 

Then start writing short paragraphs and getting corrections, noting those corrections and incorporating into subsequent writings.

[imron]

8 hours ago, imron said:

The notes provided for many words are invaluable for learners looking to understand subtle differences in nuance and meaning between similar words.

For those interested, here's an example of what I mean.  Here's the entry for 反省, with two notes, one to watch the pronunciation because it's easy to get wrong (省 is usually pronounced shěng), and the second one to see the note in the definition of 反思

 

 

If we visit the definition of 反思 we have:

 

 

Which provides a nice little note on the differences between 反省 and 反思.

 

The Guifan is full of little notes like this, and it's really useful and informative.