FSI - Whos finished it?

[anticks]

Hi everyone,

I've been searching the forums this morning and would just like to ask a quick question.

Has anybody finished the online FSI Chinese series? and what level was your Mandarin at after this point? How did you study and what was your other learning methods/experience?

I've finished Pimsleur 1,2 and 3 and am part way through module 3 of FSI - I also did a 7 week short course which during Pimsleur 2 and i felt i didn't learn alot from it as the class was very slow! (the other students)

I'm planning a trip within the next 10 months so really just looking for a study method that works, and maybe a critique of my own methods. I currently listen to 2 sometimes 3lessons of FSI per day, 1 on the way to work and 1 to 2 on the way home. I'm trying not to use the PDF's. Ive calculated i should finish it by October or so.

Thanks for any advice/tips in advance.

A

[fredrik_w]

Anticks, we have taken the same route although Im just ahead of you. Im right now finishing module 7. I also would like to hear from people that finished FSI and how they continued.

I believe FSI is a great study method but a little dry. Some people have raised concerns about FSI being too old and contain outdated words and phrases. I think this is a very small problem. Watching a TV serie from the 70s in your native language will tell you that the differences are very small. I dont believe Chinese has developed faster than for example English.

When I was at module 3, I started to use a Skype tutor. That was tough in the beginning but after 15 lessons with my teacher, it paid of and I could really benefit from the conversation practice when I visited China for a one week trip. I managed to have a few half-hour conversations with Chinese people with no knowledge of English. Both of us had to struggle but we understood each other. I really recommend to start to use a tutor if you plan to visit China, otherwise there is no hurry to start speaking.

Starting module 7 was like hitting a small Chinese wall, I thought earlier FSI lessons talked in full speed but I guess I was wrong. Before module 7, I finished one lesson every other day. With module 7, it took me almost one week (I study between 1-2 hours each day). Finishing module 7 took me two months but I must add I also started to learn characters during this time.

When I have finished FSI, I will use the material at http://www.laits.utexas.edu/orkelm/chinese/

Also I will start using Chinese TV series and movies. I guess I will hit the next wall by then...

[anticks]

Thanks for the reply. Thats an interesting link that i will add to my favourites too

How does the skype tutor work? Is it a tutor you actually pay or more of a language exchange thing? How did they benefit you were FSI did not? or was it mainly the conversation practise?

Im just bowling through FSI lessons the same way i did with Pimsleur. If i have 80% of it im moving on and its working ok so far. Haven't had to repeat any yet apart from when i miss a week of study and take a few steps back. I also just got the truant flashcards that i will work on for vocab. Really is a huge intimidating stack of paper once you cut them all down lol

Are you able to confirm whether FSI is infact 2500 words? If you're on Module 7 you must know more or less 1000 now do you think?

[fredrik_w]

I found an add in swedish Craigslist about a Chinese tutor (living in Sweden). I paid about 7 US$/session. I also had a trail lesson with a Chinese tutor situated in China. The sound quality wasnt too good and I believe its very important.

In FSI, there is a lot of communication excercises in the pdf-files. I found that having a live conversation is very useful since the brain needs to work on full speed and you have to force yourself to speak. I think that the smart guys that created FSI Chinese also had the same opinion. An other good thing about talking live is that you will quickly found out your biggest problem: lack of vocabulary. And you will also feel a strong motivation to do something about it. I have ignored grammar, I learn that from the dialogs.

Im pretty sure FSI contains 2500 words. I made a simple check with a dictionary and I calculated that I know about 2000 words, it can be less. That comes from Pimsleur and FSI.

I dont understand why you dont use the pdfs. They are a small gold mine.

[OneEye]

I dont understand why you dont use the pdfs. They are a small gold mine.

I agree. FSI is not Pimsleur. The PDFs are there for a reason. You'll progress better if you use them.

[anticks]

Thanks guys!

Acutally it's because i only listen while driving and ive been ok through modules 1 and 2 without the PDF's. 1 and 2 after all 3 pimsleurs isnt too much of a stretch to listen to the same way.

However, listening to module 3 unit 4 C-2 in the car this morning and it went a fair way over my head Lots of unfamiliar sentence patterns of a sudden. So i think its time to pull out the PDF's now haha

[lokki]

I tried continuing with FSI for a while, after completing pimsleur, but I was put off, and thoroughly so, by the horrible sound quality of the freely available version.

Not that I like to complain about something that is free, but if I am going to invest my time and effort on something I like it to be effective, and those recordings just didn't feel right for that. A lot of the time they sound like someone speaking from the other end of a long tube with a towel in their mouth.

I'm sure there must have been high-quality recordings in existance for the series originally, and perhaps they are still possible to come by, if you pay for them.

Are all of you actually using those mushy, mumbly, scratchy, echoey tapes or do you have better quality FSI stuff available ? If so I'd be interested to know where you got it and how much it cost.

[yunzihao]

Here's what I got to say. Take this as the advice of someone who has been living in China for 1 and a half years, is fluent in Chinese, and has a Chinese girlfriend that can't speak a word of English.

FSI is without a doubt the best course on the web, and I still can't believe it's free. Believe it or not, the bad quality of the taps is exactly what you want. 'Cause that's what langauge is (and anyone who's been in China can verify that); that's what you hear every day, bumbly-mumbly-scratchy voices.

The voices are quite lively and fun, much better than Pimslear, which in my opinon is simply not the Chinese you will hear on the street. It's the Chinese Chinese people will speak to foreigners, overly clear, slow, lacking feeling emotion and cadence, and much too easy to understand. Which is not the Chinese you want to practise studying.

If you're still in you first year of studey FSI is just fine. You're not looking for academy award proformances in the voices, just something that can drill the grammer and vocab into your head, and get it out of your mouth. Finish FSI, then think about watching Chinese TV programs and studying the Chinese POD webcasts, those two are certainly great for more advanced learners.

I've been studying it for 11 months now, out of twelve months of my total learning, and FSI has taken me from no Chinese, to a very functional level of fluency. I am on module 8 right now. It's easy to study fast at first but you got to slow down once you hit mod 4 or 5. Plus, use the book for it's great grammer and vocab explainations, it's amazing.

Somethings are outdated, but living in China that's not a problem because my teacher will quickly sort those things out.

[wrbt]

I believe Lokki was addressing the quality of the recordings, not the quality/consistency of the voice patterns. I've been in China too and while one certainly encounters different accents, cadence, speed, mumbling, etc. I didn't have many conversations with people who sounds like they were speaking through a tube with a sock in it while heavy dead air sounds filled the background.

IMO something that's very clear like Pimsleur is fine when you're starting out, and there are certainly plenty of materials (like Across The Straits from Cheng&Tsui or David and Helen from Yale) that employ native Chinese speakers in pretty realistic conversational quality and cadence without the poor media quality.

I can't speak for FSI as I've not heard it, just pointing out I don't think Lokki necessarily has an issue with the aspects of it that you're championing and I can certainly understand someone disliking a product because of production quality.

[yunzihao]

That's fair enough. I am trying to champion it since it's free, and really, without it I could not have taken my Chinese to this level. My enthusiaism for the FSI course materials is high. I don't know, it just seems like everyone I know over here who has good Chinese has studied the FSI books and tapes, and anyone that has taken longer to learn has used some other method.

I think the FSI audio quality is fine with the exception of a few mp3s that are clearly corrupted 1 or 2 of them. They are still listenable, but I certainly suffered through them. It was produced in the 1980s, so expect 1980s audio quality.

I do agree with what you said about Pimsleurs being a begining level. I was on FSI unit six when I took a listen to Pims. level 3, and it ws simply not advanced enough.I honestly don't know if level 3 is the highest but listening to it really put me off. My girlfriend, teacher, and friends all said it was just too slow, and not true to the way things are really spoken.

My friends and everyone all love Chinese Pod, saying it's really modern and true to life. But I think it's not for low level speakers because there is not enough grammer support. And explainations.

That's just my two cents. Use it or don't use it. But I think of it like this, I don't stop listening or being friendly with speakers that have less than a perfectly clear voice (mostly men of course). I still try to interact with them and have gotten better understanding those slurry speeds.

Oh maybe you can answer this, What's a good higher level course to study? After I finish what I'm studying now, I'm not sure what to study. I wouldn't mind studying a good business Chinese book. Any suggestions are welcome.

[pandaxiongmao]

If the sound quality is poor, it will help you study for the HSK! Just do some searches for complaints about audio quality in testing centres...

[lokki]

Just to clarify, I agree that the way they speak on the FSI recordings is truer to life than something like Pimsleur. And I can see the many benefits of the FSI method. The fact that it seems so good otherwise just makes it more annoying that there should be a show-stopper in the form of sound quality.

I was referring to the technical quality of the mp3's that are available for free on the web. The technology was quite OK in the 80's and those recordings must have been OK too when they were first produced. But they were on magnetic tape initally, where the material deteriorates over time. You get added background noise, mushier sound, and also the effect of the magnetic information seeping across to the next layer of tape producing a very irritating "advance echo" effect. These recordings were apparently digitised from magnetic tapes that had been lying around and deteriorating for years, perhaps decades.

One could of course claim that the worse the quality the better, because it will force you to train your listening comprehension under less than ideal circumstances, such as you will encounter in real life. In line with this view, producers of language programs should perhaps even intentionally make the quality poorer to increase the difficulty and consequently the value of the training.

But language skill does not consist of listening ability alone. Producing speech yourself is also an important part, and especially with Mandarin you need to do lots of work in that department. To start getting your pronunciation right, you need lots and lots of input of crisp and clear native pronunciation patterns that you can imitate and compare yourself to. A bit of mumbling, and skipping over half syllables here and there is fine, if it reflects the natural patterns that you will find in real life. But poor technical sound quality will prevent you from getting the finer points of pronunciation right.

The two skills are related too. I find that expressions and patterns that I have drilled and learned to pronounce myself are then easier to pick out from the speech of others.