Lower Intermediate - How to progress

[Neil_H]

Hi,

I have hit a stopping block recently and don’t know what to do next to improve.

Vocabulary is around 1000 words now.

My last book was Yong Ho Intermediate Chinese which I worked through twice.

I have been listening to Chinese POD Intermediate.

I went back to China in October and was able to communicate far more than I did last time in 2006, but I was put off by my parents in law still using their local dialect with me when they can speak Mandarin. I had hoped that after more than 2 years of study by me they would have given me some “face” and spoken a bit of Mandarin with me but all I got was muffled conversations which took me twice as long to understand.

The good bits were the younger people and the Bejing people who spoke Mandarin and I was able to converse with. With my sister in law I was able to talk for 20 minutes about clothes, her business and English people’s views on animal fur coats. I was never asked to repeat stuff so it seemed the only problems were with other peoples Mandarin or their difficulty with my accent.

I have tried to find a few teachers in the UK as my wife and I are running out of ideas on how to improve me. Teachers I spoke to don’t want to know and seem only interested in handling beginners.

I found in China I did not have to use much of my vocabulary to converse and this lead me to think adding more words may not be the best method.

My wife and I worked hard on conversational practice over the last year or so getting the speed and repetition up but now we don’t really have anything more we can say and it gets kind of boring for her.

I have been trying to find someone who knows what we should do. I guess I am at the lower intermediate stage or on the edge of it. My long term goal is to get to Full intermediate and be able to watch not too difficult Chinese TV.

How have others who don’t live in China made it into the Intermediate stage?

Thanks

[skylee]

my wife and I are running out of ideas on how to improve me

How about reading and writing? How much can / have you read? How about using chengyu?

[renzhe]

Progress is very slow at the intermediate level (and even slower when you become advanced). It is important to make sure that you are indeed making progress and not stagnating.

1000 words is really not much. It's good that you can have basic conversations, but you'll find that you'll run out of vocabulary as soon as the topic becomes slightly more complicated. This will keep your conversations short and boring in the long run. Constantly improving your vocabulary is something you should continue doing. Personally, I just muscled lots of vocabulary through a couple of years of studying and it gave me a foundation that let me jump into books and TV shows.

I second skylee's advice to read. Reading is the most important way for improving your Chinese if you lack immersion. Only talking to your wife will not work, like you noticed. Finding other conversation partners is important (it really helped me). Read comics, read simple stories, work your way towards real books. You will expand your vocabulary in the process, and it will really improve your grammar. Finally, reading will also help you with TV shows, since they are mostly subtitled, so you can look up the words you don't know directly.

Learning on your own is a struggle. At this point, I really think that you need to do the ugly thing and learn vocabulary and work your way through a decent textbook. When you have a decent basis in vocabulary (3,000 - 5,000 words), read and watch everything you can get your hands on. Get conversation partners from a local university. Take notes. It's a long process, but it works out in the long run.

[Neil_H]

I should add I don't have the will or time to bother learning characters. Speach is the only thing important to me although I have been told characters help with this which of course they will. I have a full time busy job so characters is a no no but I don't mind reading Pinyin.

Do I need some Pinyin books then?

I suppose I need some sort of training series or something like that. I recently bought a DVD with a TV show but that had too much slang and was all in characters with no Pinyin.

[gato]

Do flashcards with the old HSK vocal list and start reading online newspapers. For reading, go with topics you would be interested in English. For many learners, the problem is that they are not even interested in reading much of anything in their native language and so it's even harder to be motivated to read in a foreign language. But you have to persevere to improve.

If you can't learn characters, then you are pretty much stuck with basic conversational Chinese. You might try improving your tone and fluidity of speaking, but it's difficult to gain vocabulary if you cannot read.

[派宛Pai-Wan]

Probably you can choose a new textbook that suitable for you first with your teacher or friend's help. Try to spend a few hours every day studying Chinese. Don't focus too many new vocabulary each time because you are not in the target language environment. Reading will help a lot for intermediate learners of Chinese to enlarge their vocabulary. Writing will help, too. You can try to write a short story or write something about your day every day. Maybe start from what you already knew first. Then try to use what you just learned to rewrite it.

Be patient. If there are some good articles in your textbook or some good articles you read, no matter it written in your native language or Chinese, try to retell it in Chinese. If the article is written in Chinese, it is better to remember it first. The article needs to fit your level, jsut has a few new words or one or two sentence pattern, not too simple nor too difficult.

[renzhe]

If you don't learn characters, it is very likely that you will never get past the lower intermediate stage. Learning characters is a grinding endeavour and hard to fit in a busy schedule, but there's really no way around it.

All the people I've met who had relatively decent spoken Chinese without learning to read (and this was only a couple of people) have spent a significant amount of time in a Chinese-speaking environment. Even so, their Chinese was limited. I've never met a person who managed to learn Chinese abroad without learning how to read.

You might have some luck with pinyin books, but almost all of them are targetted at beginners. Maybe flashcards with pinyin and some conversation partners where you prepare vocabulary and a topic ahead of time might help you expand your vocabulary and grammar.

[gato]

One idea is to start with the easiest TV show on the First Episodes list organized by renzhe and see how much you can understand. I think renzhe has given each show a difficulty rating. You might need to ask your wife for what certain words mean, like kids ask their parents. Or you can hire a tutor to watch TV shows with you, so not to annoy your wife too much.

[renzhe]

The easiest shows we've covered are probably 局中局, 花樣少年少女 and perhaps even 家有儿女.

Have a look at the wordlists, most of them also have pinyin.

The problem with watching these is that it is actually useful to have characters as subtitles because characters are much less ambiguous than the sound, so reading complements listening. Without having any transcript, it's often hard to understand what is being said, unless your listening is good enough already. Often missing two words in a sentence leads to not understanding anything, even the words you actually know, because they all kind of blend into each other.

What you could try to do is to download some of these shows, and then watch them with your wife together, and have her repeat tricky sentences to you and pick out the important words. It will be extra work for your wife, but it might be OK if the TV series is actually interesting enough for her. Unfortunately, without characters, you are dependent on other people's help since pinyin is not used for actual writing, only for noting pronunciation.

One word of warning -- starting to watch TV series is one of the most humiliating and humbling experiences you will go through. It will kick your ass. Don't give up.You will need to finish about 30-50 full episodes before it starts getting significantly better (provided that your listening and vocabulary are at a sufficient level).

[Hugh]

Have you considered finding one or two Skype language exchange partners? Google around for websites that let you host an exchange profile, and you'll easily get partners. By having several language partners you can cover the same material multiple times without feeling like you're wasting other people's time.

Also, I think continued use of ChinesePod will serve you well. They also offer paid teaching at any level, although it is fairly expensive.

[Neil_H]

I have put some posts up about exchange partners on sites like gumtree but received no responses. I was hoping to get some different listening practice with someeone else but that seems to have failed. As gumtree works per city perhaps I should try London!

My wife is happy to go through TV programs and explain them to me. We just need something to get on and do.

We watch a lot of Chinese films together with her translating either Cantonese or Mandarin for me.

Happy to download and watch if you can tell me where to get them from. We have all the facilites in the lounge to work through these. (PC linked to TV or PS3).

Thanks

[renzhe]

I've posted links to three threads, which have links for online watching and downloading.

There are more suggestions (and links) in this thread.

Keep in mind that just watching is not enough at this stage. You need to note, remember, learn, study, practice, repeat, etc. Remember recurring phrases, try to use them in conversation, parrot them until your pronunciation is perfect, that sort of work. Look at these things as study material whose primary purpose is learning.

Once you get better, there are shows which are really worth watching for their quality alone, but they might be out of your reach at this stage.

[amandagmu]

well, I don't know if they would do it for someone with only pinyin, but I recommend the online Skype thing too - and boy do I know what you mean about beginners versus above intermediate. What worked for me was finding a place that would do Skype lessons (audio or video) at my level. I had one teacher who ran out of topics and didn't really know how to teach people above intermediate (she couldn't explain complicated grammatical patterns and she couldn't figure out how to prepare a newspaper lesson with vocab for me) Anyways, at $12 per hour roughly, I dropped her after three lessons or so. (Luckily, the first one was free -- she seemed fine at first...) The next place I tried to get a lesson was ChinesePod, but they seemed to be having "issues" with getting back to me so I dropped that idea. In the end, I took some lessons with 1-on-1 mandarin (based in Beijing) and liked them a lot. They gave me a reputable teacher who agreed to use a book I already in my possession. I'm not sure what else they can do for someone who's only doing pinyin/conversation, but probably a lot since they're specialty is supposedly an emphasis on conversation.

Also, I had a rude experience in Wangfujing Foreign Languages bookstore, I wonder if anyone had this happen to them before. I was in the Chinese learning section looking for a book to take my one-on-one teacher with advanced grammatical patterns - perhaps a newspaper reading or news listening book. Basically just to use as a guide for our lessons. There were two other foreigners at the time: a low beginner (Korean? who spoke English) and a high beginner/low intermediate (Australian, with his whole expat family). I was the only one dealing entirely in English... and the only one who for the life of me could not get them to help me more than 5 seconds. They were real keen on helping the other two and selling them crap but told me they had no newspaper or news reading books. At all. Maybe I'll like to try an ancient story book? That was the end of that. I walked to a real Wangfujing bookstore and bought a book instead.

[Neil_H]

On the subject of having to learn characters there is a British born Chinese friend we know that can not read many characters or write them. He can speak Mandarin to a fluent level and has worked in China for the last 10 years.

He confirmed that characters help with the tones and getting you to split up what words mean but he never found them necessary to speak and understand Chinese.

This took me by surprise that a guy with Chinese parents who has been working over there for 10 years can't read street signs!

I guess that because he learnt Mandarin as a child it is not the same for him.

[renzhe]

I think that the 10 years in China is the important part here. That's the kind of immersion you don't get in the UK.

Having an extended family who speak Mandarin is better than only having your wife. Having a Chinese school is better than only having an extended family. Having 1 billion people around you all speaking Mandarin is still better. The more immersion you have, the easier it is to pick up the language.

I can't cite any studies, but I'm pretty sure that there is a very strong correlation between reading a lot and vocabulary. People who cannot read tend to have a very limited vocabulary. I think this is true in any language, it's just that Chinese poses a much higher barrier to basic literacy than most other languages. You can still be fluent, but very very limited.

[Hugh]

The Mixxer (http://www.language-exchanges.org/) and Langex (http://www.langex.net/) are good for hosting exchange profiles. I actually get more requests than I want (also a lot of learners are quite pushy about getting you to help them practice their target language).

[feihong]

Although I did spend a year in China I did most of my learning outside of the country. When I got back to the US, even regular access to native speakers did not help improve my vocabulary very much at all. Watching TV shows only helped a little. My vocabulary did not really take off until I started doing a significant amount of reading. So my opinion is basically the same as renzhe's: you hit a plateau that you remain at for a very long time until you become willing/able to learn to read.

The only point on which I differ with other advanced learners is that my regular reading practice did not start with comics, books, or other traditional media. Instead it was video games (all downloaded from the Chinese internet, of course). This worked out really well for me, because the amount of text was relatively small, the difficulty was usually fairly low, and the game mechanics themselves test your comprehension (often I was not able to advance until I understood what the game was telling me to do).

[Glenn]

For what it's worth, I agree with renzhe and feihong. Literacy has the advantage of allowing you to come across words in different contexts from where you'd probably hear them spoken, and in allowing you to check your hearing. If you can read the Chinese subtitles you can check to make sure what you heard is actually what you heard, for instance. And if you can read a book you're likely to pick up on more poetic or literary ways of saying things and thereby enriching your vocabulary. For instance, not everything would be 好厲害: you could say it in other ways (although unfortunately I don't know of any other way of saying that, really (unless you count 太厲害了 ^^;; )).

[amandagmu]

renzhe is 100% correct - think of people you know who speak English but never read newspapers, magazines, or novels... but maybe they watch a helluva lot of TV. I know America is full of them! The only unfortunate thing is when they enter my classroom and I must deal with them...

[valikor]

Am I the only person who thinks that learning characters might actually make things easier (I'm NOT talking about writing characters by hand)? Depending on your goals, it might not be worth it (ie, if you really just want to be able to survive on a basic level in China, and have very simple conversations)

But if you plan on continuing to study for a while, it will probably pay off. Learning new vocabulary is actually much EASIER if you know characters. Right?

For example, when I learned the word for squirrel (song1shu3) 松鼠, I never even put it into Anki. But, I have remembered it, because I know the first character song1 is a kind of tree (pine), and the second one means mouse. Both are common chars. Thinking of a squirrel as a big mouse in a pine tree made it extremely easy to remember, even for a person who regularly struggles with vocabulary.

Or what about words like 助手 = assistant? help + hand = assistant. An assistant is your helping hand. Much easier if you know the actual meaning of the word. If I told you zhu4shou3 means assistant, you would probably put it into your flashcard software, or have to study it quite a few times before being able to remember. I think the majority of words are like this. And chengyu would be damn near impossible to learn if you don't know characters, but not so difficult if you do (except for the sheer number of them).

Chinese has so many synonyms that I think it would be horrible to be stuck to pinyin.

My recommendation to the original poster (even if he's not interested in it, which is fine) would be to slowly work on recognizing common characters. Don't worry about writing them. This will open up many more resources to you--and much better ones--and thus make learning easier. I also think it will make Chinese more interesting to you, thus giving you more motivation, and probably making it "easier" in the long term (in a sense).