I need to start over

[querido]

I had a nice obsession/compulsion working for me for a couple of years but it wore off. Now, after a number of distractions, my Chinese studies are scrambled and I'm having trouble getting started again.

You know, there's this resistance when facing a hard task, but once that barrier is overcome I can apply myself whole-heartedly. Does this happen to you?

I already have enough books, websites, methodologies, algorithms, etc. Looking at one, thumbing through, then another, I don't see a compelling plan or road to follow. I'm exhausted with the formerly interesting questions about methodology, but they pop up no matter which way I turn. Like this: I could start with New HSK level one. One way? Both ways? Employ my custom algorithm or accept the flashcard program as a "black box"? Which flashcard program? Etc. Or this: I need a tutor. On line or off? Prepare with one of my books or passively accept whatever the tutor suggests? And then I can see this: after a few rehearsed sentences there's a black hole, a void. "Gee guy, there's nothing in there; how long have you been studying?; where is your *mind*?" Is anyone else terrified by this, enough to avoid speaking to anyone in Chinese?

-"If you dread talking to people so much, why do you want to learn their language??"

-"That's an interesting question. But, it's an intellectual pursuit; I don't have to explain why I might be driven to this or that interest."

-"How can you say you're "driven"? You haven't really studied for months!"

-"Hmm. Well, if I haven't eaten or slept right, or haven't exercised, or if I'm just getting old, this isn't a crime; I'll just soldier on, "one step at a time"."

-"What if you die before you get anywhere?"

-"Well, that isn't the worst possible fate. What I need to be able to say is that I didn't give up."

-"Your life, dude."

-"Yes, this is my life."

What is the proverb (I'm sure there are many) that goes something like "dripping water cuts rock"? There are others, in religion, chess, martial arts, philosophy of war, etc., something like: "first you must master yourself". This idea is not new, that achieving anything higher than basest instinct calls for a neverending struggle for the higher aspiration or ideal, a struggle against oneself.

Here's another one: "Physician, heal thyself" => Hire a live tutor, find a Chinese speaking friend, go out to dinner, movies, etc. *Who knew* that learning Chinese would demand all of this? I did; I've been here before :-(.

:-)

[abcdefg]

An eloquent appraisal and I can indeed relate. My whole life has been a series of "re-starts." Sometimes I've fallen victim to the seductive dictum "If it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing to excess." Then I sustain a "training injury" or just plainly get burnt out. "Pacing" can be a bear.

I've also found that for me to continue doing something that requires a lot of effort over time, I must treat myself to generous doses of the "goodie" in it fairly often and not be a stern ascetic who defers, defers, defers. What constitutes "reward" will of course differ from person to person. For me, being able to come to China and socialize with Chinese friends in that language is such a treat that it offsets a couple hundred hours of boring flashcard drills. For you, it may well be something different.

[jbradfor]

Personally, I'm surprised that I've managed to sustain studying Chinese for as long as I have; usually I too would get bored. I think I've done it by only doing things that I find fun. For now, that means ignoring the books I bought, letting my speaking get worse, having an ungodly huge flashcard backlog (it was up near 2000 cards....), and just reading comics. Not balanced, not the "most optimal" learning I could do for the time, but it keeps me happy; and if I'm happy, I keep going.

Perhaps for a while you should just ignore what you "should" study, and do whatever you enjoy?

[creamyhorror]

I already have enough books, websites, methodologies, algorithms, etc. Looking at one, thumbing through, then another, I don't see a compelling plan or road to follow. I'm exhausted with the formerly interesting questions about methodology, but they pop up no matter which way I turn. Like this: I could start with New HSK level one. One way? Both ways? Employ my custom algorithm or accept the flashcard program as a "black box"? Which flashcard program? Etc. Or this: I need a tutor. On line or off? Prepare with one of my books or passively accept whatever the tutor suggests?

In the face of so many choices you should just adopt a grazing approach and find whatever you enjoy most and are reasonably sure is providing sufficient learning value per hour. Don't spend your time worrying about optimising your learning; just try to get going on something.

And then I can see this: after a few rehearsed sentences there's a black hole, a void. "Gee guy, there's nothing in there; how long have you been studying?; where is your *mind*?" Is anyone else terrified by this, enough to avoid speaking to anyone in Chinese?

I don't even know how this follows from your previous sentences. If I were forced to speak at random without a topic, I too would run out of things to say very quickly. In English even.

If speaking worries you so much, keep inputting data via reading, listening to radio/podcasts and watching shows. Don't put pressure on yourself to be able to speak/produce, at least not until you've gotten all comfortable with processing Chinese again.

In sum, ease your way back into Chinese and cut through neuroses with simple rationality (not too much "thinking twice").

[querido]

Thank you abcdefg, jbradfor and creamyhorror.

I'll consider your advice.

[bande]

I ended up taking a couple of years off from Chinese and it wasn't that harmful in the end. While you may not want to take such a long period of time off, don't torture yourself for a simple break. Still, if you have time and the money, consider the other travel suggestions and not worry about any new language learning.

[rezaf]

Jbradfor is right. The one thing that I've learned after four years is that learning Chinese is a long game（full of winning and losing). Sometimes you should study hard and use all of your complicated methods and sometimes you should just enjoy it by watching a tv series(what I have been doing these days). Sometimes you should Forget about your goals and just enjoy the process.

[anonymoose]

Well, I think everyone else has more or less said it already.

Try not to put too much pressure on yourself. People are naturally better at things they enjoy, so try to enjoy your Chinese more because it will be more effective in the long term, even if not the short term.

[amandagmu]

Well, glad to know I'm not the only one in the same boat. Unfortunately, I'm most of the way through a PhD program and lacking the motivation to complete the final task due to the issues you related above...

I agree with the previous posters. I bought a bunch of movies and have been watching those along with junky game shows on TV.

EDIT: forgot to add. One thing that has always kept me entertained/learning is finding talks, seminars, or lectures to attend on a subject I like. Of course, this is much easier if you're currently living in a Chinese-speaking environment. You can, for example, go to a culture class at the Culture Yard if you're in Beijing, or sit in a talk at the 国家图书馆 , 王府井书店, or a conference at a university (most are open to the public). Just be sure to find a subject you're at least mildly interested in. For me, that's usually something (anything) to do with sports, history, politics, or literature. I suppose some of this stuff might also exist online, such as in the ChinesePod archive, or in various 记录片 on youku or tudou. Just start searching.

[Lu]

My whole life has been a series of "re-starts."

This is true for me as well. Now I just give myself a break, and another, and another. When I do the things I planned (go through my anki, read ten pages in my book, take the stairs ten stories instead of the lift, clean contacts before going to bed) it's good, if not, there's another chance tomorrow. The all-or-nothing approach would otherwise quickly result in nothing. I've been through several rather big rounds of anki backlogs already and I've only been using it for a year or so. I just start over again.

[nsbane]

A bit of advice:

Make a basic study plan using two or three resources, and stick to it. It can be tempting to collect a ton of books, flash cards, online subscriptions, etc... But you can become paralyzed by all the choices - where do you start? What do you start with? And when you become distracted or bored, it will be so easy to drop whatever you're studying and look to the next book. This is something I have a tendency to do, and I've found it just slows down my learning.

When I first started Chinese, I used three resources: a tutor, a text book (New Practical Chinese Reader) and Skritter (online resource for writing characters). I would self-study a chapter for a week in the text, learning all the characters with Skritter. Then for two hours, I would meet my tutor and read aloud all of the dialogues. She would correct my pronunciation, and then engage me in some conversation practice.

As my Chinese got stronger, I was able to add resources. Now I also subscribe to ChinesePod, and listen to a lesson a week. I bought the Chinese Breeze readers and read a couple chapters a day. I've bought a few grammar workbooks, and soon I'll be adding a chapter a week to my studying as well. I also have goals like "learn 75 characters a week" (which is easy because I live in China). But I still stick to my core study plan of text + tutor + Skritter.

I still have that impulse to "collect" and I channel that toward multimedia. I download a lot of podcasts, music, and TV shows. I skip from one to thing to the next, whatever strikes my interest.

(as for teacher, I think it's self-evidently better to have a live teacher, rather than one on-line. When I return to the states, I plan on looking for a Chinese student at the local college studying abroad. It is really difficult for tutors to come up with compelling lessons - imagine trying to teach someone English, who only knows 150 words. Textbooks provide great structure. I've been pretty successful with my approach - self study all the characters and dialogues, meet with a tutor and read through them while she corrects my pronunciation, and then engage her in conversation. Any native speaker can do that).

... and one final word. When I started my study plan, it was a little rocky, and I wasn't sure I was cut out for it. But I stuck to it. Just two months later, my progress in Chinese was amazing. You need to stick to it, give it a couple months, and you will make so much progress.

[trisha2766]

My whole life has been a series of "re-starts." Sometimes I've fallen victim to the seductive dictum "If it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing to excess." Then I sustain a "training injury" or just plainly get burnt out. "Pacing" can be a bear.

Maybe we are the same person?

Anymore the only time I can study is while I'm taking care of my 2.5 yr. old. Which makes some types of studying pretty much impossible. I don't even want to think about how many characters I've probably forgotten.

As far as speaking to people goes, I'm in pretty much the same situation. I'm taking an adult class at a weekend Chinese school. I don't get much time to speak in class mostly because I just can't quite keep up with some of the people whose speaking skills are much better than mine. And I have access to a Chinese Corner while I'm there, but I never use it to actually practice conversation - I wouldn't know where to begin. It just feels so awkward. Well, I would know where to begin ('Wo jiao ..., wo xue hanyu hen duo nian le ...') but then I'd just be repeating the same thing every week to the same people. And then anything else I'd want to say I would have no idea of how to say it.

I have a theory which may be entirely wrong, but I'm choosing to believe it anyway at least for now. I think that if I got my listening skills to a much better level, like where I could watch Chinese TV shows and understand pretty much everything. And then listened and listened and listened and listened and listened, etc. that speaking would come pretty easily and naturally.

I'm still trying to figure out how to improve my listening skills. I don't think listening to slower audio in Chinese or textbook stuff has really helped, for me anyway. Or at least not helped enough. I'm currently leaning towards thinking that what I really need to do now is work on increasing my vocabulary. A lot. My listening skills are better than they once were and I think at this point that really not knowing the words I'm hearing is slowing me down when watching TV shows.

So my plan is to increase my vocabulary, then focus on listening practice, all the while keeping pronunciation skills in back of my head but worrying too terribly much about it until my listening skills are better. Then maybe hire a local tutor just to focus on pronunciation.

Of course next month I may have another plan.

Please let us know what you decide to do.

[querido]

Thank you everybody.

1. I uninstalled/deleted everything related to Python development (flashcard and other program modification). Anki's plugin mechanism provides sufficient access to the algorithm with just a text editor. So, Anki gets the call, again, with my minor changes.

2. I lovingly put away for now all of my books designed for children. The idea was beautiful, that I would apprehend the language, history and civic culture from the bottom up, :-) but it was too impractical.

3. I put away my old flashcard decks, all of my text/audio/video snippets, etc.

4. I restarted from page one of the Hanyu Kouyu series "Red" (Elementary Spoken Chinese, Peking University Press, 2nd Edition). See, this *series* goes farther than I'll probably ever get (with fl--ncy), so it defines a new little world for me, replacing People's Education Press Yuwen. College age people. Let me know when they make a series for old people who want to talk about the Cold War and "kids these days" and stuff like that.

5. I composed an email (in English) to my local Chinese school, asking for help finding a tutor. Then, I pressed "Send". No reply yet. I might retry in Chinese and I know of another lead locally too. Chineseteachers.com would be an alternative. I've used it twice and thought it was very productive, but it's agony clicking on "Connect Now".

Want to hear more?

This is my new routine so far: I clip the dialogues out of the sound files, place them in a random/repeat playlist, and let that go.

I'm making a new flashcard deck. The effort here is not a problem for two reasons- I already know almost all of the words, and I'm *not agonizing over which, or all, of the ABC definitions to use*, instead using, in most cases, the simple definition given in the book (which is the meaning as the word is used in the text, in *this* lesson). In Wenlin- Hanzi [tab] pinyin [tab] definition [return], for all of the New Words in the lesson (but not the Additional Words), save to a text file, and import into Anki.

Here is the justification for using these simple definitions: The purpose of these flashcards now (I'm repeatedly reminding myself) is just to remember how to write (with other reinforcement incidental). All of the rest must come from the effort of my mind's engagement with the audio (and with a tutor).

After all those hours working with my previous word collection, I'm not too worried about forgetting them permanently. My idea is to hurry and re-acquire my 3000 words while ensuring listening/speaking fl--ncy with them *this time*. Then maybe I'll bring back my children's stories (to read and enjoy!) someday. Two years in children's books, becoming unbalanced toward reading and writing, and now up to two years in Hanyu Kouyu, to restore balance, should be *enough* for simple useable language! I believe it will be.

I see now that I *do* have a tiny core of real useable language. Expanding it is... possible.

More?

When I was studying chess I took exactly one paid lesson, with a titled player. We were studying one of my games and reached the point where I moved a knight to a very good square, a goal which I had sought with my previous few moves. He commented negatively, and I said something like "Man, that knight is beautiful there!". His reply, with a thick Russian accent: "knight not girl".

This also applies to my "beautiful" idea of grasping all of Chinese language, history and culture "from the bottom up", as it is taught to children; it was outrageously impractical, but aside from that, it was beautiful.

[querido]

I've proceeded as described above, and have established a good language-exchange as described here.

Now, I have an announcement to make if you don't mind hearing it: I speak Chinese a little. :-) Now proven true. :-) Clear road ahead. :-)

Thanks everybody. :-)

[27.0]

I second that. The most important thing in learning is that you have fun.

Once you have a basic understanding of Chinese you can focus on things you enjoy. Like watching Chinese movies, listening to music, or reading books. Whatever culture you like to consume, it's very important that you consume it.

[querido]

Language exchange? Losing friends. Terribly depressing.

Now I have, as friends I think, an in-person tutor 鍾老师 (retired middle school teacher) and her husband 何先生 (retired mathematician (same degree as mine)), both recently arrived from China, her daughter (with American husband) and granddaughter (who is the same age as my granddaughter). They're native Cantonese speakers; that's O.K. My tutor is certified to teach putonghua through middle school and there's no problem.

To our first meeting I took my books and a laptop and showed the tutor much of what I've collected- tools, audio/video, etc. I showed her my reading and writing and reading aloud, and I recited children's poems from memory (they were amused). It was evident that I could learn on my own but couldn't converse (as I've explained to you). She did ask me about my priorities and I explained that *with her* I want to converse. She selected the P.U.P. Hanyu Kouyu (Spoken Chinese, red/orange/yellow) series to coordinate us (to prepare herself with, so she knows what I know) but isn't going to follow it exactly; we'll be making "field trips" to the grocery store, restaurant, etc. Two-hour meetings.

Interestingly:

As with my language-exchange friends in China, she had never seen a flashcard program.

I showed her my best grammar book and she said we needn't use it (despite my having said I've never studied Chinese grammar). O.K. with me.

[abcdefg]

I am glad that you are bouncing back. Best wishes with your new tutor and her family. I've had the privelege of being "adopted" like that, and found it made for a very pleasant and fertile learning environment.

[querido]

(to Hao Zheng: see my previous post)

To abcdefg:

From the beginning, I imagined someday helping a child (my granddaughter, potentially).

I hadn't thought about helping an older person- not only with English, but with having a helpful and trustworthy friend in a new country, etc. Her husband showed a special interest in my books, etc. He speaks very little English; I want to show him around and buy him lunch and stuff. :-)

[Meng Lelan]

Wow. So they are Cantonese speakers - from Hong Kong? And how did she learn to speak putonghua then? How did you get connected with them?

[querido]

To Meng Lelan:

Hey, thanks for your interest.

Cantonese, from Hong Kong, yes. The daughter has been here for some years with her American husband; the parents arrived recently, having retired. The tutor (her mother) has (they said) a certificate of putonghua proficiency from the Chinese government for teaching in school. I made sure: I repeated in my initial email and in person that I am studying putonghua and simple characters, and she said "through middle school, no problem". She speaks clearly enough for me. (And I speak (what little I can) clearly enough for them! Do I sound like a newscaster? )

How did I get connected?

About a year ago I discovered by googling around (didn't really expect it for some reason) a Chinese School for children in my town. A link from there took me to the...

"[mytown] Chinese Association". Check it out (google): Miami Overseas Chinese Association; North Houston Chinese Association; etc.

...then, I finally composed an email introducing myself, my motives, study history, situation, etc., sent it to the Association, and they kindly forwarded it to their mailing list! I've had four contacts so far. One is my tutor and one more is also promising.

(P.S. You know, I didn't forget my "哪里哪里" and "不好". And they laughed...)

I gotta mow the lawn. 再见！