[paninaro]

(12-29-2013 04:48 AM)Suits Wrote:  

Quote:

Unless you are planning on doing translation work, a vocabulary of 1000-1500 characters is far more than you need to read a newspaper.

Statements like these cause me to question your exact qualifications.

I think you're being too harsh on this poster, especially in light of the relatively good information they provided. Whether the number is 1,000 or 3,000, I don't think that's really the major point. What he pointed out (and also what you did) is that there are different methods for studying Chinese, and you should do what's best for you. My "study method" follows something similar to what he suggested. It works for me and is line with my goals, and it works for how I have learned languages in the past. Others will have different goals, or learn differently, and there will be other methods that work better for them.

[Sargon of Akkad]

There are also some aspects of the Chinese language(s) that can be considered easy, which I haven't heard many people mention.

One is the fact that Chinese, unlike English and Japanese, has very few loanwords from other languages. At the very most you'll usually just have technical terminology and idioms that are derived from Classical Chinese. This means that many technical terms and compound words will be easier to learn and to understand from the context if you know even basic Chinese vocabulary. For instance, a while back I was having a conversation with a Chinese girl who was talking about having to take a linguistics course. Here she mentioned the word I hadn't heard before: "句法 Ju4fa3", which means "syntax", a word which, despite its technicality, someone with even basic knowledge of Chinese should be able to understand even if they've never heard it before (the word literally means something along the lines of "sentence law").

Imagine a Chinese person learning English, on the other hand, hearing the word "syntax" for the first time. It's unlikely (s)he would have a clue what you're talking about without havnig heard the word before. Hell, even a lot of English speakers don't know what that word means. This is an impractical aspect of English, whose vocabulary consists, to a large extent, of words taken from Latin, Greek and French. So if you're learning English or another Germanic language with Latin/Greek loanwords, you'll frequently have the problem of hearing words you won't be able to understand by themselves. Compare the following technical terms in English and their Chinese equivalents:

Chinese: 動物學 dong4wuxue2 ("animal-studies")
English: zoology

Chinese: 皮膚科 pi2fu1ke1 ("skin-science")
English: dermatology

Chinese: 人類學 ren2lei4xue2 ("humanity-studies")
English: anthropology

Chinese: 詞法 ci2fa3 ("word-law")
English: (linguistic) morphology

Chinese: 步行者 bu4xing2zhe3 (something like "walk-go-er")
English: pedestrian

Chinese: 神話 shen2hua4 (approx.: "god-speak")
English: mythology

In most of the English examples, if you haven't heard them before (or you don't know Greek or Latin) you're pretty much fucked. Japanese has a similar problem in that they have a lot of compound words derived from Classial Chinese and English. If you're learning Japanese and you don't know Chinese or English you'll not only have to learn the normal Japanese vocabulary, but also a shitload of compound words derived from Classical Chinese (think Japanese "east" = "higashi", "north" = "kita", while "northeast" is "tohoku", from the Middle Chinese pronunciation of "東北 dongbei").

What this means is that not all aspects of Chinese have to be difficult. Due to the amount of compound words and relative scarcity of foreign words it can often be easy to understand words you've never heard before based on their context.

[Soyouz]

Great worksheet! I’m also learning Chinese, I will share some of my tips.

To learn a language, most experts will agree that you must practice one hour a day. I find it hard to stop one hour per day to improve my Chinese, so here are two things I do to save time :

Pimsleur/Audiobooks : I listen to Pimsleur whenever I have a chance. I need to walk 20 minutes to go to my office everyday. I use those 20 minutes to listen to Pimsleur, or a Chinese audiobook.
I also let Pimsleur play when I’m cooking. While I’m not 100% focused, it still helps to hear Chinese non-stop during my day...

Music : I don’t mind listening to Pimsleur/Audiobook while walking or cooking, but I find it quite boring while going to gym or jogging. It’s easy to find and download free MP3s on the internet. Oh, and if you bring a girl over and have a playlist in her language, you gain extra points! I find my songs on youtube, and convert them to MP3s using those two websites :
http://www.listentoyoutube.com/
http://anything2mp3.com/

Learning a language can be quite boring... Here are two ways to make it more interesting

Language partner : I like to always have two language partner. A nice girl that I will flirt with and try to bang. But that’s not the most efficient way because my focus won’t be on learning the language... I will also find a guy to practice with, so I will have better results with him.
Some websites to find a language partner :
-mylanguageexchange.com
-conversationexchange.com
-languageforexchange.com
I live in an international city (Montreal), where it’s easy to find a language partner. If you live in an area with no immigrants, I know there are some websites for practicing a language by webcam. Not sure which ones are good because I never had to try them.

Movies...I found plenty of Chinese movies. I will watch them first with English subtitles, and a second time with Chinese subtitles.
-to find movies, I use torrents (I won’t go into details about it, but you can easily find some informations on Google, or even this forum).
-for subtitles : http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/search

But learning a language is not only about fun... Hard work has to be done.

The traditional way :
-Start with a language class. Don’t go straight to Rosetta Stone/ Pimsleur without having a good foundation. Taking at least a beginner class is a must. Or hire a private teacher if you can’t go to a class.
-Studying grammar / characters : that’s the boring part, but it has to be done. I make some flaschards to learn the characters. I try to read about Chinese grammar once a week (Chinese grammar is easy, but someone learning another language will have to spend more time on the grammar).

[Apoc]

To get started I would also recommend some apps like ChineseSkill and HelloChinese to learn vocab/grammar and Memrise/Anki to study characters. I've been using these excellent apps since I started learning four months ago and I have a feeling they have saved me both time and money compared to going to a beginner class. Depends on what kind of person you are, I enjoy studying by myself. After a while I also started listening to Pimsleur and later private tutoring from Italki.

It could be easier to lose motivation if you don't have a regular class to attend to, but in the beginning motivation is rarely the problem anyway (how could anyone take up such a gigantic task of learning a language without having motivation??). I will probably sign into a class later if I lose focus and start slipping on my studying schedule.

[Fast Eddie]

I've been studying Chinese on and off for a while now and what I've found pretty helpful lately is the following.

There is an app called Pleco, which among other functionalities contains a flash card system that allows you to turn dictionary entries into flashcards and then test yourself. It's a pretty robust system with plenty of options, so you can create different categories, choose which categories are going to be in given test, how many cards per test, etc.

Now when I want to learn some vocab, I simply add those words to the flashcard system, which takes like 5 minutes for 20-30 words, and constantly quiz myself throughout the day when I'm on the subway, waiting in line, etc. Also, in order to solidify my progress, I periodically combine all the categories, old words and new ones, and quiz myself on the entirety of my character base. Hammering this in time after time leads to pretty good progress.

What I've said so far is only for expanding your vocabulary and learning to read, for which it's very good. But looking at a dictionary definition of a word, and even the example sentences, will not really help you use the words or-especially- catch them in a conversation. For that, I like to just set up language exchange sessions. During those sessions I'll come prepared with a list of complex words (such as jie, receive) which I learned in the previous few days and ask my partner how they're typically used in a sentence. I'll also ask them to look at my list of words and just randomly give a monologue that contains all of them so i can hone my ear to recognize them in everyday speech. Then of course the typical pronunciation help etc.

I find that this system works pretty well for me. The limiting factor is definitely getting the language practice required to fully integrate those words into your brain so you can access them in real time when listening and speaking. It's very similar to fight training: you can go through the moves all you want, but you're gonna have to spar before they become a useful part of your arsenal.