So watched this great Chinese movie called The Captain (my review here) and can't help but think that Mandarin second language learners will have so much fun trying to differentiate the pronounciation of 机长 (captain) and 机场 (airport). The tones are the same, but the pronunciation different - with 机长 it is jīzhǎng and 机场 jīchǎng.
On this beautiful sunny day, I discovered that if I look up stroke order for the traditional character 肅 in three different places, I get three different results.
The Pleco mobile app seems to represent mainland China. Why does China have official guidelines for traditional characters, you ask? I know not. Singapore certainly doesn't. But China does.
Have learned 100/1000 Chinese characters using mnemonics and memory palace techniques :). Apps I'm using to do this: Tofu Learn to write the characters and Du Chinese as a graded reader.
🐉 There are lots of Mandarin/English puns circulating for the Year of the Dragon playing on the Mandarin word for dragon: 龍 (lóng).
Another form of pun uses lóng 龍 in Mandarin vs lóng 攏 in Taiwanese which means all/everything.
The characters 龍賀 (lóng-hè) mean "congratulations for the dragon year" in Mandarin. In Taiwanese this sounds similar to "everything is good" (lóng hó 攏好)
So I guess if I understand this podcast I am upper intermediate when it comes to Mandarin? Unfortunately while I understand this podcast quite well, no way can I speak this quickly. It is so weird that my listening skills are soooo much better than my speaking skills 🤣
We're blessed to have so many tools to use to learn #Mandarin free. It has made learning the language so much faster and easier. Here are the apps and courses I'm using to improve my Mandarin.
@liztai Thank you for such a great list. Big Pleco+Outlier fan as well. Keep meaning to try their flashcard feature. I’m going to give Tofu Learn a try off the back of your list as I’ve been using Skritter instead.
As my #Mandarin journey started with ChinesePod it's so nice to see it given a mention. I hadn't realised it was still going. They went through a rough patch at one point.
Big challenge for me is translating characters on flashcards into the ability to read anything at all.
It's interesting, what I'm seeing in the current Chinese Primary 1 textbooks. They're using Singaporean terms like 巴士 for "bus", but they're also teaching the formal pronoun 您 that nobody bothered with during my childhood, and so far I haven't caught a single concession to local pronunciation. #Mandarin
My brother was disgusted to hear they're working so hard to teach the polite pronoun, but I think it's nice that the next generation will be able to insult our cousins from the motherland on purpose instead of accidentally. :) #Mandarin
I managed to get myself up and out this afternoon for the first decent walk with the dogs this year.
Chilly, but a beautiful day, and thoroughly worth it.
As a bonus, I spotted a bit of wildlife.
as someone currently trying to learn #mandarin#chinese , i wonder if any #actuallyautistic or #audhd people noticed some particularities when it comes to language learning?
i'm doing an immersion focused approach and sometimes find myself missing the fixed structure that a school class or course provides.
(also it's hard to find good grammar explanations when you're often not even sure about the correct name of the structure you are looking for...)
How I memorize Chinese characters: First, I memorise a component, then if 2 or more components form a word, I create a story of how they came together. For example, for 好 (hao, good), which is made of 女 (nǚ, woman) and 子 (zĭ, child), I imagine a mother-in-law saying that a man with a woman and a child is a good thing 🤭.
I do encounter difficulties with less familiar words/if I can't come up with a good story. May have to use on memory palace techniques for those.
#Mandarin learning progress - memorised 50 characters so far. Upgrading my goal to 1000 characters in 2024 from 100. I think it's doable.
Watching one or two #CDrama episodes daily also helping a lot.
About memorisation: Not sure why I found memory palace techniques taught by some language teachers too complex. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I already understand a lot of words, so adding that extra layer of complexity is confusing. 🤷♀️
Updated this article with an extra para on the #Malaysian school system & realise how confusing it is. I speak 4 languages only because I had the luck of growing up in certain areas & studying in schools where Malay, English and Chinese are used often. These days, it's not unusual to find graduates who can only speak ONE language. In #Malaysia, this can be limiting, especially if you cannot speak Bahasa Malaysia, the national language.
#Mandarin#Language learning progress: 30/100 characters learned & memorised so far. HSK 2 vocab nearly 80% done. I may complete HSK 4 vocab in Q1 after all.
May be upping my goal for learning characters to 1000 by end of 2024. My brain seems to like the Tofu Learning app's flashcard system. Things actually stick!
Once upon a time, I took a HSK1 class thinking I could improve my Mandarin that way. It wasn't. After spending half of 2023 researching strategies to improve my Mandarin fluency, I now have a plan in place, detailed in this post below:
I gave myself a very low bar of learning 100 characters this year. I am currently using the free app Tofu Learn to learn my characters and I have learned 20 characters in 20 days. The app has lots of decks that you can download to use, and I am using one where they teach you the radicals, then give you a story why the radicals combined makes said word. This proved to be very effective for me as the story behind the word makes it easier for to remember it.
In 2024, I'm determined to improve my Mandarin vocabulary to a point where I can understand Chinese dramas without subtitles. Here's how I plan to do it.