Back from China

It was a great trip!

Phase 3: I went to Dalian, took my intensive course and loved it. I did a total of 26 hours of private lessons. Classes were all conversation, with me making vocab lists as we went along. I picked up about 200 new words.

I did pretty well in conversation. My main problem was trying to recall words that I already learned. This happened several times per class, slowing down the conversation, but I usually remembered the word. I'd never used many of my new words in conversation before that. A friend of mine once told me that one doesn't "own" a word until one uses it several times in conversation. Very true. Another problem I had was trying to remember what tones a word has. This problem wasn't too bad really, less than 10 times total, and I suspect it will work itself out with time.

They were very impressed with my pronunciation, and amazed that I was able to get so good in a short time without living in China. I attribute this mostly to Pimsleur at the sentence level, but have to credit Sinosplice, FSI Chinese and Mandarin Chinese Phonetics at the syllable level. 

At one point in one class, I asked my teacher to do a pronunciation check. I pronounced about 10 words that have given me trouble in the past, including all the ones that confused conversation partners. You see, I'd fixed these all on my own, and wanted confirmation that they finally sound right. Of these, I only missed one - yu3. I was really happy about that, and I can even say yu3 correctly now.

Probably my greatest nemesis has been lv3xing2. Here's an example of a word that one could think they are pronouncing right by using Pimsleur or chorusing, but might actually be very wrong. This drives home the point that one should spend the relatively small amount of time required to make sure one knows the correct way to produce each syllable. Once again, I recommend doing the first 6 tapes of FSI, reading the descriptions in Sinosplice, and chorusing the syllables in Mandarin Phonetics. Other products will the do the same thing; these are just the ones I know about.

TLI Dalian is an excellent school, and I highly recommend it. 

The rest of the trip: From Dalian, I went to Beijing. We saw the great wall, then took a train down to Yichang. From Yichang, we took a cruise up the Yangtze to Chongqing. I watched my friend get married there, then flew home.

How was my language outside the classroom? Not as good as inside, but not bad. I got into many conversations. My first was with a guy at the cleaners who seemed to love Americans. I was pretty shaky, but came back the next day much more confident, and we understood each other pretty well. The best was a series of conversations I had with the needlepoint lady on the cruise. We talked for hours (yes - she was cute), all in Chinese. She said she didn't know there are people who aggressively seek conversation partners at an early stage in learning a language, but really liked the idea. That brings up an interesting point; I only had one person try really hard to practice English with me. She was a cute little girl on the long train ride, already quite fluent. Maybe I just lucked out.

The accent differences in Mardarin are major. For example, the needlepoint lady, who is from Yichang, pronounced chang2 as tang2. And how about those Chongqing folks, do they love "z" or what? Re4 was pronounced ze4. Chi1 was pronounced zi1. Shi4bu2shi4 was zi4bu2zi4. Very odd.

As for the "r" ending common in the north, I've come to some conclusions. Just about everyone hates yidianr; it seems like every time I said it, people repeated "yidian", which tells me yidianr is annoying to them. Never heard nar3, wan2, hua1. Heard na3li, war2, huar1. I'm sure I've left some out. I'm going to use something more like the Shanghai accent, like Chinesepod, than the Beijing. Also, I really dislike the kermit-the-frog thing that lots of men use in the north, like the man on pimsleur 1, so I won't do that.

There are lot's of synonyms that I've finally figured out which is the most common. For mandarin, han4yu3 is the clear winner. For usual, yi4ban1. Dan4shi4 beats out ke3shi4. I'm missing some here. It's very important to be able to recognize the synonyms, but it's nice for a beginner to use the most common form.

Phase 4: I made it through about half of the beginner lessons before I left for China, so I'll get those 100 or so words into [URL=http://supermemo.com/]supermemo[/URL]. I'm not going to do any new lessons for now though, so this phase is essentially finished. My end products for review are

1. all the new vocab in supermemo 

2. mp3s of the dialogs only for the lessons I've covered.

Sumary:  

All 4 phases are over, except for getting the words into supermemo. This should take a couple weeks. Now I'm going to try to move to Japan. So I won't be learning any new Mandarin for a while; just reviewing the old stuff. Hopefully doing flashcards and listening to Chinesepod will be enough to maintain a low -intermediate level in the spoken language.

I'm happy with what I've accomplished so far. Some statistics: 500 study hours, 2000 words, good pronunciation, fair listening skills, fair conversation. I believe another 500 hours will get me to: 5000 words, good pronunciation, good listening skills, good conversation. At that point I'll finally begin to concentrate on the written language.

Quit my Job, and preparing for my trip...

Happy happy joy joy, I'm unemployed! Now I have lot's of time to learn. So I'll take this opportunity to update stuff.

Phase 1 is over. Another big yippee! Pimsleur is awesome, but it's sweet to be finished. I still have to load the final 100 spreadsheet entries into supermemo, but that's a cake walk. The final stats, about 1400 supermemo entries. About 500 words, and 900 sentences, very well engrained in my brain.

Phase 2 is almost over. 3 more lessons to go. We've exhausted the entire syllabus that we were using as a vocabulary guide, and are now just conversing for an hour. This is so much nicer. Extrapolating the last 3 classes, I've will have learned 1000 words in 45 lessons, or 9 weeks. This was expensive, $100 per week, but it has been invaluable to me.

I think I'm using a little over half the words now. I used to think I was lagging by a week or two because I hadn't yet drilled the words enough. This is probably a contributor, but now I think whether or not I've used the recordings is a bigger contributor. In the beginning, due to some technical difficulties, it took a long time to begin using the recordings. I was 2 weeks into phase 2 before I began using them. Now I see clearly that I'm much more likely to use the words from the recordings then those I haven't gotten to yet. Being forced to pull them out while driving, with a set time limit, really helps evidently. Lesson learned: stay on top of the recordings. Don't let them fall behind.

Phase 3 will begin on the 23rd. I'm very excited. I want to be really aggressive about conversation in that one week of class. Not only in class, but from the moment I clear customs. I always speak English until I clear customs; I'm paranoid they'll think I'm worthy of questioning or something because I speak the language.

Phase 4 (yes, that's a new phase) is Chinesepod. I was able to listen to all 200+ Newbie lessons while at work the last week or so. Rather than download the dialogs, I just noted the new vocabulary. I got about 200 new words. Now that I'm at home, I'll probably download all the lessons for my trip. Even though I've been listening to a lot of English explanations in the newbie lessons, overall I feel Chinese pod has helped my listening a lot. And the advanced lessons are great to listen to for pure Chinese. Two very clear female voices, eloquent and beautiful. I catch quite a few phrases now, but am nowhere near comprehending the dialogs. It's a nice break from the slow pace of the newbies though.

FSI's first module is over. I was very pleased with the program; excellent descriptions of all aspects of pronunciation. The drills are very helpful too. Unfortunately I uncovered a problem that I didn't know I had. My tone recognition is not very good. After doing poorly on the FSI tone recognition drills, I confirmed with 2 other sites, shufawest and pinyin practice that I can recognize single syllable tones 80-90% of the time, and double syllable tones only 50-60% of the time. After a lot of fussing about this on another site, I've come to the conclusion that I just need a lot more listening practice. Time to be patient. I will try to do about 10 min per day tone recognition drills though, just in case that can really help.

So it looks like I'm in good shape for my trip. I'll probably try to memorize the 200 new words and cram them into into supermemo before I leave, but may not make it. If I do, my word count will be 500(pimsleur) + 1000(tutor) + 200(chinesepod) = 1700. Not enough of course, but not too shabby.

Started Chinesepod

I started listening to chinesepod this morning. It's much better than I thought it would be. I'm going to be using it to improve my listening skills (only listening to it at work). Due to time and ethical constraints, I won't be stripping it or looking at text. Just playing it as is.

Fine tuning my pronunciation

I've talked to about 10 native speakers now, 2 in real life and the rest on skype. Every one has been very surprised initially that they can understand me, or that I actually start out speaking Mandarin, or something. I guess there must be a lot of skype users who aren't too interested in good pronunciation. Anyway, after starting out really well, one guy burst my bubble the other day by not understanding a particular word I said.

It turns out while using Pimsleur I've been ignoring the differences between x and sh in some words for the sake of speed. Tsk tsk. Now this has carried over into my conversation, so I'm beating it back down. I'm being anal about this specific pronunciation, and I think I've got it licked now. But this got me thinking, it's time to review pronunciation again.

Reviewing pronunciation makes a lot sense. I now believe it's an iterative process. I did a big pronunciation pre-study to begin this journey, but I didn't try to perfect it, thinking it would be far more efficient to let the minor details work themselves out. And this has worked for the most part. But I've noticed some nagging little differences too, and I can't remember my training in every instance.

So I'll review now, but I have decided to try a different source. Getting complete pronunciation explanations from several different sources makes a lot of sense to me. There are advantages and disadvantages to most sources, so why not use them all? Of course, time is an issue. I wouldn't finish 2 complete beginners texts which cover the same material, for example, due to the amount of time required. But pronunciation explanations/drills can usually be completed in a few hours, so here we go.

I've begun using the first module of FSI Chinese. It's free, and is a very comprehensive unit from what I can tell. There are 6 "tapes", all 20 something minutes long. There is a PDF to stare at while the tape plays. It's free; I downloaded the PDF, but not the tapes. I just play them online.

Wow, I'm glad I decided to do this. they point out all sorts of little things I didn't know, or wasn't paying attention to before. I can't wait to get to the last tape, which covers mixed tones. I've been ignoring the differences between 3-2 & 2-2 tone words. Many sources tell you to pronounce a 3-2 as a 2-2, which is obviously wrong. Others tell you to pronounce a 3-2 as "half of a 3"-2. I've heard this is not quite right either. I can't wait to see how FSI handles it.

Planning Intensive Course

Phase 1 is still going strong. I really don't miss that third day. However, I'll be glad when this phase is over. I'm on lesson 77 now, so less than a month to go!  

Phase 2 is going really well. By using this tutor, I'm truly able to learn 20+ words per day. It feels really efficient. I'm still a little tentative when conversing with my tutor, but this is just a typical nervous problem I've had with all my tutors. My conversations with her are quite a bit better than the ones I had with my Japanese tutors, so I'm not worried about it.  

Here's what we do. I pick out the next topic in my syllabus, and post it in the chat box in skype. For the first 30 min, she gives me about 20 words that apply to the topic, types the pinyin, makes sure I can pronounce them and understand the meaning and usage. The last 30 min is conversation time. I try to post links to pictures that have some relation to the topic, and we talk about them. Most of the talking is on side issues, and we always add several vocab words. This happens 5-6am, before work. Skype reception seems to be the best at that time, and I'm more alert than in the evening. After the lesson, I go to work, and my tutor makes my list.  

She creates an excel spreadsheet for me that has columns for pinyin(word), English(word), Mandarin(word), pinyin(sentence), English(sentence), Mandarin(sentence). She mails this to me.  

When I get home from work, I check the spreadsheet for English and translation mistakes. I make sure the English sentence is literal enough so I can guess the correct Mandarin sentence. I also make sure I understand all the words and grammar. If I don't, I make a note to her to try again on the next lesson, and delete the whole line. I mail the corrected spreadsheet back to her.  

She makes a recording (of the sentences only), Learn in your Car style. By this I mean English-mandarin-mandarin, with big enough gaps for me to say the sentence without stopping the recording, but small enough for me to develop good speed. I'll explain how to get the correct gaps.  

Let the time it takes to say the sentence at native speed = t. I make the first gap a little longer, because it's a little harder. I use t + 2 sec. I make the second and third gaps t + 1 sec. To summarize, English(t+2)Mandarin(t+1)Mandarin(t+1). It's very important that she speaks the Mandarin at normal native speed. I don't want to talk too slow.  

She does this recording using audacity. I'm actually pretty pleased with myself getting her to learn audacity. Her previous recordings were of poor sound quality, and were not edited to give proper gaps. Now she produces a very high quality product. When she's finished, she emails the recording to me. Using this spacing, lesson recordings are about 5min long. After about 6 or 8 listens, I have the sentences down pretty well, and I put the text version into supermemo.  

While she's doing the recording over there in Shanghai, I memorize the day's vocab. I print out a list with 2 columns: pinyin(word), English(word). I peak at the word, cover the pinyin, and pronounce it in Mandarin. I work in sets of 5 to 7 words. It's much more effective than trying to go down the whole list of 20+ words in one shot. I work with a set until I can cover the Mandarin and remember all the words reasonably well. Then I move onto the next set, until I exhaust all the sets. I never learn from Mandarin to English, because that direction seems to take care of itself. I review the previous 3 days of vocab too. Once at lunch, and once in the evening. When a list gets 4 days old, I stick it in supermemo.  

Phase 2 takes about 3 hrs per day; 1 hour lesson and 2 hrs study. I feel I'm actually learning vocabulary, grammar and conversation in a meaningful way, everything confirmed by a native. It's intense, but worth it. I'll continue this until my trip to China.

Phase 3. I booked the course in Dalian, which is a 1hr flight from Beijing. I went with TLI Dalian which was highly recommended by the folks from Chinese Forums. I tried, but wasn't able to get a homestay. I guess homestays aren't too common in China. Oh well, a hotel will just have to do.

Working with a Tutor

Phase 1 is going quite well. 2 days seems to be just right for Pimsleur. Mandarin 3 seems to be the easiest level so far, even though speech is faster. They still don't talk at normal speeds all the time, but there's a higher percentage. 

Phase 2 hit a major snag. I couldn't find a tutor. There were a few candidates, but they either wanted to meet at a distant location, or wanted a lot of money. One guy asked me for $100 per hour. Ta1 feng1 le.  

So on the advice of my Friend Joe, I invested in a headset, and installed Skype. I knew from the beginning that a language partner wasn't exactly what I wanted, so I placed an ad on craigslist for a Skype Mandarin teacher. I got several responses. Amazingly, the cheapest was also the most appealing. The price is $10 per hour. $5 per hour for the offline work I'm having her do - writing up the days vocab list, and recording a sentence for each word. We're using Greg Thomson's excellent article Language Learning in the real world for Non Beginners for a rough syllabus. The goal is to learn 20 to 30 words per day, and get comfortable with speech.  

Phase 3. Yep, this is a new phase. I've decided to take an intensive 1 week Mandarin course in China immediately before meeting up with my friend in Beijing. In order to see more of the country, I want a course that's not in Bejing, preferably an hour or so away by plane. I'm looking into homestays, since this seems to be a better immersion than just staying at a hotel.

Bike wreck changes my focus

I wrecked my bicycle today; head on collision with another cyclist. We were on the bike path, heading towards each other in the same lane, closing in on the center of a big dip in the trail. I was on my right, he was on his left. I yelled at him, thinking he'd make the simple adjustment. It wasn't till we were very close that I realized he was holding his line. So I made a last second maneuver to my left that would have barely cleared him, only to be blocked by his jack-knifing bike. Rank amateur. And me too, for not braking harder earlier. I broke both my shoulder blades. The doctor said he'd never seen that before. I guess I rolled on my back. I also broke a rib, a bone in my hand, and got some really cool handlebar shaped bruises.  

While I was going through the whole emergency room BS, I realized something. It really sucks to be totally isolated sometimes. So I went over the reasons I'm in that predicament. A long time ago I had some goals that seemed important. And I would have met those goals, except when I got close, I set higher goals. I've been doing that for years now, pushing myself to extremes in ways that I won't get into here. The point is that I'm living far from my home and friends to achieve goals that I just don't need to achieve. Time for a change. I'm going to teach ESL oversees, which will allow me to pursue my dreams of studying languages while being immersed.  

So priorities have shifted a little. The crash was a setback to my studies, but not too bad. My immediate goal is still to get good enough at Mandarin to enjoy my friend's wedding in August. What has changed is the amount of time I'll devote to Mandarin after that trip. Things will be a little hectic for a while. So I want to crank it up a notch before the trip, get to a higher level, which will make it easier to recall later.  

Phase 1 of my new plan: I actually did the math, and realized that I won't finish Pimsleur in time doing 1 lesson every 3 days. So I'll reduce it to 2 days. I'll finish around the end of July at that pace. It shouldn't be a big deal, because I'm consistently 80%+ after 2 lessons these days.  

Phase 2 of my new plan: I need to get a tutor to get comfortable speaking the language, and learn a lot of new vocabulary. It will be very painful at first, due to my knowing only 350 words or so, but I have to go through this sometime. Better sooner than later.

Finished Pimsleur Volume 1

I finshed Pimsleur volume 1. Because I use the buy back program, I was a little slow at ordering vol 2. I had about a week off. Actually, it worked out just fine, because it gave me time to feed everything into supermemo. Experience has shown me not to put too much into supermemo at once, so I did about 100 per day. I had about 500 entries (vocabulary + sentences). Now my supermemo reviews are very short, since I already know the material well. Why do them at all? Experience has shown me that I will lose what I don't use. I won't drop supermemo until I reach my goals in Mandarin. It's a superb long term review tool.