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.
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