Blue finger up and other fun
Another trip to the mailbox, and the full set of Michel Thomas Mandarin still hasn't arrived. But this weekend I wandered over to a local Chinese bookshop and picked up a bunch of Mandarin-English children's stories with the pin-yin included. And when I read them aloud, syllable by syllable, I am now merely terrible. (Once I was worse.) There are those who take to the Mandarin right away, and there are those who don't. I am sadly in the latter camp, as much as I would love to sufficiently master the language to declare myself done with it.
The Get-Started Mandarin kit, with its goofy memory aids, especially for tones, makes things seem a little more doable. In the past, I'd look at a list of vocabulary and however much I recalled the spellings, the tones were a near total loss. In the last week or so, using the Iverson system Josh mentioned and the tone tricks from Michel Thomas Mandarin, I've learned a good 30 or 40 words and phrases with the correct tones. Those who are experts with Mandarin - and I salute you - are doubtless shaking your heads. But if you're one of those people who just can't quite get the sound of Mandarin, do give this a try.
(Blue finger up, by the way, is one of the regular cues for remembering the tone of a syllable, hence the post's title.)
On another front, I tried out an ItalianPod podcast or two and was immediately charmed. While I'm listening to the FrenchPod podcasts to put a little French back in my life and recover what I've lost, I've been listening to the Italian to move from simple, functional Italian to something a little more natural. Also, I dragged out an old set of Italian in Your Car I had laying around, which I've been listening to as I sleep at night. I'm not sure I'm learning anything, but I've had some strange dreams where I insisted I wanted una camera senza doccia (Maybe it was cheaper?) so something must be sinking in.
Lastly, I've been staggering through the exercises in Brezhoneg... buan hag aes and using the Iverson method to learn vocabulary items I don't recognize so that I can do the readings straight through.
One funny thing about the flurry of language activity: while my level of effort has been varied depending on the language and the materials used, I've really felt engaged with language in the last few weeks again, and when I speak, be it French and Spanish at work, Italian at home or the odd word of Breton or Mandarin just for the helluvit all, the words are coming easier. So, to round off the ramble with something sensible: If you want to learn one language, or several, your key is exposure, exposure, exposure. I've talked enough about attitude and keeping going, etc, but this is the bottom line: The more you're around what you're learning, the more you'll learn. So if you find something that holds your attention for ten more minutes before you decide to see what's on tv, or whatever, grab it and enjoy.
The Get-Started Mandarin kit, with its goofy memory aids, especially for tones, makes things seem a little more doable. In the past, I'd look at a list of vocabulary and however much I recalled the spellings, the tones were a near total loss. In the last week or so, using the Iverson system Josh mentioned and the tone tricks from Michel Thomas Mandarin, I've learned a good 30 or 40 words and phrases with the correct tones. Those who are experts with Mandarin - and I salute you - are doubtless shaking your heads. But if you're one of those people who just can't quite get the sound of Mandarin, do give this a try.
(Blue finger up, by the way, is one of the regular cues for remembering the tone of a syllable, hence the post's title.)
On another front, I tried out an ItalianPod podcast or two and was immediately charmed. While I'm listening to the FrenchPod podcasts to put a little French back in my life and recover what I've lost, I've been listening to the Italian to move from simple, functional Italian to something a little more natural. Also, I dragged out an old set of Italian in Your Car I had laying around, which I've been listening to as I sleep at night. I'm not sure I'm learning anything, but I've had some strange dreams where I insisted I wanted una camera senza doccia (Maybe it was cheaper?) so something must be sinking in.
Lastly, I've been staggering through the exercises in Brezhoneg... buan hag aes and using the Iverson method to learn vocabulary items I don't recognize so that I can do the readings straight through.
One funny thing about the flurry of language activity: while my level of effort has been varied depending on the language and the materials used, I've really felt engaged with language in the last few weeks again, and when I speak, be it French and Spanish at work, Italian at home or the odd word of Breton or Mandarin just for the helluvit all, the words are coming easier. So, to round off the ramble with something sensible: If you want to learn one language, or several, your key is exposure, exposure, exposure. I've talked enough about attitude and keeping going, etc, but this is the bottom line: The more you're around what you're learning, the more you'll learn. So if you find something that holds your attention for ten more minutes before you decide to see what's on tv, or whatever, grab it and enjoy.
3 Comments:
ya, i think the key to mandarin tones is also exposure. do a lot of listening. find some online radio stuff, even if you don't understand a word of it. just listen to it as background noise for 20 hours and then come back to your previous stuff and you'll probably find it a lot easier.
even better is if you can find recordings of stuff that you have pinyin for. then you can repeat it over and over while reading the pinyin and you'll get it stuck in your head....but sometimes material like that is hard to find.
Hey Geoff,
Glad to hear the Iversen word list method is proving useful to you! :)
梁平恬: Thanks for the thoughts. I've tried listening to children's books on CD where the pinyin is included and it does help. Liked your post on the dream of fluency, by the way.
Josh: I won't say Iverson lists are a panacea, but they make a good start for learning new words. So often, you make a list of words you don't know, look them up and write them down, and when you're done you've got a very nice list of words you still don't know. The Iverson list works a lot better; thanks for the pointer to it.
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