Dienstag, 1. Dezember 2009

Learning Mandarin from scratch 2

This is a continuation of one of my earlier posts from November about starting out from scratch in Mandarin using Zhang PengPeng's 'Intensive Spoken Chinese', which I just found out you can access the first 30 chapters of for FREE at http://www.chinese-tools.com/learn/chinese

The book is simply a collection of 40 short dialogues with pinyin transliterations, wordlists and audio to learn about 1,000 common words in Chinese.

This is simply a reiteration of my earlier post, with an addition at the end:

Following each chapter is also a relevant grammar point, but I just skipped those in my hunger for more vocabulary.

My method was
1) read (the pinyin) and listen without understanding first
2) read and listen and look at the word list on the side of the page to figure out what they are saying
3) read and listen again to see if I understand
4) listen without reading to test my comprehension

This only took about 10 minutes for each dialogue, and I found that I could learn to understand a dialogue with sometimes 30 new vocab words in that time.

Once you can understand without reading, move onto the next lesson and do the same. Try to do a lesson a day. Then it's just a matter of listening to the dialogues every day over the course of a week or so and after that occasionally repeating, and within about a month or less you can understand 1000 words of Chinese (in context).

To learn even more effectively, use the following approach:

Day 1: Do the four steps above for dialogue 1
Day 2: Do step 4 for dialogue 1, do all four steps for dialogue 2.
Day 3: Do step 4 for dialogues 1 and 2, do all four steps for dialogue 3.
Day 4: Do step 4 for dialogues 1, 2, and 3, do all four steps for dialogue 4.
Day 5: Do step 4 for dialogues 1, 2, 3, and 4, do all four steps for dialogue 5.
Day 6: Do step 4 for dialogues 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, do all four steps for dialogue 6.
Day 7: Do step 4 for dialogues 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, do all four steps for dialogue 7.
DAY 8: DO STEP 4 FOR DIALOGUES 2,3,4,5,6, and 7, DO ALL FOUR STEPS FOR DIALOGUE 8.
Day 9: etc.

Continue with this pattern, removing one dialogue and adding one every day, until you've finished all the dialogues. Each dialogue is only a minute long (without the vocabulary review), so you only need a maximum of about 15-20 minutes a day, including each day's new lesson. By the end of the month you will know these dialogues quite well and have a very solid basic knowledge of Chinese, and you will be ready to start out learning on LingQ!




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