How I learned to understand 1000 words of Mandarin in 1 month

The secret has been to work primarily with dialogues, as I think the brain responds best to conversations (given that they're the basis for all communication) starting out at about 1 minute, and getting progressively longer. I describe starting from scratch here

http://davidamartin2sblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/learning-mandarin-from-scratch-2.html


This INTENSIVE and REPETITIVE listening (and re-reading if I had forgotten something) in combination with the EXTENSIVE and REGULAR listening to larger dialogues (I love the LingQ Chinese Podcast, there's so many cool topics) while reading along in English helped me to accustomize myself to the language very quickly.

I also experimented with transliterating the larger dialogues into pinyin and printing them out so that I could read along and create my own vocab lists in the margins/above the words to improve my extensive reading and listening without having to learn the characters, which I think helped me a lot to understand longer passages and expose myself to a lot of new vocabulary in a short period of time.

You can access 31 of the 40 lessons of Zhang Peng Peng's Intensive Spoken Chinese here

http://www.chinese-tools.com/learn/chinese

Spaced Repetition Listening with Anki

I just figured out that you can upload audio as large as you want onto the front of flashcards in Anki, and you can put the transcript/translation on the back.

That means that you can use Anki to do spaced reviews of your listening (vocabulary in context) - I'm doing this with the extracted dialogues and transcripts from ChinesePOD.com

Anki gives you four options for grading your comprehension/performance:

Again - You'll see the card again soon
Hard - You'll see the card again the next day
Good - You'll see the card again in 3-4 days
Easy - You'll see the card again in 7-9 days

Of course, each time you see a card and choose one of these options, Anki recalculates the interval accordingly, and over time all of these intervals will become longer, eventually to the point where you don't have to review certain items for years.

In the context of listening, this means that the levels would be such that:

Again = 0-25% comprehension -> You'll see the card again soon
Hard = 25-50% comprehension -> You'll see the card again the next day
Good = 50-75% comprehension -> You'll see the card again in 3-4 days
Easy = 75%-100% comprehension -> You'll see the card again in 7-9 days

Obviously these levels are based on your subjective opinion of your rate of comprehension, but I think that if you use Anki in this way with short (max 1-2 minutes) content containing new vocabulary, over time you will see rapid progress and passive to active vocabulary transfer (especially as a beginner).

The 'Who is she?' or 'Eating Out' series on LingQ would be perfect to use with this method if you're just starting out in a language:)

For more advanced learners, this could be used as a supplement to your regular, more extensive listening and reading.

Using Anki with Smartfm, and eventually with LingQ

Anki is a spaced repetition system (SRS). It helps you remember things by intelligently scheduling flashcards, so that you can learn a lot of information with a minimum amount of effort. Here's an intro video:


http://ichi2.net/anki/screencast1.html

The following was borrowed from http://howtojapan.blogspot.com/2009/03/using-anki-with-smartfm.html

"Where do I get good sentences to use with Anki?"

smart.fm is the answer. It has over 10,000 sentences with a picture and a sound file. It also has it's own online learning system.

Take a look at how to get the smart.fm plugin for Anki here:
http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/Plugins#Importsmart.fmi tems.2Candgenerallists

Once you've downloaded it, instructions on how to use it are here
http://wiki.github.com/ridisculous/anki-iknow-importer

With the latest Anki release, you can also download using Anki's built in plugin manager. The plugin provides full control over what card types are created.

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I've been experimenting with Anki and my LingQs, but so far I can only import them one-by-one. I'm trying to find a way to mass import them into the program. Does anyone have any experience with Anki?

Yiddish vs. Hebrew

This is from one of my recent posts on the LingQ forum
(http://www.lingq.com/learn/zh/forum/1/4799/)

Yiddish is a Germanic language with Hebrew (Semitic) influence, while Hebrew is simply a Semitic language.

Here is the the Our Father in German:

Alle Menschen sind frei und gleich an Würde und Rechten geboren. Sie sind mit Vernunft und Gewissen begabt und sollen einander im Geist der Brüderlichkeit begegnen.

Here is a transliteration of the Our Father in Yiddish (I capitalized some nouns for comparison):

Yeder Mentsh vert geboyrn fray un glaykh in Koved un Rekht. Yeder vert bashonkn mit Farshtand un Gevisn; yeder zol zikh firn mit a tsveytn in a gemit fun Brudershaft.

And here is a transliteration of the Our Father in Hebrew:

Kol benei ha'adam noldu benei xorin veshavim be'erkam uvizxuyoteihem. Kulam xonenu batevuna uvematspun, lefixax xova 'aleihem linhog ish bere'ehu beruax shel axava.


As you can see, Yiddish and German are quite similar, and if you speak German you can understand even spoken Yiddish quite well. You can listen to the above examples by searching each language here http://www.omniglot.com/

As far as learning them, I imagine there are more resources for Hebrew than for Yiddish; however, Yiddish will be easier for you to learn as it's a Western European language. But, where there's a will, there's way.

Check out these Google searches for Hebrew resources I recently did for a friend:

http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1SKPC_en___US35 5&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=learn+hebrew
http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1SKPC_en___US35 5&aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=hebrew

and these two sites I've already checked out and they're quite good:

www.learnhebrewpod.com
http://www.hebrewtoday.com/ntext.asp?psn=16

The same search in Yiddish yields some interesting resources as well.

Learning the Mandarin Characters (Hanzi)

Once you've got a good vocabulary base in Mandarin, and preferably not before, you'll want to get started on learning the Hanzi.

I've found the following combination quite good for learning the characters:

1) Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters - gives you picture stories with built in mnemonics for remembering the tones and pronunciations of the 800 most basic characters (HSK Level A), and builds up your character knowledge systematically going from least to most complicated by only introducing characters containing components you've already seen

2) Tuttle Chinese-English Learner's Dictionary - Contains the 4,800 most frequently used Chinese vocabulary items, including the 3000+ words for HSK Level A and B proficiency, and over 4,700 sample sentences with characters and pinyin, and the best thing, all the entries are arranged alphabetically by pinyin in the main dictionary, or can be looked up as in a standard Chinese dictionary. Compound words are broken down into their constituent parts to facilitate learning and understanding.

If you combine these two resources with Skritter's (http://www.skritter.com/about) Spaced Repetition approach to learning how to write the characters, you'll gain the character fluency you're striving for in no time!

Also, smartfm.com has a great program for learning the 2,500 most common characters (http://smart.fm/goals/49389-chinese-characters-level-1-beginner) using the Spaced Repetition Method and memory games, and it's free!

Also, this is a good free site for the 4000 most basic characters, and each entry also contains a flash video of the stroke order:

http://www.learnchineseez.com/read-write/simplifie d/index.php?page=1

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!

Improving your Mandarin reading and listening without having to learn lots of characters

LingQ is about input, not about memorization. Learning the Chinese characters requires memorization. Therefore, I am striving to attain basic fluency in Chinese before concentrating on the characters, and I'm currently using what I consider to be a pretty innovative method to improve my extensive Chinese reading and listening skills without having to learn the characters:

1) I translitere the LingQ podcasts, which are beyond my current level in Chinese, using PopUpChinese.com (which has the best transliteration software I've found so far, parsing the words correctly 99% of the time) and print the pinyin text on paper with a space between each line.

2) Once I've listened to the text and read along with the rough English translation, I go back and read the text on LingQ and write the definitions of the words I don't know (highlighted in blue and yellow) above the pinyin in the printed paper text - you could also write them on the side.

3) Once I've finished that, I listen to the text again while reading along in pinyin and looking above the unknown words (or on the side of the text) for the definitions.

4) When I can understand the words while reading without looking at the definitions, I just listen, without reading.

I find that this is a great way to improve your listening and reading skills without have to know a lot of characters, as my brain still remember words written in letters better than in the characters. This will also help you to 'pick up on' words in your other listenings and readings.

Besides that, I find it more effective anyway to go back and learn the characters in a context you're already familiar with and for words you already know on LingQ after using this method.

The Popup Chinese pinyinization tool can be found here

http://popupchinese.com/chinese/adso

or simply by going to the homepage and clicking on 'chinese tools'.