Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

tonight i was working with a learner who was doing all the right tones with her hand but *saying* the wrong tones, over and over again

bless

the three types by which i'm constantly surrounded are

1. those who genuinely think they're saying the right tones but are not
2. those who don't even try
3. people like that 3 month guy who make up tones like it's all just fucking decoration, "hey look at me i can speak ~chinese~ because i'm all Doing Tones and shit"

Not studying Mandarin but I'm down with
1) Thinking the hyper-correcting teacher who interrupts after the first word is spoken is a bad teacher
2) Being irritated by other students who babble and don't even try to get it anything close to what it is supposed to be.

this week i asked the coordinator of the whole course to be strict as hell on first year students' tones, because i am sick to death of dealing with their disgusting habits two years later

oh and i complained about hyper-correcto and was told that i'm several people deep in the queue to make the same complaint, so

Are these corrections made in English?

yeah

Yeesh.

'我对老师烦死了' probably wouldn't have cut it tbh

oh wait you said 'corrections' gah

yes, all made in english except the word she's correcting

they tell us what's in the exam, and then they send us off to prepare (which i spent seriously 40 hrs doing), and we get in there and it's suddenly OH THIS IS OPEN BOOK YOU JUST WASTED YOUR TIME WITH ALL THAT STUDY LOL and we basically just copy the course notes. then there's a whole surprise second part of the exam which is reading a load of junk about the spring festival (this is year 3 and we're STILL doing the fucking spring festival but they haven't told us what a chair or an elbow is) but FULL and i mean FULL of words nobody in the course has ever seen (i can pick up any old book and get the gist but this crap might as well have been greek, so much so that at one point the invigilator was suddenly and without provocation all 'oh no this might be too hard oh no sorry') and we had to answer the questions in chinese ON THE BACK OF THE SAME SHEET OF PAPER, so everyone spent the whole time constantly flipping the page back and forth trying desperately to copy stroke-for-stroke a pile of brand new characters. it didn't help that someone in the room had death breath. one question (a) didn't make sense (i put the whole thing into google translate and google couldn't even work out what it said) and (b) didn't seem to be addressed by the text. at all. i have never written I DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS QUESTION on a test paper before today. that was seriously the second stupidest exam i have ever sat in my entire life (and i probably passed tbh)

Yeesh, sounds brutal; fingers crossed my character exam on Thurs doesn't spring anything like that on me. Been spending a lot of time up at the library w/characters and wishing I'd started doing that a few months ago. Fingers crossed yr 40hrs of study isn't wasted time in terms of general proficiency, I guess?

oh it's definitely paid off in terms of proficiency, like a billion times

what's in your exam?

http://i39.tinypic.com/14m9rb8.jpg

Nothing fancy; the whole "create a dialogue" thing can wrong-foot me if it has to be done on a topic I've blanked (hai @ 京剧) or about some of the NPCR textbook characters whose, uh, characters I shouldn't have neglected.

ah yeah, it's easy to forget topics/chars when there's so much to absorb

sad lol @ 京剧

haha yeah

we did all that in first year too. too much chinese language instruction is backward looking imo.

slightly apropos of that: at the weekend i got trapped in a conversation with a guy about the 三国. on and on and on. that's all nice etc, really, but dude, my exams are about finding a job in network engineering in ~this millennium~

speaking of which, apparently i did all right in last night's exam (although why they're telling other students how i went i've no idea)

A few years ago, a few other translators and I were talking with employees of a Chinese publishing house who said that they had some books that they wanted to translate into English — things that they said would show foreigners the real China. There was a brief and intense period of excitement, until the publishers said that these were coffee-table books about Peking Opera masks and different varieties of tea. Ever since then, I’ve used “Peking Opera masks” as mental shorthand for the Chinese habit of attempting to interest the world in aspects of itself that most Chinese people don’t give two-tenths of a rat’s ass about. (This same thing affects Chinese-language instruction, but I’ll save that rant for another post.) Even just a couple of years ago, almost all officially backed Chinese cultural offerings were of this sort — books about tea and opera masks, yes, or Foreign Languages Press translations by non-native English speakers, or poorly subtitled documentaries about the Potato Festival in some godforsaken corner of the Shandong peninsula. (“Since late Ming dynasty, the town of Pirang is acclaimed as ‘hometown of potato!’”)

http://www.rectified.name/2012/04/30/peking-opera-masks-and-the-london-book-fair/

yes!! i use that term to describe the hideous bloody chop suey english fonts and ancient scroll backgrounds in every second piece of chinese language software

i spend like 80% of my mandarin exposure time listening to electropop and 0% of it studying the qin dynasty

2000 years of history
DOWN THE DRAIN

oh hey there's a baby down here

haha oh god

Bleak laughter, etc.

I feel you re: "Peking Opera masks" but I'm not sure if any culture really escapes that in the language-instruction field (based on my uh limited exposure to learning Dutch/German in NZ before my stint in Europe).

Got talking about 三国 w/a girl in my class who got into it via Dynasty Warriors. I wonder if I've still got my old PSX copy of Suikoden & if so whether I'd recognise any bits of 水浒传.

Wld be keen for an electropop YT/Spotify playlist or links to a mix or w/e, AA.

here's a few mainly taiwanese things to get you going (i love the crap out of all of these):

elva hsiao - super girl (disc 1 is great, disc 2 is all hideous ballads)

http://lightyearsofcy.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/elva-hsiao-super-girl.jpg

jamaster a - dong fang shen mi

http://mjchip.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/00-jamaster_a-dong_fang_shen_mi-front.jpg

da mouth - influenza

http://i.eimg.com.tw/d/alb/17/321917.300.jpg

da mouth (again) - one two three

http://music.yule.tom.com/uimg/2010/1/30/caiyingzhe/1264832880300_35468.jpg

girl and the robots - parallel universe

http://img001.photo.21cn.com/photos/album/20121202/o/29B53DC6BA0EC5214B1CCE179969EE35.jpg

a couple more that i love for some reason but might be difficult to find:

mosaic (马赛克) - self titled

http://www.mask9.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/thumbnail_150x150/mt0x0001/info_thumbnail/57713/57713_event-mosaic-chian-tour-bt-mask9.jpg

郭易yodai - if there was a time machine

http://m.yyq.cn/upload/avatar/504849657cdf8772903.jpg

no point in me looking for any of this on spotify etc because geoblocking is shit

nearly four years in, i go into a cafe and the lady asks me a question in chinese and i have not got any idea what she is saying

one day i am going to flip a table and walk the hell away from this fucking language

advice for learners

1. don't

advice for learners

1. move to china :(

fuck

like, i expect that by now when someone says 'are you learning chinese' in chinese that i can do more than stare back like a gormless fucking bell-end

if she had written down the finer details of last week's eye surgery i'd be sound as a pound

i have more to say but not out in the open like this

but it's probably more helpful to reflect on what you've learned after four years and what your longterm goals are. understanding cafe ladies might be part of the 5 year plan but it's not the whole package.

this is thin advice but i think the best way to advance is to:
-- quickly move from instruction in the language to instruction in the language. i like the idea of having a second year chinese course that's not CHINESE 201: YOUR SECOND INTRO TO ABSTRACT GRAMMAR RULES AND MORE LISTS OF VOCABULARY and more like... in my second year of chinese at school, we had a class that was an intro to chinese folk tales, where the goal wasn't the peking opera masks learn about chinese culture but more about choosing a neutral peripheral topic that just became the stimulus as much as chinese folk tales can be stimulating and the theme and vocab/grammar was something that students were pointed toward and even better encouraged to seek out for themselves to approach the topic. instruction started at 70/30 chinese-english slowly moving to 90/10, which is frustrating but helpful. in the third year, the topic advanced to, like, modern chinese short stories... international business? stuff like that.

the years at university i advanced most in spoken/written chinese was when we moved to what were simply undergraduate courses taught in chinese. so, the discussion at the start of class-- say, we were discussing yellow earth, chen kaige movie--became a moment of supreme personal anxiety. i'd carefully write out my talking points and work to come up with answers to potential questions lobbed into the group by the prof. i spent hours working on just the opening discussion, just to produce 2-3 minutes put together of cogent thought/reasonable responses.

-- move from instruction to use of the language. when i finally got a friend to translate my resume into chinese and scammed my way into a job where the people hired me thought i could read and write and speak chinese at a level that wouldn't embarrass their company and might make them money, i was in a daily panic and i was forced to do a lot of: 1) last minute research into a topic so that i would have the vocabulary to talk about, say, brake pads, 2) bluffing and learning the talent of bluffing. but if that's not possible, you could come up with some sort of personal project in one of your areas of interest. my interest was literary translation, modern literature, so deciding to sit down and translate abandoned capital (the great work of modern chinese literature, untranslated!) and just work through it and hope that i'd finish even a single chapter of it. that was crucial.

my chinese activated out of the blue is pretty weak, though. if you aren't speaking chinese every single day, hours a day, your language is going to be shakey mo collier.

just chalk it up to her nonmainstream accent. she's probably a primary school graduate from a village in guangdong, right? haughtily demand that she speak standard mandarin and then walk out of her shabby little cafe.

http://www.hdpth.com/upload/image/ubfkCr70.jpg

haha brilliant.

my chinese (listening and speaking) does improve after a warm-up, so i'm probably being too hard on myself tbh.

your lengthy advice is ace. thanks heaps. i must owe you at least 12 beers by now.

i've ramped up the learning pretty sharply just recently (going to way more language groups, going to way more chinese cafes, have started weekly (2 hr session) one-on-ones with a proper teacher) and might be being a bit impatient. also, this might be my last year in the course for a number of reasons raging from (a) it's shit now to (b) they're losing funding to (c) my ~grand plans~ re the language (that i really can't discuss until/unless something real happens).

re practising answers to questions &c.: that's a thing i plan to do alone in the form of drills, then roll out when i feel confident enough to freeball my way through a broad range of relatively simple constructions. doubly so in my field of work.

lengthy/detailed posting on a phone is still pants btw

http://i.imgur.com/sF77BKh.png

这张专辑献给所有告诉我我将一无所成的老师
献给所有住在我楼上的，因为我为了挣钱养我的女儿而作违法的事叫警察来的那些人
献给所有正在挣扎中的兄弟们，你们懂得？

http://rudb.org/img/2010_04/i4bc56a1dbde8a.jpg

http://ohverlycritical.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tumblr_luzr7x2ZlQ1r5blq2o1_400.jpg

it sounds like you're taking all the right steps. learning a language isn't a four year process, especially a language that offers you the following challenges:

1) completely unrelated to your mother tongue + tonal,

2) a writing system that requires years of study and maintenance-study of already learned material in order to approach even simple texts (as i think dyao said the fact is that study of written and spoken chinese are "separate disciplines" but to learn the language, you have to grind away at both of them),

3) there are lots of materials for studying mandarin compared to other languages but opportunities for exposure to and use of the language are few and far between and require dedicated seeking-out,

4) teaching of chinese as a foreign language is a relatively new thing and your teachers/tutors won't have much idea about acquisition of the language by foreign speakers and will mostly be flying blind/teaching the language to you like it was taught to them,

5) "chinese culture," and i mean the real difficulty of approaching a language esp the written language that's tied to a different culture and there's lots of necessary background study to grasp shit sometimes and also the emphasis placed on the chineseness of chinese, teachers trying to instruct you in the crazy bullshit idea of/glory of 5000 years of chinese history instead of things you actually need to know to communicate in mandarin chinese to normal people in 2013.

if you want something concrete to direct your energies toward, you could think about doing the hsk. it's easy to study for-- okay, not easy to study for but easy to know what to study, i mean, because there's lots of hsk material online. the hsk level 1 is probably too basic for you; level 2 is the last test that has pinyin for everything, so level 3 is probably what you'd want to shoot for unless you're feeling really ambitious: it has no romanization and it's the first level that has a writing component but it's still very approachable. the writing component is made up of short questions, rather than a lengthy composition. i think hsk 3 is doable with, i don't know, minimum 300-400 characters?

you are so great with the lengthy advice. beer/beer substitute forthcoming. i'm on a tram (out every night studying like a mad bastard atm) so can't reply fully but will chuck in these for now:

- i have hsk 2 and am going for 3 in september (and possibly 4 in china in april) – i can do around 1,300 chars and have maybe another 100 to make up for hsk 3

- the newness/immaturity of chinese instruction to laowai intersects nicely with the thing i can't talk about yet (if only this were ~secret borad~)

- two languages otm, and every single learner i have ever spoken to about this has excelled in one and lagged in the other

- i knew this language would be a slog when i embarked; occasionally i have a mini-meltdown but dust myself off pretty quickly

also just throwing in quickly that the single best thing about learning chinese is dealing with unbelievably friendly and warm and wonderful chinese/chinese-descended people who seem to be in abundance (even the apparently taciturn people open up like a flower when they know i'm learning 中文)

broke through the conversational wall in malaysia of all places. now i'm starting conversations like a trooper. i suspected it'd be a sudden jump and that's pretty much what it was, even though my speech is hacky in places. tonight in class i was ahead of a classmate whose ability left me flat-out intimidated last year.

it also helps to know that i can't understand some people merely because (a) they've got like a guangdong accent or something or (b) they talk too damn quickly, and that it's fine to just ask them to say it again.