I went out to the local Mandarin Meetup tonight, which happens twice per month. Lately i’ve been a bit worried about my ability to speak, but i think this is more of a symptom of my perfectionism. I want to be fluent already, dammit! Anyway, in the past few times i’ve gone [...]
This morning i was once again inspired by the latest post over at AJATT. Having Khatsumoto’s advice compressed into a short video talk was quite helpful. He goes over a couple of really important points.
One relates to the common perception of “learning”. Through our experience in the school system, we sometimes come [...]
In the past few weeks, my main strategy for learning chinese has been to saturate myself with input. I’ve been reading books, and going through lots of understandable example sentences on a couple of websites. One of them is dict.cn, which has plenty of example sentences for every word i look up, and [...]
When learning a new language, one of the most vital things is getting familiar with the sounds of that language. Every language has its own set of sounds that are “normal” for the speakers of that language, and there are usually a couple of them that will trip up people who speak a different [...]
I had a question the other day from someone who wants to start learning mandarin chinese, and wants to continue studying french. It really got me thinking, because all of my learning strategies lately have been focused on moving myself from “advanced beginner” to “intermediate” stages, but it’s been a long time since [...]
I was having dinner with some friends of mine the other day, and they’re all chinese exchange students. We were talking about sushi in Vancouver, since the sushi is quite good here (supposedly some of the best, outside japan). My friends asked me what the “green stuff” was called, but when i said [...]
I love reading about people who speak many languages. I’m quite impatient to get to that point myself, but until now i’ve resisted the urge to try to learn more than one language at once. My main problem is that i tend to jump around from new thing to new thing all the [...]
I thought it’d be helpful for some people if i wrote out more details of my methods, so here we go. Firstly, there are many different ways to learn 汉å—, and there isn’t just 1 single way to do it. I actually like to use a combination of methods, and i hop between [...]
I’ve been having great success with Anki lately. I was off on vacation with my parents this past week, and i kept a regular schedule with my flashcards. We had some cloudy and rainy weather, so i ended up staying indoors more than i would have liked, but the unexpected benefit was that [...]
I was just reading this article about an american in beijing who speaks fluent chinese. I think i need a dose of encouragement like this every once in a while, just to remind myself that it actually is possible to be really good at a language. In the past i’ve always flitted to [...]