After studying, understand, and SRS'ing a little over 200 sentences (500 words) in the past 3 weeks, I feel like I've barely made it out of the gate. Not because there's still a long way to go, but because I've only done recognition SRS. I can barely produce anything, and with one of my goals being able to write and speak I'm not getting any closer to this.

Any suggestions? I was going to begin writing short 1 paragraph stories on lang-8.com , but I don't know enough grammatical constructs yet to be able to express even the most simple of situations.

For those curious, I've been doing chinesepod.com Newbie lessons starting from the first. I've studied 55 lessons so far out of 328 I believe.

Too early i'd say. If you do production cards which are kana in the question and kanji in the answer it will help you memorize the kanji and produce it from memory. (You're doing chinese (Mandarin) i presume then you can put the pitches in the question and the kanji in the answer.

It takes time but it is very effective. Plus producing a bit to early won't help you too much. Because you haven't seen the context and when those particular kanji are used in certain contexts. In terms of writing just keep writing you're srs reps it will help you're writing plus memory of the kanjis. As producing sentences, just follow basic ones. Such as greeting,dates,numbers,etc. So you can make those solid first then to move onto expressing yourself in chinese. Such things like "Hello my name is......",etc,etc.

(I assume you are studying Chinese.)

Try making 2-3 cards of the same thing like this:

[我的名字是牛汁。] --------------> [My name is Gyuujuice.]

[My name is Gyuujuice] -------> [我的名字是牛汁。]

[*audio*]------------------------>[我的名字是牛汁。]

[我的名字是牛汁。] ---------------> [wo3 de ming2 zi4 shi4 niu2 zhi1]

[*audio*]------------------------->[wo3 de ming2 zi4 shi4 niu2 zhi1]

Obviously it will be difficult to find audio but you can find a lot of Smart.fm but most of it is rather difficult. I'm currently not studying Chinese but it took me 3 months of self study (without a textbook or ANYONE to talk to) before I could actually speak sentences correctly.

你加油！(頑張って！)

gyuujuice, Right now I have cards with Hanzi on the front and the Pinyin and english meaning on the back. I fail the card if I don't know either the pinyin or the meaning.

The audio is trivial since that's basically what Chinesepod is. The tedious thing though will be splitting up the dialogue into individual sentences unless I just do complete dialogues at a time.

ta12121, Thanks, I'll keep it in mind, although I have no trouble producing the simple sentences, but what I want to do is tell a story. For example I can say "my name is deathtrap" , but what I want to say is "My name is deathtrap, I enjoy studying chinese because I find the culture fascinating. IN the near future I hope to travel and live there for a while, although I hope I know how to speak well enough by then".

Hmmm that will take time. Yea me too. I find both chinese+japanese culture to be interesting. Those are the two languages i want to master.

As for writing it just takes time. I still personally have a hard time expressing myself in Japanese perfectly in both writing/speaking. My understanding/reading are getting really high now but my writing/speaking isn';t as good as my other skills. For writing what people recommended is that, just keep writing your srs reps or the ones you have trouble remembering. Try to find examples of people expressing themselves in Chinese (both text wise and speech wise) and try to mimic them/their sentences.

Also you gotta keep note that in terms of speaking it will be random. It's never straightforward as it is in books and such. So you gotta keep trying to understand more Chinese until it become easy. Because one understanding is down, all you need is how to reply back in the right context and add you're personally touch to it. (i think that how you express yourself in you're native language will carry onto another language)

"The tedious thing though will be splitting up the dialogue into individual sentences unless I just do complete dialogues at a time."

Yep, it can be tedius. 2 sentences could go on a card but the shorter the the content the easier it will to master. (RTK for example

"Yea me too. I find both chinese+japanese culture to be interesting. Those are the two languages i want to master."

Most of us are interested in Asian culture. ^__^
Except I am crazy and want to learn:

Japanese (with speakin/writing/reading/listening fluency + some dialect terms that everyone seems to know like おいでやす)

Mandarin (Upper intermediate to advance, I have to be near fluent--in fact I plan on just focusing on written Chinese)

Korean (I don't plan on fluency but I want to be able to convey myself in basic terms and understand 50% of what I see/hear--by the time I start I would allready to an extent know Japanese and Chinese and Hanguel so it would be pretty simple other than pronunciation and advnance grammar.)!

English (XD)

lol haha. Yea i know a lot of my posts have incorrect grammar. I seem to be making more mistakes then normal. I think all the new things i;m learning in japanese are kicking out the old stuff i know in english.

For me personally i doubt i'l learn korean only if i'm interested. But at the moment it's japanese and then mandarin. I know some people who wish to master like 5-7 languages. But to be honest i think it's better to just master 2-3 to a high level then knowing 5-7 in intermediate level.

Well I just want to understand Japanese to a high level. The rest can be so-so. ^_^

"lol haha. Yea i know a lot of my posts have incorrect grammar. I seem to be making more mistakes then normal. I think all the new things i;m learning in japanese are kicking out the old stuff i know in english."

There was only 7-8 mistakes in your paragraph. XD
But honestly I make spelling mistakes every time I sit down and write. For example today I wrote,"successful" as "sucsessful". ;__; ...and I am a native speaker!

deathtrap Wrote:After studying, understand, and SRS'ing a little over 200 sentences (500 words) in the past 3 weeks, I feel like I've barely made it out of the gate.

Because you have barely made it out of the gate. Heck you might not even be at the gate yet lol.

deathtrap Wrote:Not because there's still a long way to go, but because I've only done recognition SRS. I can barely produce anything, and with one of my goals being able to write and speak I'm not getting any closer to this.

Um yes you do have a long ways to go and that is exactly the reason. You've been studying for 3 weeks at a 10 sentence per day pace, which is less than earth shattering btw.

I know it's not a fast pace, I was doing 5 CPod lessons per day at the beginning and stepped it up to 10 lessons in the past couple days. Going to see how that goes and see if I can increase it to 15 lessons if it's not too much strain.

I started out just doing sentences, now I'm doing a vocab only deck to isolate and learn the writing of and readings of the words, and a sentence deck to practice reading sentences/grammar (also using subs2srs for listening). When I was doing just sentences I found trying to learn often several words in a sentence, + testing grammar to be more difficult then it needed to be (and thus inefficient). Now I wait to do the sentences after I have trained their vocabulary.

And like gyuujuice suggests, my vocab cards have three directions: English meaning -> tests writing and speaking. Audio clip-> tests writing and understanding meaning. Kanji-> tests reading and understanding. I add example sentences to look at if I want, then also get a bit more context when I test in my sentence deck. The rest of context and nuance comes from media/immersion. I also have a language partner who I can ask about usage/nuances, and practice speaking with. I plan to add more time/language partners as I get more vocab under my belt, and use lang8.

I have only been studying for about a year, but if I had it to do all over again, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have just gone with sentences only (AJATT dogma?). There are benefits to studying things in isolation.

And a dynamic approach that trains each/all area(s) is essential, depending on your goals.

You just started, keep on keep'in on!

EDIT - One thing to add -> training writing will add a decent amount of time to your workload IMHO. I choose to do this for myself, but perhaps at the cost of learning more new vocabulary quicker.

deathtrap Wrote:with one of my goals being able to write and speak...

I can tell you what helps me put words into my active memory when I learn English (it works for all other languages).

Phase one:

FRONT:
to fall off in vigor, energy, activity, interest, etc.

Public enthusiasm flagged when the team kept losing.

BACK:
(nothing)


In this phase I learn to understand the word. The card consists of the sentence with the unfamiliar word bolded and a definition or a native-language equivalent of it. After like 2-5 reviews (1-2 weeks) I start to get the feeling that I would be able to instantaneously recognise it "in the wild" and maybe to produce it - but the latter with some to significant effort. Then it's time for phase two:


FRONT:
to fall off in vigor, energy, activity, interest, etc.

Public enthusiasm ______ when the team kept losing.

BACK:
Public enthusiasm flagged when the team kept losing.


As you see, I replace the word with a ____ (or #### or ........ or :::::::::, doesn't matter). This forces me to reproduce it from memory, which usually is quite easy after phase one (that's why one shouldn't skip it). The definition is still there to help me, but I drop it sometimes when the context is really clear.

Important: when switching form phase one to phase two, i.e. after transforming the card, always click "again", even if you're tempted to click "good". After a few reps recalling the word is a snap, also in real-life situations.

I hope what I've written is helpful... Or maybe everybody knows it already?

I've got 300 sentences in my japanese deck, and I feel like I don't know jack also. But that's because I'm only just making a start on sentences to keep my motivation for finishing RTK up. I hardly consider 300 sentences getting off the start line. It feels like I've only just begun.

Although I find I'm starting to hear more and more words/phrases in Japanese language material, more than just the 'konichiwa' and 'baka' that everyone picks up. When I hear a decent sentence and understand it, it's a huge motivation boost. Just keep going, I'd say.

I've reached 8138 sentence in my deck and it's 7 months. I feel like Japanese has become quite easier compared to when i first started. I seriously felt like i didn't know anything, sure kanji meanings was good to know but other than that it wasn't other good. Now i can understand quite a lot and read a lot. Just speaking and writing need more time to improve.

I'm going to start working on cutting up the chinesepod dialogues into individual sentences. Most dialogues will produce 4 sentences for the newbie level. This will most likely drive me insane, so if you don't hear from me after this I'm rotting away in a mental institution somewhere

In the digital archives at University of Texas at Austin, there are some recordings of the dialogues from Practical Chinese Reader I and II, and the first 11 lessons of Intermediate Reader of Modern Chinese. This comprises the first 2 years of their Chinese program. The speaker is a native Chinese woman (one of the instructors at UT). There's also audio for their Business Chinese course, which is about the same level as their normal third year courses, which are focused on modern literature and newspaper readings.

https://dase.laits.utexas.edu/collections

Chinese 506 - First Year Chinese I (PCR I, Lessons 1-24)
Chinese 507 - First Year Chinese II (PCR I, Lessons 25-30; PCR II, Lessons 31-40)
Chinese 412K - Second Year Chinese I (PCR II, Lessons 41-50)
Chinese 412L - Second Year Chinese II (IRMC, Lessons 1-11)
Chinese 326 - Business Chinese (Business Chinese for Success, Lessons 1-10)

Fortunately, the PCR texts are available in simplified characters on Oxford's website. I think you might be on your own with the IRMC text though.

http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/PCR/PCR%2022-23.htm

Edit: I forgot about this: The text for PCR Lessons 1-40 is also available on Dr. Tim Xie's website, in both simplified and traditional characters.

http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/pcr/etext/

There are also a lot of other things worth looking through on the UT site.

bflatnine, I have the New Practical Chinese Reader(text and audio), and I thought about doing it, but since I've already started on CPod I don't want to start jumping between materials, I've tried that before and it just led me to keep on jumping until I got tired and quit.

Can you get an ID and pass for the UT website without being a student there though?

IceCream, I don't suppose you have any names for any shows would you? Do they speak proper mandarin or do they also include some taiwanese terms/words/sayings in as well?

cheers.

deathtrap Wrote:Can you get an ID and pass for the UT website without being a student there though?

I don't think you need to have an ID and password for those files. At least, I don't, and I'm not a student there (yet).

bflatnine Wrote:

deathtrap Wrote:Can you get an ID and pass for the UT website without being a student there though?

I don't think you need to have an ID and password for those files. At least, I don't, and I'm not a student there (yet).

The link for the UT site that you posted redirects me to a login page

Believe me, you will feel this way for a long time.

I've reached 700 sentences (then ditched them) and now I'm around 2500 vocabulary and I don't know jack. It actually feels worse every day: "I've learned so many things already why can't I understand this, it looks so SIMPLE".

But its normal so just keep going.

thurd Wrote:Believe me, you will feel this way for a long time.

I've reached 700 sentences (then ditched them) and now I'm around 2500 vocabulary and I don't know jack. It actually feels worse every day: "I've learned so many things already why can't I understand this, it looks so SIMPLE".

But its normal so just keep going.

I still feel like i don't know enough yet. You know that feeling when you've reached a goal but there's still so much left to do. Like writing/speaking. Listening/reading has become easier compared to 5-6 months ago when i felt barely any improvement. But now hey i can just listen to stuff in the background and understand what's going on perfectly fine. I still have trouble with music(some of them) and news. Although some news topics i can understand perfectly well.

One piece of good advice is to maintain what you do daily everyday if possible. So if a lot of immersion, good srsing. Writing practice, speaking practice(don't really get this that much, but i mimic what i hear and try to reply back in best way possible, if i can.)
I was worried about writing japanese, but to be honest only one way to improve this is to write and write and write till you get used to writing in japanese. Also knowing readings/meanings help in writing a lot. You want to know what you're writing of course. Speaking definitely needs to have good understand before practicing output.