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Howdy, all!
I’m still around, still studying, but haven’t been spending much time online for the past few months. My husband and I are in the process of adopting a child from Taiwan who speaks Mandarin. Fun! So I’m switching languages for a bit in hopes that it will be easier to communicate with her once we pick her up from Taiwan and bring her back to the US. I decided to keep up with my flashcards so that I don’t lose any of my Japanese in the meantime but won’t be adding any new material. It’ll probably take a year for the entire adoption process so we’ll see how much Mandarin I can learn in a year. :)
Happy studying!
CassandraGood luck!
Sounds great, good luck with it all :D It should be easier doing Mandarin now that you know all the language learning tricks from having done Japanese already ;) I’ve heard that the hardest parts of Chinese are the characters and the tones, and you’ve pretty much got the first one down haha. I’ve also heard that the grammar is pretty easy in comparison to other languages.
Be sure to check in here from time to time to let us know how you’re doing with it, I’d be pretty interested to know how it goes. And there’s also that you’re the only admin left, what with Koichi abandoning us, Hashi leaving, and Sheepy being who knows where :P Are you the oldest member to still visit this forum or did missingno15 join here before you?
Here’s an interesting couple of graphs to consider:
Thanks for the good luck wishes!
Yeah, I do want to stick around the forums a bit more than I have been. I enjoy seeing how people are progressing in their studies. I have no intention of giving up on Japanese as it is my favorite language but want to make things easier for our daughter when she arrives. I know she’s being taught English in school but, based on what my Chinese friend says, the English classes are a joke and our girl will probably only know a couple words.
Cool graphs! I’m working on the tones already. I listened to one lesson that gave the vocabulary and said “this one is second tone. This one is third tone.” I quickly realized I needed to back up a step and learn those tones first! Otherwise my vocab will be really messed up.
I’ve been around longer than Missing. ;)
Yeah, I did Mandarin for four years way back in high school. Not sure I ever really got the hang of tones, though I don’t actually recall how fluent I actually got. I just remember enjoying it in year seven and eight, which made me choose it as an elective for years nine and ten, but then I got put in a combined background/non-background class and just got completely overwhelmed. Hated it.
I’ve had a rough look into learning Mandarin a few times in the past but never really fancied it. I can kinda remember the tones; on their own, they don’t really seem that hard, but I’m sure when you’re trying to talk at any reasonable speed, remembering and pronouncing the tones correctly must be a nightmare :P It’s interesting to see how many words have the same/similar characters to the Japanese counterpart; that should make learning vocab a bit quicker if you already know the kanji form, I suspect.
Having done Remembering the Kanji, do you think you’ll do Remembering the Hanzi? :P
I think RTK will help. Kiera and I were sitting down one day with some of my kanji sheets. She quizzed me on a number of them, asking me about the meanings in Japanese. Her response was a lot of “yup, same in Chinese. Yup, same in Chinese.”
I don’t know if I want to do RTH, though… Since I’m learning the language to help a child transition into our home, I think I’m going to concentrate on spoken Mandarin. If necessary, I can write kanji to help her understand what I am talking about, but conversation would be more beneficial for both of us. If I was learning the language to be fluent, I would concentrate on written and spoken, but I think I’m going to concentrate on spoken Mandarin with some reading thrown in to help with Anki/vocabulary retention.
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