Studying Mandarin - part II.

One of the few things that I am sure of until now, when it comes to learning Chinese is that you should not memorize characters before you've learned how to use the relevant word confidently in real life speech (in other words learn the word without knowing how to write it) and definitely not learn 10000+ characters like a maniac through an SRS system in the beginner/intermediate stage. (Actually even later. I found out that even though I could recall a relatively large amount of words, in real life speech it was very very tiring to use them because I had to recall the correct syllable and tone 3-4 times in every sentence which was devastating and the words didn’t “stick” as well as some of the other words that I learned in natural conversation without the SRS stress). In my opinion it is a complete loss of time and energy. My reasons are that character images are being stored in a completely different part of the brain, there is too much interference between the characters themselves and you will just become overwhelmed with the information as a beginner. Some might argue that this way one can remember the word much better but in my case whenever I thought of a word I had first the character pop up in my mind and not the sound which is insane time loss in real time speech. At the beginning of my learning process I used to color characters in 4 colors according to their tones which is good aid in remembering which tone the syllable actually has but not an aid in remembering the sound itself, which is again terrible time loss and interference, as the sound is much more important than the image. I realized that whenever I wanted to say a word I had the color pop up instead of hearing the correct sound with the correct tone in my head. I realized this way too late and lost too much time, energy and nerves. Goes without saying that the tones should not be learned in isolation and instead should be understood as a permanent component of a syllable and the same syllables in different tones should be considered as completely different sound units and not grouped and learned together. 

Studying Mandarin - part I.

At the language site I used to post my entries, I also held a Mandarin journal, where I tracked my progress, but I eventually stopped writing it because of several issues, the main reason probably being the fact, that often during the course of learning Chinese I came to a point, where I thought I had come up with a brilliant theory on how to learn this language correctly, thought I had found a suitable technique or had figured out a rule, that I thought I had interpreted correctly (be it phonetics, or just an overall learning strategy) and about a week later I realized I was completely wrong. Then came up with a new brilliant theory that I changed a week later again. I decided that until I would personally be satisfied with the way I speak, understand, read and write Chinese, I would stop making any further conclusions not to mention give people advice on how to learn Chinese because I didn't know how to learn it myself. This post is sort of a summary of my techniques. I am also writing this post now as a record entry to see what I was thinking about Chinese at this point and maybe a read for anyone who would be interested to read about one man's never ending struggles. This is my attempt at speaking Chinese on 20.10.2010: