EPTMemrise: Learning languages with a game approach - Page 59
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Rimstalker
Germany734 Posts
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TheUltimate
82 Posts
On August 21 2012 03:46 bardtown wrote: How comfortably can you communicate in Chinese now? My ultimate aim with mandarin on memrise is to learn the entire 'Comprehensive' course (so 3000 words or so, just a bit less than you). With that done I'll focus on reading actual books/conversing in Chinese if that's feasible. That's a very tricky question to answer, especially considering memrise only teaches vocabulary (you need to use other learning tools too) and I'm unsure precisely what you intend when you say "communicate". Other than memrise, which has comprised the vast majority of my learning, I've learned through graded readers (+ audio), the occasional consultation of a grammar book, and brief utterances with my girlfriend. This has given me a rather skewed skillset: I can understand a surprisingly large amount of written Chinese (I can totally understand QQ conversations between native Chinese but can't read novels), can get the gist of Chinese tv shows when accompanied with subtitles, but have only extremely basic conversational abilities and am never sure if my sentences are grammatically correct. Anyway, I'll give you some more useful advice, as your goals sound quite similar to mine. 1. Don't learn the "comprehensive course" as towards the end it's full of ridiculously uncommon words that you won't need for a long time. Ben Whately (the course creator) has stated it's only there for organisational purposes and that you should be relying on other graded courses (such as the HSK series) to learn. In fact, the best way to learn vocabulary is not to learn pre-existing lists at all, but to make your own lists of words that you have encountered in your studies. After getting halfway through the HSK5 word list, I made this realisation, and now I'm focusing on learning a custom-made word list full of words that are much more useful to me in daily life. 2. Get a textbook! 3. If your focus is on reading books, get some graded readers as soon as you know 300 words or more. They're invaluable in teaching grammar concepts and learning how to read/listen at full speed. I recommend Chinese Breeze to begin with (when you have less than 1000 words), then the Graded Chinese Reader series (Books 1-3) and the special Chinese learner edition of Ba Jin's trilogy (Family, Spring and Autumn). 4. If you want to be able to have fluent conversations, the best thing you can do is organise either a language exchange (if you're poor) or a 1-1 tutor (if you're rich). Find tutors/language partners to skype with if you have to. Skip group classes or non-individual tutors. They're not an efficient use of your time/money and you can pick up bad habits from other learners. If you're not willing to have a back-and-forth conversation, Chinese TV shows can be a good substitute. Go to chinese-forums.com, where they have a whole host of resources on chinese tv shows to learn with. 5. Keep using memrise. A large vocabulary does not give you any language ability just by itself, but it helps speed up the learning process. 6. Keep it slow and steady. No one ever learns Chinese as quickly as they think they will, and if you try to learn too quickly you'll burnout. (See Benny Lewis of FluentIn3Months.com fame.) Edit: Oh, and if you are at all confused about the effort it takes to learn Chinese to complete comprehension, consider this: most native Chinese speakers will know somewhere in the region of 20000 words and university graduates can know upwards of 40000. This doesn't include idioms or regionalisms. In terms of characters, basic literacy is defined as knowing 3000 characters, and graduates can know more than 5000. To reach total fluency in Chinese is generally considered to take more than 4 times as long as a language close to English, such as French - approx 6000 hours total study time. In short, Chinese is the Mount Everest of languages. | ||
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VictorJones
United States235 Posts
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bardtown
England2313 Posts
I will skip group classes. I had considered taking a module or two as I have some free choices at university, but it's not worth it especially as I'm very reliant on my own pace to learn well. Cramming suits me very well, and I have a good memory for the characters using my own weird assosciations. It's a shame the comprehensive list has a lot of obscure words, I'd love to have in one place all the characters needed for basic fluency. | ||
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Rimstalker
Germany734 Posts
- common - good to know - obscure (or something similar) | ||
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bardtown
England2313 Posts
On August 21 2012 05:07 Rimstalker wrote: I am currently brainstorming some ideas for memrise, and one of them was a 'obscurity' rating that would be applied by native speakers, and you would be able to filter by it. - common - good to know - obscure (or something similar) Please give some support to my idea for comprehensive language lists. That is to say, a list for each language that has every unique word with at least one mem. In combination with an obscurity rating system you could learn, for example, every single word from a language that was 'good to know' or 'common'. I think that would be ideal! | ||
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solidbebe
Netherlands4921 Posts
On August 21 2012 05:30 bardtown wrote: Please give some support to my idea for comprehensive language lists. That is to say, a list for each language that has every unique word with at least one mem. In combination with an obscurity rating system you could learn, for example, every single word from a language that was 'good to know' or 'common'. I think that would be ideal! Where are you gonna get that from though? Someone needs to put in all the work to make those lists, which is a full time job easily. | ||
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TheUltimate
82 Posts
On August 21 2012 04:57 bardtown wrote: Thanks for the in depth answer. I've already got a 'text book' (Teach Yourself series, seems to be good enough) mostly for the grammar. Where do you find these books? I can't remember the last time I bought a (first-hand) book anywhere except amazon, but I can't see the Ba Jin book there at least. I will skip group classes. I had considered taking a module or two as I have some free choices at university, but it's not worth it especially as I'm very reliant on my own pace to learn well. Cramming suits me very well, and I have a good memory for the characters using my own weird assosciations. It's a shame the comprehensive list has a lot of obscure words, I'd love to have in one place all the characters needed for basic fluency. For the UK, chinesebookshop.com. It's not cheap (be careful about delivery charges) but I haven't found many other places that sell everything in one place. I'd offer you my own books but they're already promised to someone else. Cramming languages is inefficient. Cramming's great for exams and short-term memory tasks, but languages require you to create long-term memories. This is what memrise excels at. If you really want pre-made lists use the HSK1-5 lists that are featured on memrise. This'll get you around 2500 words that are useful to all speakers. After a certain point you need to start making your own vocab lists though, because so much vocabulary is highly context specific. | ||
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bardtown
England2313 Posts
On August 21 2012 05:33 TheUltimate wrote: For the UK, chinesebookshop.com. It's not cheap (be careful about delivery charges) but I haven't found many other places that sell everything in one place. I'd offer you my own books but they're already promised to someone else. Cramming languages is inefficient. Cramming's great for exams and short-term memory tasks, but languages require you to create long-term memories. This is what memrise excels at. If you really want pre-made lists use the HSK1-5 lists that are featured on memrise. This'll get you around 2500 words that are useful to all speakers. After a certain point you need to start making your own vocab lists though, because so much vocabulary is highly context specific. I cram at intervals though, so I still get the refreshing that makes memrise so effective. It might not be the most effective way, but I can't defy my inclinations on this :p. I've just finished the introduction course, so I'll do the 'first 500 characters' and then work through the HSK courses. After that I'll decide if it's worth doing the rest of the comprehensive course (I'm inclined to, having added it haha). Looking at that website now, looks like it will be useful. Thanks. @Solidbebe It's not a full time job because it's reeelatively easy to code a comprehensive word list. And as it's a community-fed project (and 'a wiki' to quote someone else on here) the community could be mostly responsible (for rankings words obscurity level), with moderators just keeping on eye on things. | ||
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Seiferz
United States640 Posts
I've slacked off lately because of class but I'll get back to it as soon as I can! | ||
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mierin
United States4943 Posts
Like the starcraft player, Jinro (kind of) ^.^ | ||
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robjapan
Japan104 Posts
On August 21 2012 00:46 bardtown wrote: Hehe, did you mean rank 17 all time of your cohort? I couldn't find you either looking on the leaderboard. Still way ahead of me  I meant the list of TL'ers  | ||
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Phenny
Australia1435 Posts
 (((I better fix that hey. | ||
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CatNzHat
United States1599 Posts
For languages like Korean, have the english key stroke equivalent under a "how to type" category. I've been doing this myself for my own sake, for example 국사 (Korean History) = rnrtk I'm able to associate the string of English characters with the meaning in Korean, which helps me remember the word. It also is quite convenient when learning new words to immediately be able to type them out a few times without having to pull up a hangul keyboard image and hunt and peck the keys out. Seeing as there are libraries out there capable of doing the conversion I don't see implementing this to be too difficult. It would only be applicable to people fluent in some languages trying to learn another language with a different keyset (e.g. Koreans learning English, Americans learning Korean) If there are others interested in this idea, or if it's been brought up before then please chime in. I'd love to hear other peoples thoughts and tricks for learning to type hangul. | ||
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TheKwas
Iceland372 Posts
At any rate, around 1000 words you should have a mental map of the koeran keyboard ingrained anyways. Relevant: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=korean keyboard | ||
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tRavE
United States23 Posts
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robjapan
Japan104 Posts
The Japanese is pretty simple, if the word is 野菜 やさい yasai for example... you type in... yasai... so then why in gods name is Korean not made to match a standard English keyboard... ;-/ seriously, not trolling, I actually want to know! | ||
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Quesadilla
United States1814 Posts
On August 21 2012 13:48 TheKwas wrote: If you're serious about learning and communicating in Korea, I would suggest actually just ordering a Korean keyboard online, or just making small notes on each key. I think remembering the string of english letters is counter-productive to actually learning the word and the Korean alphabet. At any rate, around 1000 words you should have a mental map of the koeran keyboard ingrained anyways. Relevant: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=korean keyboard I know less than 1,000 words, never took Korean classes and learned the entire keyboard in about a month of fooling around upon learning the alphabet. It's way easier than you'd think just finding each character until you get it right. | ||
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CobaltBlu
United States919 Posts
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robjapan
Japan104 Posts
じゃ ー ja しゃ ー sha よ ー yo etc etc etc, when I tried hangul it asked me to input the "d" sound, I hit d and some other symbol came up! so, I'm guessing that Hangul is a bit too complex for a English keyboard? | ||
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