These days I’m goal-less, but it’s not what you think. I actually accomplished my earlier goals! I didn’t give up and I’m sure I’ll still keep growing in my Chinese. I’m not a fan of HSK, nor most tests, so that route won’t work for me.

I’m looking for ideas, so here’s the goals I’ve passed, and those I know I haven’t. Any others out here for me to try?

ACCOMPLISHED
-I recognize most of what’s on the menu (of a standard menu, not high-end fancy-smanz restaurants with weird names for everythign)

-I recognize the signs around me, I can say them outloud. You know important signs like the ‘pi e ka da’ Pierre Cardin furniture store. j/k (I’m in China. I was Lost in Translation when I first arrived.)

-When I feel like it, I can go 3-4 rounds in a bargaining session (those sellers that get to round 5+ still out-gun me)

-I can read 90% of Doraemon comics. I’m working on more ‘grown up comics now. You know, those for junior-high kids.

-I will cry watching a good Chinese drama, or Korean/Japanese drama dubbed and with sub-titles (cry only when they kill off the beautiful female lead or make her life miserable).

-I can understand and engage in conversations with Chinese friends (these are friends who can read ‘in-between’ the lines and figure out what I’m saying, not some random stranger). Some converstations I’m glad I can’t understand.

-I can text pretty much most messages in my mobile phone, in Chinese. Enough to meet up with people, etc. I can’t read the spam yet. Blessing?

-I can handwrite in Chinese, it’s not super fluid, but at least it doesn’t look like kid block printing, and I know where to swerve and re-jig the order of the strokes to make it ‘handwriteable.

-When people aren’t paying attention, they take about 4-6 minutes before they start wondering about my ‘weird Chinese. This is versus the first 1-3 seconds when I first started.

CAN’T DO
- I can’t yell loud enough, ‘xia che’, in the bus to get the busdriver to stop. I don’t really enunciate loud enough (yell) in Chinese. People say I speak like a sweet girl…ugg. GRR.

- I can’t confidently YELL fuwuyuan, or maidan, in the restaurant without feeling that my pronunciation goes to shot. When are we having the Learn to Yell in Chinese podcast that we can safely ‘practice’ in the car?

- I can’t read a newspaper (I can read some articles and the paparazzi photo captions)

- I don’t really enjoy trying to phone in a take-out order.

- I can’t really say the abstract or sarcastic things that I want to, in Chinese. Plus/minus?

- When I handwrite characters, yah I resort to pinyin and getting a picklist off of my mobile.

What other ‘markers’ or milestones do others have? I’d really like to hear from some long-time learners. Those that are 3-5 years plus in China.

I really thought what John said was important, motivation is key and that it’s a long-term process. I also want to say that we should distinguish between long-term and “hard”.

I don’t think Chinese is particularly hard to learn, but like any language, there’s just a lot to learn. In a grown-up busy life, this means it competes with lots of other stuff for my attention.

Having fun, attainable, concrete goals invents segments of time that make the years slip away. I’m in year 2 and it just feels like I started!

http://blogs.chinesepod.com/2006/11/28/study-as-a-journey/

More importantly, with the computers coming back up, good weather, and some time: Here’s what’s coming up soon:

• The next full-transcript for Chinesepod
• Talking about ‘the parser‘.
• Tactics for using text-messages to study

Here’s why it’s probably a separate track to learning newspaper talk than it is to learn conversational Chinese. The words are different. The 1000 most frequent spoken or fiction words are different than the top 1000 in newspapers.

At Chinese Text Computing you can see various lists of Chinese word frequency, for example in fiction versus the press.

http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/

Here’s another list with English definitions and notes, it’s actually a fun list to puruse and sip coffee over. You should be learning words in this order, as these are ranked by frequency.

http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html

If you’d like to try your hand at reading a newspaper, there’s an online site that gives mouse-over popup of recent headline news, and saves you the trouble of copy-pasting into other translation tools.

http://www.newsinchinese.com/

And of course, there’s always browsing the papers.

http://www.xinhuanet.com/
http://fzsb.hinews.cn/php/

Content or info overload is a challenge with all the resources available online. To help parse things down a bit, I found one way to make ’sound-bites’ or rather ‘text-bites’ that I can read. Get a couple of Chinese RSS feeds and view them via Netvibes, a RSS reader. With each entry it gives you a popup of the first 50-characters of text, this is enough to see the topic and keeps you ‘reading’ the Chinese.

At the end of the day, however, it would be nice to sit down and casually pick u p a Chinese newspaper and read it to relax, just like in English. If I figure out how, I’ll post again!

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The one book has a chapter on how to write about a sequence of events, like cooking a recipe or describing a series of events.
For example, it says

“In describing procedures and processes, the following expressesions are often useful:

首先 first of all
然后 then
随后 soon afterwards
最后 finally

They also then nicely introduce,

“When presenting one’s point of view…it is more forceful to list them…by using the following words and phrases

首先 first of all
其次 secondly
除此之外 besides
不仅如此 not only that

Here’s what REALLY bugs me. I just DON’T GET it. I got in a pretty big argument/discussion with a Chinese person about how my viewpoint was wrong, almost offensive. WHY is there no pinyin? If I already know the word, well then I sure do hope I know how to use it.

If the authors think that I don’t know how to use these words, and they don’t since they are explaining their usage to me, then how do they expect me to know the sounds for the word? I think they are just LAZY, the book publishers want to keep the total pages to a minimum, I don’t know but it’s batty.

Why do authors feel like they need to mix up memorization and recall with explanations? It’s like explaining to me how to tie my shoes while spinning me around.

I’m used to studying online, where I can do this:

首先 然后 随后 最后 首先 其次 除此之外 不仅如此
shǒuxiān ranhou suihou zuihou shouxian qici chucizhiwai bujin ruci

via sites like ADSO: http://www.adsotrans.com/new/

Recently on Chinesepod.com I posted some sentences from the day’s lesson. I found the feedback from Connie, a Chinesepod host, to be extremely helpful. The first examples are my original sentences, and the second sentences are Connie’s correct sentences.

The key here is not to learn grammar, but to see how the English mind orders things differently than Chinese when expressing an idea. First look at the English sentence, but just think about what it means. Visualize the context, the meaning, the circumstances. Then try to express it in Chinese, or your own English. You’ll see that if you try to write down the thought in your own English, it probably won’t be the same exact sentence as mine.

This is because thoughts are separate from language. We’re just used to matching it up with one language, our first language. This is what we must ‘break’ or expand upon, creating a match to another language.

What we are trying to do is make the mind capable of the following, the first we already can do, the second is where we are now, and the third is our target:

Thought—>English

Thought—>interlanguage
(mixed up English/Chinese grammar with Chinese words)

Thought—>Chinese
Thought—>English/Chinese

—————————————————————————————

I lost my heart. Ohh! I see it…it’s in the palm of your hand.

diū liǎo wǒ de xīn。 é！ kàndéjiàn。 。 。 zài nǐ de shǒuzhǎng shàng。
丢了我的心。哦！看得见。。。在你的手掌上。

Wǒ de xīn diū le. Ò，wǒ kànjian le，zài nǐ de shǒu xīn li.
我的心丢了。哦，我看见了，在你的手心里。

• I was looking at the word ‘dui’ and wanted to use it in a sentence. In my excitement I started off the sentence with that ‘verb’. Chinese sentences never start with a verb, in fact English sentences don’t either. So why did I? If you look closely at my first sentence you’ll see that actually it is a butchered English construction, I’ve left off the “(I) lost my heart.” Chinese for the most part starts off with the subject (my heart) and then says what happened (was lost). I must beat it into my brain, subject first, subject first, think subject. Don’t first think of me, me, me.

• Chinese thinking is very linear and sequential, especially because there is no conjugation. Right? Well there is a sort of conjugation, using ‘le’. It happens a lot with the second phrase when expressing a thought. I forgot, again I think it’s my English phrase-generator that is muddling things up. Chinese goes like this:

(1st phrase introduces the subject)
我的心丢了。
(2nd phrase gives more context about what happened)
哦，我看见了

• My last mistake was actually the easiest to correct, the grammar is correct, just I didn’t use the proper words for ‘in the palm of your hand’. That was because I used a dictionary!

在你的手掌上。vs
在你的手心里

I dropped my cell phone. Ahh, I found it. Ohh no, it’s broken.

shǒujì diào le。 ā ， zhǎo de dào。 āiyā ， wǒ de shǒujì huài le。
手记掉了。啊，找的到。哎呀，我的手记坏了。<>

.Wǒ de shǒujī diào le. A，zhǎodào le. Āiyā，wǒ de shǒujī huài le.
我的手机掉了。啊，找到了。哎呀，我的手机坏了。

• While we’re used to thinking of English as very much focused on the individual, I find that Chinese is actually much more self-centered! In the first sentence I left of ‘I’, but see Connie’s, the ‘wo de’ comes up front and center.
• In my second phrase, again I have forgotten the nice progression of the sequence of events, leaving off the ‘le’. I got the ‘le’ in the first phrase right, but my freshman Chinese didn’t have a sophmore level second phrase sophistication. Note to myself, think about what happens next, it’s important in Chinese…and my life for that matter.

I can’t find my soul mate. Don’t be anxious, it’s best to look slowly.
àiren zhǎobùdào。
A: 爱人找不到。

bié zháojí ， mànmàn zhǎo jiù hǎo le。
B: 别着急，慢慢找就好了。

Wǒ zhǎobudào wǒ de zhīxīn àirén .
我找不到我的知心爱人。
Bié zháojí，zuìhǎo shi mànmàn zhǎo.
别着急，最好是慢慢找。

• Here’s where I think a lot of traditional academic teaching and examples breaks down. The mind doesn’t really think so narrowly as making a noun always the subject, or a person the subject. In my first sentence the subject is ‘looking for’ 找不到, and thus I should have put it at the front of my sentence.
• Actually, I also think my first sentence is correct, but that Connie saw it as incorrect because I hadn’t introduced the context. If we had already been talking about ‘my soulmate’ I could have used my sentence. But when starting tabla rasa, I need to slowly introduce that idea.
• In the second sentence, the Chinese logic is much simpler and step-by-step than my original sentence.

别着急，慢慢找就好了。
(don’t worry) (slowly look) (it’s best)

别着急，最好是慢慢找。
(don’t worry) (it’s best) (to do) (slowly look)

SUMMARY: There are a couple things to do when thinking in Chinese, first put the subject first. Second, in your followup phrase, express clearly the next event, using a ‘le’ or other connector word like ‘jiu hao’.