The life of a Chinese learner living in China... part 3 As posted on Facebook

At this point in the game, I can do alot in China. In this way, I am fairly independent. As I commented on before, people speak with different accents and dialects. Some are easier to understand than others. With some people, it is like I can't speak Chinese at all. With others, they can understand everything I say. I talk with one Chinese woman who runs a gift shop downtown. She can understand me. I am able to speak what is commonly understood to be the main dialect of Chinese. If I am in Beijing, I can talk with almost anyone. I have a fairly decent vocabulary, but my grammar is awful. From what I'm told, my accent isn't that bad, but not that good either. People are able to understand me. My listening is not that good. I can read some Chinese, but there are limitations to what I can do. I can understand a basic text message from a Chinese friend, but I cannot read a newspaper. What I hope to improve on is listening and grammar. I think that if these things improve, I will be able to speak Chinese quite well. I guess that is all I want to say right now.

October 4th, 2010 ChinesePod Profile Update

Updated on October 4th, 2010 -- I started learning Chinese on November 23rd 2008. During the past few months, my Chinese learning has been really poor. I study a lot, but seem not to make much progress. Nevertheless, I will continue to work at it.

I am still studying Chinese, but not with quite the intensity that I had before. I spent lots of time studying in June and July, but cooled off considerably in August and September. For most of August and September, I was traveling around the Northern part of China, and therefore had less time to commit to studying.

I was not very motivated to study, this is especially true for the latter part of September. We are in October now, and now I want to renew my efforts to study and make progress. What I can say about the past few months is that my reading level has not really increased that much, but my speaking and listening has. My speaking and listening is catching up to my reading. My handwritten Chinese is still very poor. When I switched to Intermediate, I really felt the change in difficulty. While I was learning a lot more, I really could feel the strain of the increased difficulty. It requires a lot more effort to study the intermediate level lessons than the elementary lessons. There is a huge difference.

I guess that I am in a transition period right now in terms of my Chinese learning. I don't know which direction to go. Here are some possible outcomes;
- I could stop studying. This happened to me last year at this time. I simply stopped studying Chinese for my first few months here. My increase in responsibility and the realization of the fact that my Chinese was so poor was too overwhelming, so I simply stopped studying. I am facing a similar situation now. In the past week (before the 1st), my studying had been lackluster at best. I did study a little bit, but it was just a token effort. I want to acknowledge this situation so that I can do work to prevent a complete stop in studying.
- I could work solely with Chinesepod. This is a possibility. I use a number of resources to study Chinese. I may simple stop using the rest, and stick with Chinesepod. I am seriously considering this option. I will, however, use a tutor if one becomes available.
- I could diversify my study efforts. I may seek out additional resources to use to study Chinese.

I don't know which direction I will choose. Today, I hope that I don't simply give up.

Yesterday, I started going through the flashcards I was using last year to see how many I remember. I am about a third through the stack, and I can read more than half. It is interesting because I am using a better developed thinking process to attempt to read the words. It is like trying to solve a puzzle. So far, I feel satisfied with what I am finding with this process.

Today, I took the Chinesepod placement test. I seem unable to do well on this test. According to this test, I am still a Chinesepod newbie. The test seems very difficult. Despite all the time that I have spent studying Chinese, my score is not improving. I do believe that I am improving, but the placement test does not support this belief.

Well, I don't want to think too much about the placement test. Instead, I will focus my efforts on improving my Chinese.

The life of a Chinese learner living in China... part 2 As posted on Facebook

Things have improved since my last note. About two or three weeks ago, I was spending time with some friends. I was talking to Charlie, a Chinese man, and like usual, really having trouble communicating. Shortly thereafter, I started talking to him, and I was understanding some of what he said to me. I am not trying to say that after that moment, I was fluent, but I was more confident. I have been spending time at the local store talking to the women that work there. I find that I can express many of my ideas in Chinese, what a great feeling! After so much time of frustration and heartache, my work is paying off. There are many words I do not know, but I have a lot of linguistic tools at my disposal that I can use. Granted, those women have to use some language barrier gymnastics to understand my GaoYuan Hua (高原话） GaoYuan (高原)　is my Chinese name, and hua (话) is one of the Chinese words for language. What I am saying is that I make many mistakes when speaking Chinese that sometimes I feel I am speaking my own dialect of Chinese.
I find that I am better able to express myself if I feel confused, frustrated or upset. These are things I could not do in the past.
Where I live, people speak different types of Chinese. Some people are easier to understand than others. Sometimes, I talk to people whose pronunciation is so different that I cannot understand them at all, and sometimes I want to correct them. The local accent is very difficult for me to understand, it is remarkably different than standard Mandarin. Well, at least I think it is. Perhaps a native speaker may not think so.
I guess that is all I want to say right now.

The life of a Chinese learner living in China... As posted on Facebook

I think that I can understand how hard it is for a foreigner to learn a new language. I have been living in China for 8 months now, and in addition to that, I had studied Chinese for around 10 months while living in the states. I have some experience with this. I must say, it can be difficult at times. Learning Chinese for an English speaker is probably easier than it would be for a Chinese person to learn English in the United States, because many people can speak at least some English. When these Chinese people see a foreigner, they are often friendly and eager to use the little bit of English that they know. This means that they may be willing to be helpful, and patient when I try to speak Chinese. However, there are not many Chinese speakers in the United States, so this is not very likely.

Anyhow, my life in China is filled with constant frustration, confusion, and irritation. Doing any task in the street is always difficult, because my Chinese is not good. I study Chinese for several hours on most days, but I still know very little after all this time. Everyday, the fact that my language skills are poor is immediately apparent. As I learn more Chinese, I find that, in some ways, it actually gets harder to function. When I knew very little, people were more patient with me. Now, people expect me to be able to speak better than I actually can, so they just get frustrated with me. Sometimes, Chinese people, meaning to be helpful, will sometimes throw English words in their Chinese sentence. This causes problems for two reasons; first, their pronunciation is often very poor, so I don't realize that they are trying to speak an English word until later. And second, they will say the English for words that I already understand the Chinese for anyway. In this way, this is no help and serves only to frustrate matters worse.

I recently hired a Chinese person to help me work on my oral Chinese. I am one of the very few Chinese learners whose reading and writing is better than my speaking. For most people, their speaking and listening is good, but they cannot read or write. After my first lesson, I got discouraged because she spent lots of time talking in English. I might have to find a new tutor.

I get so frustrated sometimes. Some days, I might spend a three hour session studying Chinese, then go to the street to do something, and fumble, stumble, and crawl my way through the most basic Chinese interaction. As I said earlier, I am constantly reminded of my poor speaking ability. My reaction sometimes is to simply say 'screw it, this is too hard. Perhaps I will just play video games during my spare time' but I know that if I practice, I will improve. I know this because I am improving. It is very slow, but I am getting better each day. I just have to maintain the regimen of studying that I have been doing since around January or thereabouts.

I know this is not well written, but it is a first draft, and I don't really care to revise and edit. This is what you get. Sorry.

No use in keeping track of time.

我会说中文好一点. 我一直学习中文天天都. Ok, I will switch to English. I wrote that I am able to speak Chinese better than I could before, and that I still study Chinese everyday. These things are true. Not much has changed since the last update, but I will discuss some of the stuff I have been doing lately. The Chinesepod work that I described in the last post is very similar to what I do now. Recently, I made some changes to what I do with Chinesepod. For example, I am now studying intermediate lessons. I must say that making the jump from Elementary to Intermediate is quite difficult. Perhaps, I am not truly ready for Intermediate, but I felt that I was not learning enough with the Elementary. I wanted more of a challenge, and I am getting it with the Intermediate. Before I was studying three lessons at a time, but because of the increased difficulty, I have dropped it to two, and increased the time that I work on lessons from 9 days to 10 days. This may not seem like a huge change, but it allows me to more keenly focus my study on the two lessons that I am working on instead of trying to do three. As a rule, I will learn between 10 - 15 new Chinese words with each Intermediate lesson. Because I focus on the lesson for 10 days, I really hammer down on pronunciation. Each 5 days, I add a new Intermediate lesson. I try to spend an hour on Chinesepod each day to solidify the work that I do on the podcast, but that can feel like a chore, and I don't do it as often as I should.

I have also signed up with a website called Smart.fm. It is really good, and it has been helpful with helping me learn to read Chinese characters. I am actually not too bad with reading hanzi, (thanks to the hours of studying I did using flashcards while living in the states), but I don't know how to say the chinese with the characters or write the pinyin. smart.fm is helping me with both of these. I recommend Smart.fm for anyone who is learning to learn a foreign language as a good free supplement to the resources they currently use.

I still am doing the writing practice that I described in the previous post. My mean average is 4 characters per day, and I hope to increase it to 5 by the end of June. It is a lofty goal, and I don't know if it is mathematically possible, but it is something to shoot for. The writing practice is helpful to me because it is helping me to understand why the characters mean what they do.

May 2nd, 2010 ChinesePod Profile Update

Updated on May 2nd, 2010 -- I started learning Chinese on November 23rd 2008. I am able to spend more time studying Chinese. Between what I use here at Chinesepod, and other resources that I use, and the practice with native speakers, I have noticed improvement. As always, the improvement is slow, but it is happening.

Year two pretty far into the year

I still study Chinese almost everyday. Since December, I have kept a semi-rigid regimen. When I am not teaching, I work harder than I do when I am teaching. For speaking/listening, I work on Elementary level lessons. I listen to a show for three days, then work on audio reviews for the lesson that I am currently on, and the audio reviews for the previous two lesson I studied. In this way, I really master the words that I am studying. I don't feel too satisfied with the difficulty level of the lessons, but I do spend much time teaching. I will focus on studying more difficult lessons when I have fewer classes to teach.

I have been working out of a Chinese writing textbook for a little over two months now, and I am not doing too much with reading. At this point, I am able to do many things around town. I can talk to people about basic things, and if I am controlling the conversation, I can appear to know more Chinese than I really do.

I still have much work to do. I hope to be better about updating my progress in the future.

02 year 06 weeks into study

After I arrived to China, I felt discouraged about the amount of Chinese that I knew. It is very difficult for people to understand what I am saying, and it feels overwhelming at times. In the past week or so, I have been studying much harder than I was when I first arrived. I am focusing more on speaking/listening than I did when I first started. It is something I wish I did more of when I was learning in the states.