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.