I’m learning Chinese at uni, and while I’m fine with learning vocab and structures and the like, I can’t seem to be able to translate quick enough when I am listening to it. My brain gets seriously muddled. It seems like the other people in my class are so far ahead of me, and they all do an extra Chinese class that I wasn’t able to fit in to my schedule.
I already do these things:
Listen to tapes of our course dialogues over and over;
Record myself saying things on tape, then listening to it repeatedly;
and
Writing sentences on flash cards and when I flash them forcing myself to translate it instantly.
So, does anyone have any ideas that could help me? Maybe I need to revise my exam strategy? (We get a passage read out 3 times, then we have to answer questions about the passage.)
Be creative. Make your own sentences. Experiment. This way, you get a feel how the structure works, can be manipulated, and what restrictions there are.
This may be counterproductive - but learn how to make sense by context. You don’t have to understand every single word, as nice as that might be.
Chinese (Mandarin, I assume) is a real cool language! Zhongwen shi yi ge hen hao de yu!
Live learned several different languages. The only thing that helps me is simply not to translate at all. You have to ry to start thinking in that language. In other words. Use the language as much as y ou can in your own head. When you walk around, instead of thinking “ccup” and then thinking of the chinese word for cup, think if the chinese word FIRST. Do you have anyon ewho is fluent you can converse with on a regular basis? Is there a china town you can hang out in? Try to speak that languange primarily. Really! Get up in the morning and talk to yourself like," Okay, I’m going to take a shower now, get your clothes" or whatever, but in another language. Any way you can think of to use it do it. I never felt fluent until I could think and dream in a language and tell jokes with the locals. Hope it helps. It is hard to learn a language at school unless you can converse. It’s much easier that way. Try using Emglish as your second language. Sometimes I just have days where I refuse to speak English. I’ll speak Italian to my kids and german or Spanish down town…keeps my skills sharp but it is hard to keep shifting gears!! Good luck I think Mandarin would be difficult.
Happens I got my degree in Chinese. Could you tell me what level you’re at first? Because assuming you’re at a relatively low level- which is where almost everyone is still going to be at the end of the few short years you’re at university- it sounds like you’re already doing a lot… maybe too much. If you can write me some examples in pinyin (or characters if you can type) I can get a better idea of where you’re at and what you should focus on. Bottom line, though, is that Mandarin is pretty tough and not too many people master it without going to China.
If you can find the time, watch a movie/tv show in the language you are learning. Music helps as well. I did that with Italian and it helped a lot! Obviously you won’t get any grammar help (usually) from either but you will get a better feel for idioms, phrases and general flow off the language.
Sugar, although you may be at too low a level to take this advice yet, I would suggest not focusing on repetitive drilling as much as it sounds like you are. The only thing this is really useful for is character writing. I think you’ll find that if you read through your texts a few times and mark problem words you will probably pick things up quicker than if you look at flashcards over and over. You’ll get more of a sense of accomplishment out of it too. When you get to a sufficient level you can try outside materials. A newspaper is going to be tough, but there are plenty of casual Chinese message boards out there that you can try your hand at. Also, if you’re not already doing it, I suggest looking up every single character and remembering its general meanings. This will allow you to take advantage of the easy part of Chinese- the very intuitive constuction of compounds- which you just don’t get if you’re just learning compounds of a text textbook. It’ll help you understand words you learn in class and build extra vocab besides.
Hard to give tips about listening, you just have to get used to it. As suggested, get a movie, dialogue tends to be slow and clear. You’ll probably want something from the mainland rather than Taiwan or you may find the accent confusing.
Speaking is another thing entirely. It’s easily my worst aspect. The only people I’ve seen make some decent progress at speaking without actually going to China were people who hooked up with a Chinese person. “Don’t translate” is the good advice, but I doubt you’ll be able to put this into practice any time soon.
That’s my general advice for where I guess you must be, but still, let me know exactly what you’re working on and I’ll see if I can think of anything else.
Try this. As a Singapore-based website you should not worry about the standards of English. Furthermore they practically translate sentences literally, so all you need to do is to match the nouns, verbs, adjectives together to get a sense of the structures.
Try reading aloud from stuff that you have never read before. It helps to hone your reading skills.
Lots of very good language-learning advice in previous posts. I’ll add my own paltry suggestions to the mix…
Let me preface this by saying that I have not studied Chinese, nor any Asian languages, but I have studied French, Spanish, German and American Sign Language, and found that similar strategies worked for each.
The key for me has been actually using them; the drilling and memorization are important to learn structure and vocabulary, but that’s not what gives you fluidity in a language; the ability to think in a language without translating (which relates to what miapiace said earlier). And until you can start to do that, it is certainly very difficult to use or understand any new language (because your mind has to constantly switch between two languages - the new one and your native one - and it can only work so fast!).
So, the key here is practice, but practice in a less rote, less formal setting than your study has been. Discussion groups, essay writing, and storytelling are all great ways to practice, and they’ll help you learn to think on your feet - both in forming the language (speaking, writing), and understanding it (hearing, reading).
I highly recommend getting together with some classmates for a Chinese conversation hour, a couple times a week, if you don’t already do that.
And if you are already doing these things, then just give it time. We all work and learn at our own pace. The effort you’re putting in will pay off, even if you feel confused right now.
Good luck, Sugar!
Oh, one more, less conventional tip on speaking. I’m kind of a perfectionist and embarrassed about speaking a language badly, and alcohol worked wonders for my ability to just throw caution to the wind and start talking. And that’s not just my imagination, people actually told me “your Chinese seems to have improved a lot from half an hour ago” after a couple bottles of beer. The first step is making yourself understood, you can worry about perfection later.
(Of course you’re not going to rely on alcohol every time, I’m just saying it can help in getting early conversation practice if you’re hesitant.)
I concur with the above who have said not to focus on translating because that will slow you down. Translating from Chinese = English means you’ll probably have to rearrange back into meanginful English, and the second step takes a long time. Translate the big words and go from there. Try the best you can to think in Chinese.
Also, rather than listen to tapes and doing drills, find someone who speaks Chinese and converse with them. After a while your brain will memorize taped sentences and conversations and what you’ve done is memorize that lesson. If your time is really limited, go to a Chinese restaurant and practice with the wait staff.
one technique i have heard of from a teacher and other students, is to start writing a daily journal in the language you are studying. another friend just starts writing stream of consciousness-style in the new language just to see what comes out. i think this could also get one’s brain into just starting to associate more in the new language.
in my town there’s an international house that has conversation hours. maybe there’s something like that where you are. or, maybe there’s a chinese association that has picnics or something that you could join and meet some native speakers.
i’m studying mandarin in taiwan at the moment, and really, just trying to speak in the new language helps so so much. it’s one thing understanding the grammar structures intellectually, but to have to speak it without getting caught up in that is the trick. so speak as much as you can!
also, i don’t know how your book is, but i hate my book’s stupid dialogues. i’m not going to ask where the library is and how my friend’s grades are and other stupid stuff like that… one thing i love to do is make up my own weird sentences, or make up little stories. it makes it a lot more fun and makes it more natural and internalized for me. if i only repeated the book’s dialogues i would go insane and never learn chinese.
another thing, at my language school, the tests sometimes have these tricky questions so you have to listen carefully. maybe you can ask the teacher, or with a study group, to ask tricky questions of the dialogues you have studied, or of a passage read aloud first.
alsoooo… i’m in the states at the moment and, although my mom is a native speaker, she hasn’t gotten into the habit of speaking to me in chinese yet. i would love to practice chatting in chinese and, seeing there are some here who know or are studying… anyone interested in having a pinyin chat thread, or chat hour or something?
Not sure, but might be tough to find Mandarin speakers in Australia.
Also, some of you who speak Chinese as a first language or haven’t studied it probably aren’t familiar with the pacing of the classes compared to other languages, which makes some of your advice hard to follow. Since he/she is stuck on this drilling stuff I assume he’s a term or two in. Trying to hold any kind of conversation- let alone a couple hours a week- with the vocabulary that’s going to have been taught at that point is going to be frustrating for everybody unless he’s one of those occasional people who’s just plain good at it, which he seems to be saying he isn’t. Not trying to be a know-it-all with all this blather, I’m just the only person so far who’s been in the exact same spot that I know of.
You can try the pinyin chat room at www.zhongwen.com, though the level and general quality fluctuates wildly.
maybe, depending on where in australia. one of my classmates went to brisbane to study english. while she was there, she met a lot of taiwanese friends who spoke mandarin.
i still think the best is to speak and speak and speak. don’t even think about whether or not your grammar is good or not. just getting past that block so that stuff just comes out of your mouth in another language helps. another thing a friend and i tried to do was play word games in chinese. he would say one word and i would say the next word that comes to mind. a variation, he would say a word and then i would say another word that could make them into a compound word. or, with another friend we tried the ‘story game’ where one person says a word or phrase in turn to try and make a sentence. of course trying to have conversations when you can’t will be frustrating, so if you aren’t there yet, these other speaking games might help.
i’ve also been trying to make up a card game similar to one i made for students of english. in that card game, i made 13 four word sentences and used different grammar elements i wanted them to practice. then they played the game like spoons (where you find four of a kind) only the goal was to be the first to find a grammatically correct sentence, no matter how ridiculous. (“the banana dances sadly”, for example) it was a fast game too, so not too much time for translation. i haven’t figured a way to do it with chinese though, since the sentence structure is different and i’m not advanced enough to go into those four word sayings.
but anyways, maybe just using your flash cards to make as many sentences you can within a time limit. kind of like magnetic poetry. maybe make a game with a classmate. anything to get your mind from focusing on translating and just kind of going with the flow.
and maybe you would like the zhongwen.com’s chat room, although i didn’t like it. that’s why i wondered if people here were interested. if not, no biggie.
i just had another thought… i did my master’s project on anxiety in second language learning. when the teacher or other classmates speak chinese to you, do you feel more anxious? or is it specifically during exams? if it’s just these passage readings that trip you up, the trick questions practice is really helpful. if listening does make you anxious, some of the word games i mentioned above are helpful and maybe i can find some other games i used if you are interested.
i feel like i’m babbling too much, so i’ll stop. good luck with your chinese studies!
Ok, I’m back! Thanks very much for your suggestions! Space Vampire, I have actually learnt chinese for the whole of high school and now I’m 3rd year uni. (Not that we learnt much in HS!) So, I should be much better than I am!
At the moment I am getting consistently in the 65%-75% range, when in my other subjects I usually get 75%+, so it’s very frustrating for me!
I also don’t learn characters - that’s what I wasn’t able to fit in that everyone else in my class does.
(On a side note, how do you download the character font or whatever it is? I press yes, but then all I see is “???” )
I like the idea of thinking in chinese. I did that a tiny bit after I got back from China. (Only 10 days there!)
We have chinese videos at uni, so I will try that.
Wo ye juede hanyu shi yi ge hen hao de yu, danshi wo xue hanyu xue de bu tai hao!
I forgot to mention… I write out all of the dialogues again with translations… it does help.
Are there any you can recommend? I like messageboards, but not chatting. (Post in your own time and all.)
Class is over for the semester, but I will certainly bring this up with my friends next semester!
I also like the idea of writing a journal. I actually like studying/ practising chinese, so I’m quite excited about this!
Absolutely, that would be fun! (a thread, i think)
YES! I feel really anxious in class and in exams! It doesn’t help that everyone is so much better than me. It’s much better if there is no pressure on me to understand. Normally I thrive on pressure but it doesn’t work in chinese. In class we answer questions on the dialogues. More games would be good. If I can convince my classsmates to have conversation hour we could play them then.
Wo yinggai gaosu nimen, wo shi nu de ren!
Xiexie dajia!
I also have problems getting tones sounding right. Any more ideas. : (
Just to clarify - at my uni there are separate courses for verbal chinese and written chinese. Everyone in my class also does written chinese, I do only verbal.
how about some tongue twisters for pronunciation help? in addition to the old mama qi ma…
si4 shi2 si4 zhi1 shi2 shi1 zi
(44 stone lions)
chi1 pu2tao2 bu4 tu3 pu2tao2 pi2
bu4 chi1 pu2tao2 dao4 tu3 pu2tao2 pi2
(if you eat grapes, don’t spit the grape skin. if you don’t eat grapes… leave the skin on? cousin couldn’t really translate it)
there was another one my friend tried to tell me
hua1 fei1 hua1, ka1fei1 hu2 fa1 huang2
(something like a flower isn’t a flower, the coffee pot turns yellow)
anyone know others? i love tongue twisters…
i’ll look up some more games i used a bit later. where should we have a pinyin thread?
you know, i just thought of another thing… one of my best chinese teachers is my friend’s 5 yr old son. he makes sure i pronounce everything right and his imagination makes it so fun. we had this nice chat about his 100 giant invisible girlfriends with blue hair and over 300 cats. back when he was two and i knew even less, i would just have fun asking him things like “ni shi houzi ma?” “ni shi mian bao ma?” (yes, i’m his weirdest a-yi)
i don’t know if you know any little ones who speak chinese, but if you like kids, that’s a low pressure speaking situation.
You actually had the option to take Chinese in high school? Lucky you.
I’ve always thought not learning characters was bad news. I can’t imagine learning very well without the visual aid. Are you aware of the elements of the compound words you learn, or are they just sounds to you? That would make me kind of mixed up.
Unfortunately, message boards aren’t going to be in pinyin, so I can’t help you with that. And all the ones I frequent are “in” Cantonese, and wouldn’t be very comprehensible to you.
If you’re on your third year then yeah, I think it’s time to try to break out of the drilling rut with some movies or more speaking if you can get it.
Oh, have you considered learning characters on your own? If you’re free of the quiz imposed need to learn to write them and just focus on recognition they aren’t that hard at all. Of course, I learned the traditional way and can learn them on my own because I have a good foundation, don’t know how easy it would be to do that from scratch. If this is an element that is keeping you behind other students it might be worth your while, though. It would open up a lot of outside opportunities to you, to. Don’t know how much time you have for that if you’re in school, but if you’re really interested in improving your language skills in addition to getting your grades up it’d be worth your while.
you have to learn to think in Chinese. if you do the chinese to english translation, it will remain a real challenge. I did two years of Uni and then emersed myself in Taiwan, and it was in Taiwan that i really learned to speak. I really think the key is thinking in chinese.
Also, I firmly believe that you have to learn at least a couple thousand characters to get a good base in the language. Once you learn base character vocabulary (I suppose you could do it just on pinyin but I have yet to meet someone who took that route successfully), then you learn how logical Chinese is and how to combine those characters to really expand your vocab.
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