A competitive presentation: moving myself up from intermediate

KALEIDESCOPE - Today while studying, aka me browsing the internet and calling it studying, I spent some time with a site mentioned by another Cpodder. It took a while to download, as I'm in China, but otherwise everything worked fine. What I really enjoyed about it was that I was able to view the Chinese from various presentations. That is, whatever writing system I liked, and in either video, audio, English/Chinese, and in whatever order I preferred.

I think these variations helped keep up my level of interest, and maximizes the technology, and it also helped my studying as each view gave me different bits of the Chinese, making my mind work the other parts on it's own, all on MY TERMS. Without someone else's pedagogy imposing input limitations.

First I started off the download of the Quicktime clip. This clip is a simple video recording of a Chinese person saying a few words on a certain topic. They also have a mp3 recording which I'll put on the iPod to listen to later.

Second, the site in one window gives me the option of seeing the transcript in traditional hanzi, simplified, pinyin, English or no text.   I used adso to create pop-up pinyin from the text. I used a separate browser window to display the pop-up created with adso next to the video.

Third, I read the simplified-text dialogue, guessing whatever I didn't know. Actually, I first read the traditional script, but that hurt my head a little. Then I read it with the adso pop-up. Lastly, I listened and watched the to video on it's own.

Later I will probably re-view the video and pay closer attention to the adso for words I don't know. And will listen to the mp3 on my way to tonight's tennis game. 

It was all pretty fullfilling. There was no onerous scut-work to patch together dialogue sentences, I could watch the video or various text versions as I liked, their transcript includes a lot of the um, hums, etc., I haven't read the English translation yet, gonna let the Chinese muddle around in my head a little first, but I'm glad I can go look at it later. No perpetual state of ambiguity.

Of course there's still stuff I would have liked, pushing it all (the transcript, popup) to my ipod for mobility, expansion sentences, a comments thread to talk about it with others, a more interesting video production, the pop-up being another presentation version rather than me having to do it, an rss daily-push routine, no Fix, you know lots of the good Cpod stuff.

Yup.

http://www.laits.utexas.edu/orkelm/chinese/prof14.html

http://www.adsotrans.com

University of Texas, who would've thought it. Go buck-eyes or bulls or what'ver your mascot might be! 加油，多油！

Any other intermediates out there, how are you studying these days?