Activity stream settings
sebire
May 04, 2009, 09:39 PM posted in General DiscussionI don't know if anyone else finds this a slight nuisance, but the Activity Stream difficulty setting seems to be linked to my profile level, and changing one seems to affect the other. This would be great were it not for the fact that my writing is far worse than my listening. So changing to Elly in the Activity Stream changes all the recommended lesson sets to Elly rather than Intermediate when I log in.
Personally, I think it would be nice if they were independent. Does anyone think otherwise?
tingyun
May 04, 2009, 10:07 PMA bit off topic, but I'd suggest you guys try "Reading and Writing Chinese" by William McNaughton, available pretty cheap on amazon to learn your first 2000 or so charecters - I love CPod, but its not the best place to learn charecters. I used the above book, and I love its approach - teaching radicals early, setting up phonetic series of characters, including explanations and hints to help you see the semantic-phonetic logic behind the characters.
In my opinion, trying to pick up charecters only from CPod dialogues is inefficient - you're unlikely to see the logic behind them, without some heavy guidance. Each one the becomes its own little arbitrary thing - and thus quite hard to memorize.
However, once you have a good amount under your belt, then CPod is great for learning new ones - because any you encounter, you likely will recognize what element might hint at the sound or meaning, associate it with past characters, etc. Though of course sometime www.zhongwen.com is also helpful to connect it with other charecters you know, given its well developed charecter trees. But again not the most ideal source right at the start....
mickeytoon
May 04, 2009, 10:36 PMGood point Sebire,
This is one of the reasons I've not used the activity stream that much - it's just a hassle switching to newbie to cope with my woeful written Chinese then back to Ele/Int for lessons (actually thinking about this I'm probably just being typically lazy - hence I haven't yet learned my 2000 or so characters). But surely this isn't a hard fix for the techies at CPod?
antony73
May 04, 2009, 10:50 PMtimbendersls Would you know it, I've only recently begun this very same book, the simplified version. Thank you anyway for your help and advice. I plan to learn to read and write the radicals first, then begin the other 2000 or so characters in the book. Did you also learn to write them, and did you use the simplified or traditional versions of the book?
tingyun
May 05, 2009, 12:47 AMMostly the simplified, like you (I own both though - and both are good). Actually, the book sort of introduces the radicals as you go, in a very logical order. It tends to introduce a radical, followed closely by some charecters that draw from that radicals meaning, or have a comment pronounciation related to the radical...so a viable alternate plan would be to jump right into the main list, and pick up the radicals as they are introduced - that way, you'd be learning the radicals in relation to example of their use, which might be helpful.
The downside of this feature of the book is that many of the "Characters" you learn will actually be radicals, and often can't be used independly. That the book doesn't always point this out (though often it does, via saying "not in modern use as an independant charecter") is a small negative point. So after learning its a little over 2000 characters, you'll really only know 1800-1900 or so modern idependant ones, but still a great foundation.
Yep, I also focussed on the radicals - though often just as much on non-radicals that nevertheless repeatdly show up as phonetic clues. The book does a good job of introducing these too. All in all, I loved it.
Much later you might want to supplement with the Tuttle "Chinese in a Flash" flashcards, I also found them pretty good, though not until a good foundation knowledge is built. Because they most certainly are not in any sort of logical order...
antony73
May 05, 2009, 07:58 AMThanks for your help on this one. Really is about time I cracked on with this.
tingyun
May 05, 2009, 10:01 AMNo problem, I put it off myself until a good way into intermediate. Was very glad after I remedied that - for one thing, new spoken vocab is much, much easier to remember, because when I understand the basic meanings of the component charecters to a multisyllablle word, the words meaning is usually fairly evident - and further, if you already know the charecters, memorizing the tones and sounds of a new word is very easy. Much better than treating every two syllablle word as something of a new thing, and never realizing how often you have already encountered the charecters in other words. I wish I'd started sooner - maybe in Ele, as you menotion.
Anyway, if you practice drawing the charecters, and you don't already have the right paper to do so - you can just go into microsoft word and create some. You'd want to basically put a bunch of boxes, fairly big at the start, graphing out the whole sheet, so that you would then use a square of 4 boxes to draw a single charecter. That way you could make sure, say, the right proportion of the charecter is in the upper right quadrant, and thus you haven't drawn it to short or too far to the left. Also, if you ever get really into wanting to learn how to write charecters, not caligraphy, but still make the best version of the strokes that you can with a pen, "Learn to Write Chinese Characters" by Johan Bjorksten seems to be the standard English little booklet. I personally neglected this skill up until a day or so ago. Personally I think good handwriting is kind of useless what with it being so easy to type things (I never write in English), and so easy to remember charecters based on their radicals and other elements, but every Chinese person I say that too attacks me, and my university doesn't agree (and has handwritten assignments, yikes), so I'm planning to surrender and finally practice.
Ok, I've rambled on quite long enough. Final bit - in case anyone is wondering how to set up their windows computer to type chinse, here's a link I stumbled across a few weeks ago. Sets up the Microsoft function, so no need to download any programs. http://classes.yale.edu/chns130/TypingTutorials/index.html
sebire
May 05, 2009, 12:11 PMTimbender, thanks for the tip, but I mainly use activity stream as a way of actually forcing myself to create sentences, rather than learn how to write the characters.
I tried using Skritter to learn characters, but I find that a bit random too. I think I should use it more regularly.
I'm glad I'm not the only one with the activity stream problem though! Ideally, I would like to see both Elly and Intermediate. Maybe one day!
antony73
May 04, 2009, 09:52 PMNo, I am the same as yourself. I am Elementary level, but my writing is Newbie. And what I find awkward is that the Newbie level uses pinyin what only serves to slow my progress.