lots of lessons fast, or a few lessons in detail slow
pretzellogic
November 10, 2009, 11:29 AM posted in General DiscussionNotwithstanding the usual disclaimers about learning styles, and everyone learning differently, do what's best for you, there's no one right answer, and to each his own, etc..., i'm curious if people felt that they picked up mandarin effectively by listening to lots of lessons over a week versus studying them in detail and taking more time.
I'm starting to feel that it might make sense to blow though lots of lessons because:
1) Keeps me learning new "words" at a constant rate
2) the top level metric is better. in other words, i'm "learning" 50 words/week, albeit not retaining new words as well as i'd like, versus learning 10 words per week well.
I do remember Pimsleurs saying that a retention rate of around 80% was good enough to go to the next series of lessons. If cpod were a college or high school class, 70 would be considered passing, and well enough to go to the next level (at least in high school). Cpod offers no guidance in this area, so i'm curious as to what others would say about this, or what worked for them.
simonpettersson
February 01, 2010, 07:27 AMI think I should point out, that in the many lessons I've studies, I don't think I've ever heard an explanation of the "... 的话" pattern.
pretzellogic
November 10, 2009, 04:54 PMvallance, simonpettersson, thanks. I'm seeing that with the guided subscription, i'm in the range of working through 3 intermediate lessons a week, which could be about 30-50 words per week. But i'm starting to feel a bit more lost than I would have had I not sped up. I'm feeling like this speed is worth seeing how it works out, at least for awhile. But there's plenty of reviewing that needs to go on for me as a result, and some of that review is not happening.
simonpettersson
November 10, 2009, 04:59 PMIf you don't have a good system for review, burning through lessons quickly is likely to give crap results, I think.
hunchiepunker
November 10, 2009, 05:45 PMI'm also doing the guided subscription, and finding myself settling into a kind of hybrid study/review style. It seems to work for me, so I'll share it here.
I'm able to listen to cpod while at work during some parts of the day, so that's where the bulk of my listening practice happens. That's also where I listen to the lessons assigned by Crystal. Prior to beginning my work week and the new batch of assigned lessons, I add all the vocab to the flashcards and look through them on the ipod when I have a free minute. I keep it trimmed to about a hundred words per week.
I keep reviewing these assigned lessons each day until my talk with Crystal on Thursday evenings.
As more lessons are added through my normal subscription, I just listen to them on the computer when I can dedicate about a half hour. For these, I'll always listen to the lesson while looking at the dialog and vocab pages, so as to not miss details. If needed, I'll add a few words from these to my vocabs. Otherwise, I just hope to use one or two words from each subscription-added lesson during my review with Crystal. If I can squeak one in, then it's icing on the guided cake.
Hey, one question! Does anyone still receive a package of past lessons each week? I looked at
"My Personal RSS Lesson Feed - Settings"
and find that the settings haven't changed since forever, though it's been months since I've received any past lessons...
xiaophil
November 11, 2009, 03:39 AMPersonally, I don't get into systematically studying a lesson and then moving on only when the majority of words are memorized. This way perhaps works if you have 20 years to gain fluency (i.e. it is too slow). I go on a blitzkrieg path and just devour as many lessons as possible, take a break and then take the mp3s and listen to them again over and over in my mp3 player while on my way to work. During said break, I move on to other material and repeat the process. Eventually, most of the new words, at least not the specialized ones, show up again elsewhere, and then they really sink in. This is based on my personal '3 theory', which basically says that if I hear or see a word three times in different contexts within a relatively short period of time (short being measured in weeks and not hours or days) I will tend to remember them later. I don't know if my ideas are bunk, but they seem to work for me.
pretzellogic
November 11, 2009, 04:47 AMxiaophil, you explained better why I was thinking this "blast through lots of lessons" works better than I did. I was thinking that going through lots of lessons would force me into the review that is necessary in order to retain new phrases/patterns/words/sentences.
I'm not sure that it works. I agree with simonpettersson that there's a tremendous amount of review that needs to be done when you blast through lessons.
Maybe the answer is to blast through a set of lessons, but then blast through a sample set of previously studied lessons a couple of weeks after you learn them?
When I did Pimsleur's this way, it did seem to help my retention.
pretzellogic
November 11, 2009, 04:53 AMoh, hunchiepunker, i'm in the same boat on RSS feeds. I still haven't got a good handle on how they work, or what benefit they provide, let alone how to change my feed.
It is interesting about using the site itself and doing the review the way you do. I actually tend not to use the Chinese pod site itself that much. I seem to post too much, and look for the site to provide guidance, but then I really end up listening to the lessons/dialogues/fixes on the go.
The bad news with this approach is that I only know about 140 characters. I really like skritter, but integrating writing and learning characters has seemed to go back to the backburner.
simonpettersson
November 11, 2009, 05:59 AMFor what it's worth, I've had no problems with the RSS feeds. I used to have an archived Intermediate lesson added to my feed every week. I just changed that to UI.
mark
November 11, 2009, 06:22 AMAs to the question of fast or slow, I try to guage the amount of lessons according to how much new vocabulary they have. I try for about 60 words a week. My memory is less than perfect. So, the number I retain for the long term is smaller than that. If I do the excercises, try to compose some sentences with the new words etc, my retention rate is better, but this extra work reduces the amount of words/material I can cover sometimes.
I think some have achieved complete fluency in the amount of time that I have been studying Chinese. So, I am an imperfect testimonial for my method, but I might be doing ok for someone who has never lived in China and has a day job.
simonpettersson
November 10, 2009, 01:16 PMI'm doing a lesson a day, which means something like 100-150 words a week (I add all words I don't already know, not just the vocabulary ones). Retention rate is hard to answer. I'm using spaced repetition to memorize them. So long-term retention is 100%, but I of course do forget a lot of words short-term. This means a lot of time spent on review. I review maybe 200-300 words a day.
calkins
November 11, 2009, 04:01 PMI think one thing that is just as important as learning lots of vocab. (perhaps more important) is learning sentence patterns.
Since attending 師大 I've realized that the amount of sentence patterns in Chinese seems to be endless. In a 10-week quarter, we cover 10 chapters...each chapter has approximately 30 - 50 new words. Regarding sentence patterns, each chapter is different, but to give an example of a chapter where 把 bǎ was covered, there were 12 different sentence patterns for this all-important little word...here are just a few:
1.
S 把 O V 。
我已经把功课做完了。
2.
S 把 O V (一) V。
別忘了把书看看。
3.
S 把 O V 来/去。
我把那本书带来了。
4.
S 把 O V-DV。
外面很冷，快把衣服穿上。
5.
S 把 O V Number M.W.。
我把那部电影看了三次。
I know this thread is about Cpod's lessons, not about "traditional" classroom learning, but I feel this is one very important element that is lacking (not entirely missing) from Cpod. Most Cpod lessons teach a sentence pattern, but it is often not very clear and obvious. Qing Wen does a great job of teaching patterns, but it just doesn't seem like enough IMO.
One thing I think would be great as a supplement to the existing Grammar Guide would be the following:
Every lesson that has a distinct sentence pattern would have a link to a page within the Grammar Guide, where a clear explanation of the pattern (i.e. S 把 O V) and approximately 10 example sentences for that pattern.
I understand that Cpod's approach is that you will learn these patterns with time and more lesson exposure, but I think it's very important that when we see a new sentence pattern in a lesson, that we are able to also see a clear map of that pattern, including additional examples.
I also know this would be a lot of work, but it'd be a great goal to have for the far off distant future.
pretzellogic
November 12, 2009, 01:52 AMcalkins, I totally agree with you. Actually, I found sentence patterns to be one of the few helpful ways for me to learn grammar. Qing Wens tend to go through many of these, but yeah, cpod doesn't explicitly cover them.
It would really be good to know that they are about 120 or so sentence patterns in Chinese. That way, cpod could know they needed about 120 separate and distinct QWs and they could go about teaching us those patterns. Personally, I thought working out the patterns in the way you did above was something I was going to have to do, so i'm happy that you started doing it.
In any event, I think you should add your grammar idea to John's thread about the list of ideas for improvements to the site. Or maybe you've already added this to the Cpod User Voice site.
lisaloon
December 13, 2009, 10:12 PMcalkins,
One thing I think would be great as a supplement to the existing Grammar Guide would be the following:
Every lesson that has a distinct sentence pattern would have a link to a page within the Grammar Guide, where a clear explanation of the pattern (i.e. S 把 O V) and approximately 10 example sentences for that pattern.
This seems right on to me. I am still Newbie and finding I'm having a hard time locating examples of sentence patterns that are relevant when I want to express myself. Unless I can use the words I've learned to address new contexts and situations, it's useless. Got to get away from thinking in English! Got to say it in Chinese first! CPod needs some more bridges to that. Ways of cross-connecting chunks and patterns and facilitating expressive rather than passive language. I've just joined, and I'm still too new to be able to ask for what I feel I need, so I hope to keep following these threads and that y'all will lead the way.
calicartel
January 03, 2010, 06:48 PMRegarding patterns, my feeling is that the more CP try to pinpoint them, the more they lapse into unfruitful repetition, like when they teach the "什么什么 ... 的话" pattern for the hundreth time. Cross-linking to previous lessons - merely mentioning a previous occurrence in the podcast - would be useful for reinforcement, but again CP students doing lesson 60 will not all of them have done lesson 53. This is a major difference compared to traditional courses.
Some good pattern learning is implicit in the expansion sentences though. Maybe the expansion sentences could concentrate more on patterns than on vocab & expressions, ie instead of having 3 sentences illustrating a particular word, have 3 sentences hammering in the same pattern.
Here are sentence pattern drills I found very efficient (listen to the latest 5th of the clip):
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/ealac/zhang/dh/dh_audio/01b.mp3
Note the immediate repeat by a second voice.
Reverting to the angst of efficiently learning patterns of grammar, one should not lose sight of the fact that one is learning a language, not a system of rules or patterns. The main thing is to get there, never mind how. I'm confident that once I can understand Chinese radio and listen to it for fun and keeping up with the headlines, patterns and new terms will sort themselves out in my mind and I'll be in business.
pretzellogic
In practice, I've found what you said about focusing in on a specific area like in a Qing Wen to be exactly the case.
simonpettersson
I think I should point out, that in the many lessons I've studies, I don't think I've ever heard an explanation of the "... 的话" pattern.
simonpettersson
January 03, 2010, 09:09 PMI have the same experience. No knowledge -> passive knowledge -> active knowledge is a lot easier than trying to skip directly to active knowledge. But then I'm not in a situation where I need to use the stuff I learn from day one. If I were in China, as many (most?) of CPod's subscribers are, maybe rushing towards active knowledge is worthwhile.
pretzellogic
From what I understand of Ken's posts in the past, most of Cpod's subscribers are hobbyists with no plans to visit China. Relatively few visit China, and fewer still are in China for 6 months or longer. I suspect that many of the very frequent posters (VFPs) are here for awhile, but not all.
calicartel
January 05, 2010, 06:36 AMYeh, in fact if I had active knowledge right now, I wouldn't know what to do with it since I'm living outside China and have no Chinese contacts. In my situation passive knowledge is gratifying enough and requires less maintenance.
pretzellogic
February 01, 2010, 07:14 AMFrom what I understand of Ken's posts in the past, most of Cpod's subscribers are hobbyists with no plans to visit China. Relatively few visit China, and fewer still are in China for 6 months or longer. I suspect that many of the very frequent posters (VFPs) are here for awhile, but not all.
pretzellogic
February 01, 2010, 07:16 AMIn practice, I've found what you said about focusing in on a specific area like in a Qing Wen to be exactly the case.
pretzellogic
November 11, 2009, 02:16 PMThanks Mark. I do recall you posting that you tested for the HSK, and you're definitely further than me on Mandarin studies.
I guess one thing I take from all this is that the balance between retention and speed seems to be around 30-50 new words/patterns per week. I definitely understand about the day job thing. I remember themainman posting that he blasted through about 90 lessons in a few months and felt significantly better about his Chinese. But then he added that he was unemployed at the time. Sounds possibly also that he didn't have wife/children making demands on his time also, but that's a big assumption. Ultimately, as we all know, the more time you put in, the faster you learn.
hamshank
November 10, 2009, 12:46 PMI'm currently trying to learn about 25 words per week and find I retain most of them... You raise a good point tho and I would be interested to hear some opinions as it seems like some people are able to run up the levels really quickly.
Im up to about 260 words now and still feel im well within newbie territory still.