User Comments - chris
chris
Posted on: Visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art
January 7, 2012 at 7:26 AMIf so inclined, feel free to come join/review the transcript attempt:
Posted on: Taking the Plunge into Intermediate
January 6, 2012 at 5:22 AM"luck is when opportunity meets preparation."
I've not come across this expression before Dave, but I like it!
Posted on: Focus and Specialization
January 6, 2012 at 1:53 AMGrambers, this is a good point. I have the same relative weighting as you across the 4 disciplines but I'd say a level below you on each one. I feel very bad about my speaking/listening ability purely because I have no excuse of not being in China (coincidentally, I'm also Hampshire born and bred, great county!). In terms of writing, I guess there are two sub-categories, namely handwriting and typing. I think my typing is pretty good for my overall level, but then I always feel like I'm cheating a bit because I'm simply fast at typing pinyin. My handwriting is atrocious and my recall from a blank sheet of paper is probably only around 100 characters. I'm also a big fan of the applications like pleco/anki. Drilling through hundreds of those flashcards every day does wonders for character recognition.
Posted on: Focus and Specialization
January 5, 2012 at 3:30 AMI can certainly see how that amount of focus and time can get one to way above intermediate within 18 months. In an ideal world I'd do a similar thing, particularly given my goal of getting my chinese to a level where I can do business quickly and efficiently in chinese without resorting to english. I suspect for most people though that, unless a student or not working, it would be quite tough to keep up that level of time investment. I often think about the possibility of a sabbatical for 6 months to purely learn and focus on Chinese day in day out.
Posted on: Focus and Specialization
January 4, 2012 at 4:36 AMHi dubaobao, I totally agree in principle with your point about focusing on the more high-frequency stuff. However, where I think we differ in point of view is that I actually find all that high-frequency stuff in the lesson discussion and banter during the lesson itself. My experience of the dialogues (at least at I and UI level) is that they tend to include nice new vocab and structures but aren't necessarily that high-frequency and are often actually quite specialised. I feel I get a huge amount of benefit out of the high-frequency and often repeated little words (I think of them as joiner-words that stick spoken language together) that occur more during the lesson discussion itself. I particularly like the last 2-3mins of the I and UI lessons when the hosts tend to go a little "offpiste".
Posted on: Focus and Specialization
January 4, 2012 at 4:12 AMRachel, have you tried clicking on the "all lessons" button under your lesson list on your Dashboard. On the next screen, tickmark the lesson you want to remove and then in the dropdown menu in the top-left (the one that says "change selected"), select "remove". Then wait a few seconds and it should work.
I actually also had this problem with a lesson a few months ago that I wanted to remove from my study list without studying. In the end, I had to resort to clicking as "studied" and just mentally remembering that my studied lesson count is actually one less than it says. Not ideal, but not too much of a bother either.
Posted on: Presentation on Trends
January 4, 2012 at 4:05 AM谢谢Connie你说明说的很清楚！（我希望我前面的语法写对的）
Posted on: Self-Taught Degrees in China
January 3, 2012 at 11:41 AMGood point on the adjectives vs verbs, my example was rather missing the point, I just remember somebody making an observation to me that English does tend to have lots of words that mean the same thing, which I'd never really thought of prior to learning Chinese. I've quite liked the fact that learning another language (chinese is my first) has also opened my eyes to so many things about English that I've never noticed before, having basically slept through English Lit and Lang during GCSEs! With the benefit of hindsight, I do wish that I'd been more linguistically enlightened when younger.
As to loanwords, I can never quite shake that feeling of cheating, if that makes sense. As for 血拼, my statistically inconsequential sample of one Fujianese person that I just asked had never heard of it.
Posted on: Self-Taught Degrees in China
January 3, 2012 at 11:02 AMI was studying an expansion sentence over the recent holidays and I'm sure I remember it having all three of those terms for shopping in the same sentence, 买东西，购物, and 逛街。I remember thinking how many terms are needed for the same thing! However, as bodawei mentions 逛街 is more like window-shopping than actual shopping. And of course English has many instances of a huge, ginormous, gigantic, big, giant, large, humungous, enormous number of words for saying the same thing... "大", for example :-)
Posted on: Taking the Plunge into Intermediate
January 7, 2012 at 7:41 AMHanPing off the Android Market - at least until Pleco releases its full version on Android. It's still in beta I think.