User Comments - chris

Posted on: Focus and Specialization

The real world mistakes can, quite literally, be more costly. I distinctly remember when I was a month or so into my now seemingly never-ending secondment to China, and a boss from the UK was visiting. I took him to a local restaurant and tried to impress by ordering in Mandarin. Three waiters immediately returned with over 20 opened large bottles of Qingdao beer for us. To this day I have no idea how they mistake my "liang ping" for "er shi duo"!

Posted on: Focus and Specialization

I hear you! One of the few disadvantages of being one of the Chinesepod early adopters. I suffer the same thing at the newbie-inter levels, but thankfully still have a deep well of UIs to work through.

Posted on: Focus and Specialization

waiguoren, that's a great idea for a 'value-add' output for the transcriptions. Another suggestion would be to provide our attempts at a translation. I think this would both be a value-add for other readers of our efforts - but perhaps more importantly would address your final point above.

I too fear the transcription process being too mechanical at times. For example, I know (or am pretty certain) that I've typed the correct characters, but when I go back and read what I've just typed, I don't really understand what Jenny/Dilu/John is saying or I don't understand how the grammar is working, and hence what the exact English translation would be. Kind of defeats the whole purpose!

A lot of times, I think this is just the Chinese vocab/grammar equivalents of our English phrases such as "you know", "like", "um", "uh" - basically, superfluous words that don't really mean anything but are always part of speech and are difficult to directly translate.

Now, whether I can face producing a full translation as well as the transcription itself, that's another story....

Posted on: Focus and Specialization

Bodawei,

"I am tempted to say that doing transcripts helps you improve your ability to do transcripts"

This is absolutely true! I think it's like anything in life, the more you do it the more proficient you become. I can knock out an entire Intermediate lesson transcript pretty quick these days and I'm sure some of that is just through repetition of the transcription process that I adopt.

However, I am also positive that a large part of it is because my listening is better now.

And it's not just the listening itself - it's the ability to pre-empt what Jenny/Dilu is going to say next. Hopefully that doesn't sound crazy - I'm not claiming to be able to hear into the future or anything - but I've noticed more and more that when I hit pause to type what I just heard I can guess the next few words before they're spoken. And this is precisely because my overall listening ability has improved. I am able to better follow what is said and also better guess, from the context, what vocab or grammar structure/pattern is coming.

Having said this, I'm sure some of it is just being familiar with Jenny and Dilu's style.

This brings me nicely to one of your questions above - outside of the "safe" world of cpod I do still struggle with my listening. However, it is all relative. Where for many years on cpod I was only picking up about 30-40% of what Jenny/Dilu were saying in Inter and UI lessons (i've not attempted any higher yet) and was picking up only 10-20% in the real world, I am now picking up 80-90% on first time listen of cpod lessons and maybe 40-50% in real world. 80-90% is more than sufficient to completely follow a cpod lesson, but 40-50% is still not sufficient in the real world.

This is why I'm religiously ploughing on with the cpod transcripts - I figure that once I get into the Advanced and Media lessons and do the transcripts for those, then I'll get my real world comprehension up to the 70-80% plus mark and so will be able to function better outside of the safety of cpod.

Finally, having thought about it more myself the last couple of days, I do think that a lesson transcript you have not prepared yourself is likely to hinder your learning, since no matter how hard you try, there will be the temptation to lean on it and not get your brain working. One of the things I like about the transcription process is when I hear either new vocab or sounds that I can't clearly hear and am forced to first guess what they might be from the context and then resort to the dictionary to actually look them up. Admittedly, this is time consuming and, in the early days, is why the transcription process itself was daunting and took a long time. But as your vocab and ability to contextually guess improves, so does the time taken to transcribe.

I'm interested why you think that doing a transcript would not put your brain to work? Maybe I misunderstood what you're saying. I can understand that relying on a transcript will have this effect, but sure not the doing?

Apologies for the longwinded post, but this area of language learning interests me.

Posted on: Focus and Specialization

Hi Bodawei, I can only speak for myself, but I can without any doubt say that the act of doing the transcripts has significantly improved my listening (and, yes, the side-effects, to a lesser extent than the impact on my listening, have been improved vocab and typing). I have always since day 1 struggled with my listening - to the point where my speaking was way ahead of my listening comprehension. I know this sounds strange - and from talking to many fellow expats they all say they have the opposite problem, i.e. they can understand a lot of chinese but can't formulate their own speech. I have tried all sorts of things to improve my listening - TV shows, movies, talking with colleagues/friends, etc but whilst slight improvements were made I never really felt like i was getting anywhere. All the while my writing, reading and speaking were progressing nicely. It was the transcripts that finally cracked it for me. This probably explains why I'm somewhat addicted to the Transcripts with Tal group. Anyway, just my tuppence. Each to their own and all that :-)

Posted on: Taking the Plunge into Intermediate

That's the one mate. Thanks! Been bugging me ever since yesterday's UI lesson. Bit puzzled why my phone dictionary didn't bring this up when I typed in "qiaome" and simply omitted the "n". Guess I might need to adjust the search setting (it shows it when I type in the full "qiaomen").

Posted on: Taking the Plunge into Intermediate

Can anyone give me the Hanzi for the word that Jenny uses near the end for "tip", as in a recommendation.  I think she also used this word in this week's UI lesson and I'm hearing it as "qiao me" or "chao me" or similar.  In my dictionary, the only word for "tip" i can find is 贴士 (tie1 shi4).

Posted on: Focus and Specialization

I agree Mark. This week's lessons would possibly have been better released as a supplement to the "how to use chinesepod series" rather than taking the place of actual lessons.

Having said that, an advantage of cpod having been around for quite a while now is that if anyone is missing their fix this week of a new more "normal" lesson, I doubt there are many users that have completely exhausted the back-catalogue of lessons at their level hence they could just pick an unstudied older lesson to get this week's fix.

Posted on: Focus and Specialization

Is this the red and green Claudia Ross book? If so, fantastic book. A rare example of a reference book that I've actually read like a novel, ie cover to cover. Several times in fact. It's really helped cement my understanding of several key grammar structures.

Posted on: Focus and Specialization

John, I couldn't agree more with your post, particularly the second paragraph. I guess I'm one of the more active transcribers on the site in recent months and I can say for certain that I get more out of doing the actual transcription than I do from reading what others have transcribed. In fact, I can confidently say that it was the act of transcribing that got me over that pesky "ele to inter bridge"! Having said that, I do also like working through others' attempts and making comments/suggestions where appropriate. I also draw some comfort from the fact that the sounds/words that others have problems with are the same as me, e.g. John vs jiang vs zheyang, xiang vs shang, jiao vs zhao (and the list goes on...and on....and on!)