Pimsleur

Just finished Pimsluer Comprehensive Mandarin Chinese I & now beginning level 2.  It took a couple months because I’d have to go through each lesson three to four times before feeling comfortable enough to move on, and that was getting about eighty percent of it. Yet as I go back and review the lessons again, can now blow right through them with no problem. Really hearing and feeling progress.

Thus far the Pimsluer method has been the backbone of my study, the one thing I make sure to do every day. It only consists of listening to words and learning dialogs using this memory method type thing developed by Dr. Pimsluer. IT ACTUALLY WORKS! I have found this the best method for keeping all this stuff in my head, which is the only way to really know it. Chinese has to become your second nature.

At this stage now feel like about at the first stage of being an intermediate beginner.

Multiple plans of attack

Enthusiasm’s there, as is lots of learning options... one thing still missing, and this is BIG... no one to practice speaking with. Still working on that, so in the meantime have been focusing mainly on comprehension, where working on several different methods at the same time has been of great help. 

For me one of the things about learning Mandarin is that most of it doesn’t immediately click or even make much sense. Only after days, weeks, and even months of trying to wrap my head around the ins and outs, does some of the haze finally start to clear. It must come to you, in it’s own way, in it’s own time. Thus far my experience has been, getting fed different concepts, from different angles, at different times really seems to help with locking this stuff in. For example, after blindly memorizing some certain word orders listening to Learn in your car Chinese, when those same word orders came into play listening to Pimsleur I was already familiar enough with the syntax to thus be able to get a good intellectual grasp of what I had just learned AGAIN. In a nutshell, once I’ve blundered through one concepts on one of the paths I’ve been following, that same concept becomes much easier when it appears in another path.

Redundancy from different perspectives equals comprehension. 

War of attrition

I began learning Mandarin with a clean slate, not knowing a lick... not one word... NOTHING... and have since come to the conclusion this is going to be a war of attrition, step by step, inch by inch.... the beginner has a lot to initially concentrate on... the four tones of Chinese Language, meaning of particles, word order... it’s like this big haze, which thank god does start to slowly dissipate the more you study of the material.

Half an hour is about all the super concentrating I can muster, so study in bursts. FIRST thing in the morning is always a Pimsleur lesson, that way no matter how busy the schedule is, at least a half an hour of study gets done per day... 

The cool thing is that once you start really seeing progress it gets addictive and you want to find time to study(I carry flash cards everywhere)... it’s kind of like playing a video game, where all you can think about is getting to the next level, then work-work-working to get there... the trick being not ever letting up. EVER... you gotta drill this stuff into your head, going through the material over and over and OVER again... words, phrases, and grammar get easily forgotten until they’re so rooted in your mind it just flows out like your second nature... with work this actually does start to happen... and that’s just one just of the many rewarding things about learning Mandarin... 

Some dudes learning Mandarin adventure

So. What does one do with ones spare time? Watch television?... Play video games?... Go to the mall and hang out?... Follow a favorite sports team?... Party hard and sleep it off?

What about learning another language?? Well. That’s what I decided to do... in lieu of all of the above...

A friend from out of state emailed me about some potential business opportunities in China... she speaks Mandarin and assured me I could get by only speaking English, which was a good thing because two years of Spanish in college as well as taking a course IN Mexico had left me feeling there was no aptitude for learning ANY foreign language.

Mandarin? Forget it... but at least had to check it out, if only to remind myself that learning a new language would never get into the skill set bag o’ tricks...

But much to my surprise discovered something a lot different than Spanish...

There’s no verb conjunctions, none of that male or female type stuff, most of the words are only one or two syllables... the tricky parts seemed to be tones, word order in complex sentences, and all those measure words... yeah, almost none of the words sound even remotely close to their English counter parts, but in a way that seemed to make things easier.... Spanish always fooled me with all it’s ‘similar’ sounding words, giving a false sense of security. Mandarin pretty much starts you off with a clean slate...

As I write this, am still a baby beginner who’ll start an intensive Mandarin course in a few weeks. Been working on my own for about three months and truly believe functional proficiency is an achievable goal(but that true fluency can only be achieved by actually living in an environment where you have to speak Mandarin all the time)....

Here I’ll document the progress and techniques used during this Mandarin learning adventure... which thus far has been working with the Pimsleur method, Living Language course, Learn in your car method, FSI language course, watching television shows and movies in Mandarin, flash cards, and looking at various stuff all over the web...

It’s actually a lot of fun and have come to the conclusion that learning Mandarin is one of the most challenging and rewarding things a person can do on multiple levels... more on that later :)