You might have no problem with it but I know a few foreigners who asked why they have to write characters over and over before they can have a “VERY” basic conversation. Methods?
Let’s all write 是 50 times. That’ll help. There are tons of foreigners who can write that character but can’t read and can’t say “你是我狗的屎是不是?” But the word appears 3 times. Now you could pretend to read it without knowing all the words, but that has to be another method and it only works with kids. Ironlady’s method is not hers. It’s an old method she is using for Chinese that is clearly superior to most other methods for all languages. Why not learn your second language the way you learn the first.
You might have no problem with it but I know a few foreigners who asked why they have to write characters over and over before they can have a “VERY” basic conversation. Methods?
Let’s all write 是 50 times. That’ll help. There are tons of foreigners who can write that character but can’t read and can’t say “你是我狗的屎是不是?” But the word appears 3 times. Now you could pretend to read it without knowing all the words, but that has to be another method and it only works with kids. Ironlady’s method is not hers. It’s an old method she is using for Chinese that is clearly superior to most other methods for all languages. Why not learn your second language the way you learn the first.[/quote]
I’ve done most work for my Chinese on flashcard decks and face-to-face conversations.
I ultimately broke it down into three sections:
[ol]
[li]a Hanzi-to-Pinyin/Zhuyin deck – for the graph-to-phone hurdle,[/li]
[li]an English-to-Chinese vocabulary deck – for vocabulary, pronunciation, and “spelling” of the terms,[/li]
[li]a Chinese-to-English sentences deck – for vocabulary, pronunciation, and gist translation of the sentences.[/li][/ol]
Now, I did some things on the development end that most sane people wouldn’t otherwise do in the interests of learning the language quickly, but it boiled down to correctly ordering the Hanzi by frequency and CJK info, and then affecting the learning order of the deck so that I could learn the things incrementally.
Also, I can study with a cell phone or my computer and be satisfied in knowing that I recognized x Hanzi, knew common Chinese translations for y English words, and could comprehend the meaning of z Chinese sentences; but some people need more than a “Congratulations!” at the end. I assume my feeling is how people who meet their New Year’s Resolutions feel.
I originally suffered because I set unrealistic study goals for myself; but once I started lightly, and then upped the study load with some training (to get into the swing of it), I really enjoyed the whole process. Self-paced study is the only method that I can tolerate anymore. I’ve been directing all of my teaching in that direction, to teach people to be more autodidactic, and then show them some efficient tools for their ends.
Spaced repetition (which wasn’t on my end of development) covered the rest of the “learning/acquisition” process. Whether it’s “memorization” or “acquisition” is a theoretical dispute, but ultimately rereading previously covered material has been extremely helpful.
In regards to writing the Hanzi, I found that I saved myself paper, time, and energy with my second deck. I won’t reveal the answer to myself until I “write” all of the characters that I had not already demonstrated that I could write from memory that day. I’d just trace with my fingers and visualize the stuff (though, gross as it sounds, the oil from my fingers on a laptop’s plastic surface actually leaves the character intact for comparison). I do it on the bus, too, which makes me look like I’m the guy in “Dreamcatcher” who can find stuff by twirling his index finger. People who see my handwriting say that it’s is “gorgeous,” and I don’t think that I’ve ever done pad-to-paper practice. It’s not perfect, though, as I’ll occasionally write ‘已’ and ‘己’ incorrectly, for instance.
But I couldn’t fathom trying to learn Hanzi the way “Shit-tastic, The Manual: a.k.a. the ‘PAVC’ or ‘Integreated Chinese,’ or Whatever” teaches it. (e.g. Write ‘樣’ first! Take no time to learn ‘木’, ‘羊’, and ‘永’ beforehand! No, no! That would make the “spelling” of the character too straightforward!)
But I’m also vicious against myself. If I am not 100% right on a card, I mark the lowest score on the flashcard app and make myself review it sooner, and I do that at every level of study or review. I think that’s a major hurdle to most self-paced learners. They just can’t admit to themselves that they’re wrong.
I definitely didn’t learn my first or second language this way, but I’m definitely doing my third and fourth this way henceforth.
And now back to the discussion of how ordinary people can learn Chinese reading, preferably with some modicum of interpersonal interaction included in the process. 
Yes, we really need to separate the language forums into For Asperger- and For Non-Asperger- Learners. 
Well, ehopi’s methods are unique. I’m sure they work for a small proportion of people, just as traditional language teaching methods do.
Of course, by this point we’re pretty far afield from the OP’s question of should he re-read something or not. I would say yes, re-read the text as a text. ehopi would maybe say take the text apart into sentences and re-read them using spaced repetition.
[quote=“ironlady”]Well, ehopi’s methods are unique. I’m sure they work for a small proportion of people, just as traditional language teaching methods do.
Of course, by this point we’re pretty far afield from the OP’s question of should he re-read something or not. I would say yes, re-read the text as a text. ehopi would maybe say take the text apart into sentences and re-read them using spaced repetition.[/quote]
More or less. If I want to reread something for the sake of the content (the story or essay), then I’d read a whole text over again. If it’s just about language skill, then I’d probably opt for splitting the text.
I generally favor methods which incorporate spaced repetition, because a computer can set the practice due dates for me more reliably than any human teacher could.
But I’m also trying to answer two questions. The second was on the value of practicing writing Hanzi. I find that it’s helpful, but that books and instructors who use those books teach them in a really goofy order.
If it’s “just” for language skill, I’d opt for keeping the text integral. I don’t want to encourage sentence-level language. And definitely keep it together for reading skill, based on what we are seeing in experiments.
[quote=“ironlady”]Well, ehopi’s methods are unique. I’m sure they work for a small proportion of people, just as traditional language teaching methods do.
Of course, by this point we’re pretty far afield from the OP’s question of should he re-read something or not. I would say yes, re-read the text as a text. ehopi would maybe say take the text apart into sentences and re-read them using spaced repetition.[/quote]
I’m trying ehopi’s methods for Malay, and they seem to work. For example, after a couple of weeks of study I googled a few random Malay words, and to my astonishment was able to read the (admittedly short) blog post that came up.
But isn’t the gist of ehopi’s method actually CI, at some level? He’s getting spaced repetition of comprehensible language, just without a teacher.
There’s not much choice sometimes: I’d love to try a real CI class, but where? So I try to do my own approximation of it.
[quote=“bababa”][quote=“ironlady”]Well, ehopi’s methods are unique. I’m sure they work for a small proportion of people, just as traditional language teaching methods do.
Of course, by this point we’re pretty far afield from the OP’s question of should he re-read something or not. I would say yes, re-read the text as a text. ehopi would maybe say take the text apart into sentences and re-read them using spaced repetition.[/quote]
I’m trying ehopi’s methods for Malay, and they seem to work. For example, after a couple of weeks of study I googled a few random Malay words, and to my astonishment was able to read the (admittedly short) blog post that came up.
But isn’t the gist of ehopi’s method actually CI, at some level? He’s getting spaced repetition of comprehensible language, just without a teacher.
There’s not much choice sometimes: I’d love to try a real CI class, but where? So I try to do my own approximation of it.[/quote]
I did it under a firm belief that most education can, in principle, be automated, and that the in-class lecture model (which hasn’t deviated substantially since the Roman Empire) will be obsolete in a few decades. The fact that I can learn calculus on Khan Academy with no prior background, learn game theory from Yale lectures on YouTube at my own pace, and master computer programs by dibbling and searching for individual solutions on forums, all seem to indicate a move away from other-paced instruction.
I don’t think that it’s a terrible theoretical dispute to say that one should learn simpler things first and harder things later. We also don’t teach trigonometry to third-graders. If CI reduces to “comprehensibility” at that level, then it’s not such a breakthrough theory of “language acquisition.”
The problems are (1) giving a rigorous account of levels of complexity for natural languages and (2) generating a procedure for ordering the difficulty of sentences. Once I solved those, it was very easy to cover the important aspects of language learning, and then I just needed to crunch relevant data.
Calculus and history are not language.
Language is unique in being an innate human ability which is developed through interaction. If you insist on developing it artificially, without interaction, that can be done, but more often than not, the result is a stilted, unnatural sort of “language” that isn’t very useful in communication with real speakers.
And the “complexity” isn’t really the issue. For example, I use subordinate clauses with beginners in Chinese in the second hour. Those are considered “difficult”, but they don’t have any difficulty dealing with them.
But – yes. The OP should definitely read the text a second time.
Then it’s a good thing that computational linguists, corpus linguists, semanticists, morphologists, and others don’t compare sentential difficulty by mere syntactic tree branch count.
If they did, then they’d make the obvious mistake of saying the first sentence below is less complex than the second sentence below:
“Antitransubstantiationalists are heterodoxical!”
“The fat, black dog with the short tail ate a white bone while the man in black went through his mail.”
It’s a good thing, too, that I caught that well in advance. (Smiley face!)
The point for teaching/learning is not how something is analyzed – the point is how efficiently, or whether, a student of the language can handle that syntax. In practical terms. To get large numbers of teachers to teach effectively, and large numbers of students to acquire effectively, is the idea. The average Chinese teacher or student does not have much, if any, grasp of theoretical linguistics.
Once more you are mixing theoretical linguistics with applied linguistics, and more specifically, applied linguistics of one specific language pair (in most cases) applied to a mature student with no cognitive impediments to comprehending the meaning of any sentence or utterance.
There are probably many fora that are more apt to discuss the sorts of linguistic topics you love in much more detail than Forumosa.
The theoretical stuff helps inform how to construct materials for steady pacing in this case. Some of the best parts about automated programs are that teachers’ comprehension of the theory which generates the program isn’t so important and that a program which provides the instruction eliminates the need for teachers to teach. For a historical analog, ‘calculators’ used to refer to people, not to machines.
In plainer words, if I create a flashcard deck, and it teaches me at a comparable pace to formal instruction, then the preference for the flashcard deck is a purely economic consideration.
Yeppers! I barely scratch the surface here.
You mentioned this, too.
“Mathematics is unique in being an innate human ability which is developed through interaction.” Both sentences are false, since other animals can use language and mathematics, too.
Yes, it is a good idea to re-read things you’ve already read.
Thanks for all of the replies. I understand now.
On another note would you recommend timing oneself to read a certain passage/ section using a stopwatch? I want to improve my reading speed and need some sort of measurable figure that I can use to calculate my progress. I can then read the text a second time to see if I my speed has increased.
Finally, Ironlady, I really appreciate your input on the Learning Chinese board.
Thanks
I would recommend going more for fluency, if you’re reading out loud (that’s good for a lot of things). I suppose if you want to see numbers that say you’re improving, you could time yourself - but remember, weighing the pig doesn’t make it grow. Reading more will make your speed increase, not measuring how fast you’re reading. So unless you need a shot in the arm of encouragement, I’d use the time to read, instead.
Thanks.
Do I need someone to be sat next to me listening to me read the text? Do I need to be getting feedback as I read? If I am sat alone in my room reading out loud to myself will this really benefit me?
Well, you need to think about what stage of study you are at, what your goals are, and so on.
If it’s not particularly important to you to become fluent in reading out loud, I wouldn’t bother to read out loud. I’d just find appropriate materials and read.
All this time you’re agonizing over what to do – just use it to read. Preferably comprehensible materials – or electronic files on something like PlecoDict that makes it far more comprehensible with far less effort.
Yeah, I just read stuff (and talk to people). That’s about it. :s