Heard about this Taiwan based Chinese learning.
Early on first 6 months or so it’s intense conversation with no characters or reading a writing.
I found a YouTube channel but no contact info or don’t even know if it still happening.
Seems It’s maybe kaput or on break or something I don’t know but started by Jamie Rufe.
Anyone know anything about it?
In his introductory lesson, he doesn’t even get the tone right on 我 and 你…
Hell I thought they would have native speakers. I don’t know if he is or not but it appears not.
Eh…obviously not a native speaker. The nose is a dead giveaway.
Yeah I didn’t even look at any of the videos yet. I’m just trying to figure out if legitimate and any reviews or experience people may have had.
If you have the patience/ability to focus on audio only for 30 minutes at a time, Pimsleur is very effective at teaching listening and speaking. They claim their levels 1-3 take speakers to a B1 level, but if that’s true, you’re doing so with very limited vocabulary (in other words, it’s probably not true…
). But you get a solid structure that you can build your vocabulary off of, which I think is more effective than learning a load of words but no sentences to use them in. And the recordings are done by native speakers. I recommend getting it from the library (for free) or seeing if the internet archive has it.
Pimsler I really enjoyed early on when I had time like on a morning commute or something.
Conversation it isn’t.
Conversation is what I’m always looking for and the best I can find is tutor ~$800 - +~$1000 an hour to converse with me which I’ve done but it just gets stupidly and prohibitively expensive.
I thought maybe Warp would provide something reasonable 2,4,6 hours a day 5 to 7 days a week for a month or something.
I don’t think this channel is going to teach you conversations. It looks like it’s just a bunch of pronunciation videos by a white guy (which, tbh, most of the semi to very good Chinese learning material out there is by white people/nonnative Chinese speakers, because they actually have an idea of what it’s like to learn Chinese)
In the past, I would consider ChinesePod, but they haven’t had any new content in like five years and they still dare to charge US$30/month for access to their platform. Scam, it is.
YouTube is now full of videos in Chinese aimed at learners of Chinese though. If you want to spend the whole day doing Chinese, I would consider getting a subscription to Chairman’s Bao or DuChinese or the like and pairing that with Skritter (or Anki if that works for you)
Once upon a time I paid for FluentU, which takes videos from the internet and puts the subtitles at the bottom in an interactive way (and you can add them to a deck), but I was constantly sending them “wrong character” notices (like many times per video) so I told them they should be paying me significantly more that I am paying them to clean up their platform. Not sure if things have improved at all, but it would be a good program if they actually used the correct characters
Why not just find some 711 employee and pay them 300 to chat for an hour
you don’t even need to pay. just find any person over 60 looking bored in the park, make small talk and if they continue the conversation they are interested. old people love to talk to foreigners
This channel and others with such short random videos are not going to help much IMO.
Pimsleur is also not much cop. It’s Beijing chinese for a start, so you can’t use it out of the box in Taiwan.
I would skip the pimsleur and go for Glossika - the audio files, not the shitty rip off new app. Download the files, you can play them and speak along similarly as Pimsleur. But it actually has a Taiwan mandarin option, so its actually - very useful out of the box.
Glossika teaches you the speech and grammar patterns. It helps get your listening and speaking up to normal speed, instead of the slow speed they will teach you in class, which is fine but its not how people actually speak out in the wild.
If you live in Taiwan i would find a language partner asap and get some speaking reps in. It should be easy to find, hello talk has tons of Taiwanese on it. No need to pay a dime.
When I was a FOP I asked someone where the 地鐵 was. The nice lady corrected me. It wasn’t a big deal.
Just sayin’.
Looks interesting. Might give it a try. I just finished the intermediate series in ChinesePod, which was very helpful for me. There is not a clear progression from one lesson to the next, which I don’t like, but you can get the basic version for free. Now I need a program where so can learn to read and write without actually writing by hand. I tried that for a semester and lived with a constant hand cramp…
Sure, if there is no Taiwanese specific version of Glossika you can use out of the box then go ahead and use Beijing pimsleur. But there is a Taiwan version of Glossika, so why not save yourself the trouble.
Doesn’t matter to me I’m tone deaf!
Also my first visit to Tiawan 5 years ago I was told oh Taiwanese are very friendly and will always help with your Chinese speaking and you’ll be bothered by young people asking you to teach them English.
These two actions has never happened, however when travelling China before Taiwan it did happen a lot!
That’s Taiwan like 30 years ago.
Skritter is great for character writing practice. When I first started learning Chinese, I bought a cheap Wacom tablet so I could practice writing the characters, rather than using a mouse/touchpad. It works wonders for the muscle memory.
Yes, 20-30 years ago in Taiwan, if one was eating alone one often got some students approaching and asking if they could talk with me. After a discussion, they needed me to sign a paper for their homework. But nowadays teachers doesn’t seems to be giving out that kind of homework anymore I guess,
I remember this happening until the early 2000s.