Well....ok. I haven't actually started on Chinese yet. In LingQ terminology I'm a "no-knowledger". I'm thinking about it. I bookmarked some web sites recommended by Chinese learners, I've had a look at the LingQ Chinese library and listened to a couple of lessons. I've been lurking in the LingQ Chinese forum, listening to what the other students have to say. One day I will be sitting at my computer, feeling a little bit bored, and I'll think "Hey! I'm going to learn Chinese!" And I'll know where to start, and what to do.
I'm confident that, when I do start, it will look like "squigglesquigglesquiggle" and sound like "blurblurblurblur" for (pick a number from 1 to 10) weeks, and then it will, gradually, start to make sense. I imagine that Chinese grammar will seem utterly insane to me, but I won't spend time trying to work it out, and after a while, the sentence patterns will work their way into my brain the way the patterns in a piece of music do. And if I have any questions, I know a bunch of very sensible people who can help me out. Some speak Chinese. Some are Chinese. I'm in good hands.
LingQ: Because Eurovision is better when you understand the words.
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It's very hard to start out from scratch on LingQ at this point - I know because I tried.
ReplyDeleteA highly recommendable book is Zhang Peng Peng's 'Intensive spoken Chinese', which will help you to understand about 1000 words over the course of 40 dialogues, each of which includes the characters and pinyin transliteration, as well as wordlists.
Following each chapter is also a relevant grammar point, but I just skipped those in my hunger for more vocabulary.
My method was
1) read (the pinyin) and listen without understanding first
2) read and listen and look at the word list on the side of the page to figure out what they are saying
3) read and listen again to see if I understand
4)listen without reading to test my comprehension
This only took about 10 minutes for each dialogue, and I found that I could learn to understand a dialogue with sometimes 30 new vocab words in that time.
Once you can understand without reading, move onto the next lesson and do the same. Then it's just a matter of listening to the dialogues every day over the course of a week or so and after that occasionally repeating, and within about a month or less you can understand 1000 words of Chinese (in context).