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L-F-J -

well, its kind of true. i know a korean guy with an american wife and children who dont speak
korean. so most of his life in america is spent speaking english except with the occasional korean
visit. but he never studies english. he's been living here for nearly 30 years and his english is
terrible. its very difficult to understand him. although he understands everything. he cant talk
hardly at all.

now along side my best friend learning chinese. he spent time learning characters because he liked
them and then learned phrases and words and spoke to people in chinese a lot. i never spoke to
anyone. mostly because i was shy. but i also spent a lot of time studying the language, listening,
and reading. over the course of years i've found that i am much more able to understand people
when they speak to us and am more able to speak back to them with somewhat non-beginner chinese
anymore. while this guy still says the same things all the time and has poor grammar. because he
doesnt study or listen. he just speaks to people....

i agree, you cant really learn that way mainly because half the dialogue is non-native response
and accent from yourself. you never hear a fully native dialogue. so what can you learn?

p.s. i'm still waiting for that chinese version of the linguist system. where is steve anyway?



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L-F-J -

i guess he lied...










flameproof -

Steves blog is still active and his new website (lingq or so) has a soft opening too.










L-F-J -

do you know if when lingq launches it will provide a mandarin version?










koreth -

In theory I like the "read and listen a lot" technique. In practice it's not so easy to do,
especially on the reading side. I've had a difficult time finding interesting reading materials
that are mostly comprehensible. By "mostly comprehensible" I mean that it's possible to read them
and get the gist of what they mean, even if there are some new words or unfamiliar sentence
patterns. Challenging enough to learn something, but not so challenging that I'll toss them away
in frustration.

Textbooks are good on the "comprehensible" side but often not so great on the "interesting" side,
especially for those of us who aren't full-time college students interested in discussions of life
in dormitories. Newspapers -- at least, all the ones I've found in my area so far -- are much more
interesting, but most of the time I can't get through a paragraph without consulting a dictionary
ten times, pushing the frustration level high enough that I rarely make it to the end of anything
but a short article. (My vocabulary is low intermediate level; I know about 1600 characters.)

And of course Chinese has the "I've heard this word spoken and know what it means, but have no
clue how it's written" problem. If you pick up vocabulary in conversation, it'll still send you
back to the dictionary the first time you encounter it in writing unless you happen to know the
component characters from somewhere else. I think there's nothing to be done about that but
memorize more characters, but it does IMO contribute in a big way to the difficulty of finding
good intermediate-level reading material.

"The Lady in the Painting" by Fred Fang-yu Wang is an example of the kind of thing I'd love to see
more of at various levels. It's a folk tale retold using only 300 basic characters (plus a very
small number of others that are introduced with English definitions and pinyin along the way).
There were still new words to learn when I read it, but to me at least, it's MUCH less frustrating
to encounter a new word made up of characters I already know than to run into a completely
unfamiliar glyph or two in every sentence. As far as I can tell, that book is nearly unique.

Children's books are kind of hit-and-miss; the very lowest level ones seem to be aimed at parents
reading to their kids, so are nearly as full of unfamiliar characters as a newspaper article is.
The bilingual series by 大山 is a good example. Even now, when my study materials are second-
and third-year college texts, I still can't fully read most pages of those books. And of course as
an adult learner, they are not so high on the "interesting" scale anyway.

What do Chinese kids read when they're older than toddlers but younger than teenagers? What are
the Chinese equivalents of series like, say, Nancy Drew or the Secret Seven?

My girlfriend tells me that when she was growing up in Taiwan, she used to read a kids' edition of
her local newspaper that had regular news stories written using much simpler vocabulary than the
normal newspaper. Neither she nor I have ever seen such a newspaper in any of the Chinese
bookstores or supermarkets we've visited in northern California, though; apparently they just
don't get imported for whatever reason.

Steve or anyone else, what did you do about finding good reading materials when you were still
coming up to speed?










flameproof -



Quote:

do you know if when lingq launches it will provide a mandarin version?

No. But it looks like "other" languages (French, plus a few more) start soon, or have already a
soft opening. Steve said Chinese will "come some time later". I wouldn't be surprised if it's
2008....



Quote:

In theory I like the "read and listen a lot" technique. In practice it's not so easy to do,
especially on the reading side. I've had a difficult time finding interesting reading materials
that are mostly comprehensible.

I think there is very, very little adult reading material with limited number of different
characters. I gave up looking. I think you really have to start with primary children books.

I did suggest "Jiandan de Nanti", for Chinese it will be very easy, for beginners it's quite a
struggle. And struggle ain't good as it can lead easily to frustration.










gato -



Quote:

What do Chinese kids read when they're older than toddlers but younger than teenagers? What are
the Chinese equivalents of series like, say, Nancy Drew or the Secret Seven?

My girlfriend tells me that when she was growing up in Taiwan, she used to read a kids' edition of
her local newspaper that had regular news stories written using much simpler vocabulary than the
normal newspaper.

There used to be a few newspapers and magazines published in China designed for elementary school
kids. I'm not sure if they still exist. There are comic books and novels written to young people,
too, just like in other countries. You can browse through them on dangdang.com:
http://www.dangdang.com/book/index_m...en_11-14.shtml

As I wrote in an earlier thread:
http://www. /showth...tary#post71552
Mainland children are typically required to recognize 1600-1800 characters and write 800-1000 by
the end of second grade, recognize 2500 characters and write 2000 by the end of fourth.

Many second graders who are native Chinese speakers already have a fairly large spoken vocabulary,
that is, they already know lots of words. Once they learn 1800 characters, they'll be able to
recognize most words in a lower-level newspaper article.










wrbt -

Koreth -

I think if you look at textbooks that are targeted towards 3rd year college + you can find the
window of "mostly comprehensible" yet somewhat interesting that you seek. In my (granted limited)
experience books published outside of China around that level often have far more interesting
topics than the standard dorm life type topics covered in the more elementary ones...
overpopulation, pollution, abortion, divorce, abandonment of the elderly, inconsiderate bastards,
swindlers, and so forth.

Try looking at Cheng & Tsui website, some stuff off the top of my head that fits =

Shifting Tides
Beyond The Basics
Across the Straits

At the very least those intermediate textbooks will have lots of dialogues with vocabulary lists
and listening materials with native speakers to practice, and they don't tow the boring line on
topics.










wrbt -

I've uploaded a brief excerpt on Housing Reform in China from "Shifting Tides" as an example. The
book has audio CDs included, clear grammar points, and focuses mainly on current events and news
instead of dorm life type stuff of many college texts.










koreth -

That sounds like a good one to get. I have one book like that already, though as far as I know it
has no audio companion: "A New Text For a Modern China" (the one from 北京大学; there are two
books with that title.) It covers some of the same topics, which is nice since presumably there'll
be a lot of vocabulary overlap. Thanks!












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