linguaholic

Let me add another two: Schadenfreude and Fachidiot. Those one's are pretty funny if you ask me:=) 8) 8) There should be a dozen others deriving from the second world war...I will do some research on this...if you know more, spread the knowledge guys

Hi Tim Warm welcome to the Linguaholic Forum!!! If you have any questions or any wishes/requests about the forum, let me know and I will be glad to help you out!! Thank you for your engagement on linguaholic.com See you around Marcel

The so called "Pimsleur Method" When it comes to language, there are a lot of different study methods (approach). Not so long ago I stumbled upon the so called "Pimsleur method". I did some research on this and after all, I am quite skeptical abut the success of this method. Why? Let me explain... In my opionion, grammar (structures) are a crucial aspect in understanding a language. At some point, you will need to know the specific grammar rules about a language if you want to further improve your skills or just simply want to be able to understand why something is said or written in a certain/specific way. The pimsleur method is widespread amongst language learners of German, French, Italian, English and Spanish. Moreover it is also used for asian languages like Japanese and Chinese. I am studying Chinese myself (since 5 years) and especially with this kind of language I really doubt about the success of the pimsleur method. why ? well, because in Chinese I think it is really important that you study speaking (oral communication) and writing at the same time. The study of characters gives you a feeling about the language and lets you understand the culture and the etymology of the language very well. In terms of grammar, it might be ok for learners of Chinese to study it thoroughly at a later point, as it is not very complex compared to other languages’ grammar. ( for instance German ^^) So may I ask you about your experience with the Pimsleur method ? I am curious to hear more about it. Positive or negative, it doesn’t matter. :=) Share your experience with the pimsleur method, please.

It is really depending on your "goals". This is what I think about the advantages / disadvantages about the two: „ Advantages“ of Studying Simplified Chinese Characters I don’t know if there are any advantages to be honest. You might see the „lower difficulty level“ as an advantage though. But then again, some people argue that studying simplified characters is not easier than studying traditional chinese characters. Their main argument is that a lot of (semantic) information gets lost in simplified characters, therefore remembering (writing) simplified characters is more difficult. So even if they have to write much more complex characters ( strokes ) they think that this is still easier than writing simplified characters as the (full) „meaning“ is still represented by the writing (strokes). „Advantages“ of Studying Traditional Chinese Characters Studying Traditional Chinese characters has a lot of „advantages“ over studying the simplified script. First of all, many reckon that the traditional script is more beautiful. I would also agree here :=) Secondly, if you are into historical (ancient) literature, you will, of course, need to know the traditional characters. The same is also true for literature from Taiwan and Hong Kong of course,, as they still mostly use traditional characters in those places Lastly, as above-mentioned, traditional characters offer you more (semantic) information about a certain character. Therefore, it might be easier to memorize the character and it’s meaning. If you are into Karaoke, you will need to know the traditional characters as well (characters of the song lyrics are almost always in traditional script) *_*

Good evening I am mainly using the Pleco Chinese App. It is indeed very nice! As you know, the Pleco Dictionary is free, but there are also a lot of paid Add-ons. I almost spent 100 bucks and got almost all the paid add-ons for Pleco. Most of them are really awesome! I especially like the flashcards plugin and the handwriting plugin. There are some crazy plugins like the Optical Character Recognition. This is one of the few add-ons that I actually did not buy. I tested the demo and, still, I have to say that it looks at least "interesting". There are also some paid dictionaries that you can buy. I bought the ABC Dictionary. It is really good and is a good alternative for the pleco dictionary. (sometimes when searching some characters or maybe even chinese idioms it comes in handy to have several dictionaries with different entries and different sample sentences). The one thing I like the most about the flashcard expansion is that you have the possibility to FIRST display just the pinyin, THEN you can hand-draw the character out of your mind, and IN THE END display the character. Like this, you can really improve your writing skills. This feature seems somewhat Trivial; however, I have not seen a single APP that allowed me to first just display pinyin, then let me draw the character by hand on the same screen and then display the full character (+more information about the character, etc.) The app is fun on an iPad as well. Studied hours and hours for the HSK with that Pleco App. It offers many many functions and works like a charm. I had a few different Chinese Apps on my iPHone back in the days. I can remember that one of the other flashcard apps I had was nice as well....unfortunately I can't remember the name for the moment. Once I remember, I will let you know xD

How do you learn/memorize Chinese Characters / Study Methods of Chinese Characters There are of course several ways of Studying Chinese characters. Maybe the most common way is to simply write down the characters over and over again until you memorize them. I would call this the „classical approach“. Another method, formerly introduced by Dr. W Heisig, is memorising the characters with help of a so called „imaginative memory“. Each Chinese Character and each radical are associated with a keyword A Chinese Characters written form and its keyword are associated by imagining a scene or story connecting the meaning of the given character with the meanings of all the primitives/radicals used to write the Chinese character. This method requires that the student needs to invent his very own stories to associate the keyword meaning wit the character in written form. However, at the beginning of his book „Remembering the Hanzi“, the stories are already made (to give you a good start). At a later stage, you will need to invent your own stories though. It is indeed a very interesting approach and I used this method a few years ago to learn 800 Hanzi. I was able to memorize all of them in just 3 weeks. However, a few month later I forgot most of the characters and I got sick of making up stories. Still, I do believe that this method can work out fine and it was, especially at the beginning, a lot of fun :=) PS: Of course, when using the „classical approach“, you might want to study all the radicals first. This will help you a lot to understand the „construction“ and the meaning of the characters. Also it will help you to memorise the written form (it’s logical; all the characters include radicals).

Like the ordinary people from Beijing, Chen Yan always turns up on time at work. Chen Yan's working place is a fitness center. Her work is being a fitness trainer and she is a private teacher. She does one-to-one style training. The first thing Chen Yan does when she arrives at the fitness center is warming up for half an hour. This kind of exercise (on machines) is generally called Aerobic nowadays. People that are into this kind of work are all young people that love to work out. It is just a rough translation, not much in detail..we can discuss this in more detail, if necessary 8) regards M

Hi deen I have been taking several of the new HSK exams. I think I can answer some of your questions. I will share my experience First of all, it is important to know that the exam is split up in two parts: Oral exam and a written exam. It is possible to just register and enroll for one of them. In my case, I just did the written exam (as many of my friends as well). The written HSK exam has the following parts/sections: Chinese HSK / Listening Part You will hear people speaking about a certain topic (1 person or discussion) and then you will need to answer multiple choice questions about it. First part are pretty short speeches/discussions and then at the end there are also some kind of stories that you will need to listen to and then answer several questions about it. Chinese HSK / Writing Part Until HSK 4 you will really need to write your own texts. You will just have to put sentences in the correct order and rewrite them. You will have something like this here: Zhu rui shi zai wo (the correct answer here would be wo zhu zai ruishi). In HSK Level 5 and 6, you will need to write two short texts. The first text will be about a given topic and some given words that you will need to implement in the text. The second thext will be based about a picture. In the second part you are completely free about the choice of vocabulary and so on. (requires a pretty good knowledge of writing, vocabulary, etc) Each text must be about 80 characters long, so that’s not too bad I reckon. Or was it 80 words ? I guess it was characters :=) Chinese HSK / Speaking Part There is not much that I can tell you about the speaking part. As mentioned above, this part is hold in a separate exam. I don't know a single person who did the oral exam of the new HSK. Hope some other members will be able to tell you about it. Chinese HSK / Reading Part You will get many different texts that you will need to read through and then answer multiple choice questions. Similar as in speaking, the content is rather short at the beginning and then it gets longer and longer. Time pressure here is a big problem, as it is (at least for me it was) almost impossible to read every sentence of every text (because the time is too short!) Hopefully that answered some of your questions deen Clue Nr 1: You just found Clue Nr.1! Congratulations. Now, use to the Linguaholic forum to find out which is the most beautiful script according to Linguaholic users. Hint: Somewhere on Linguaholic there is a poll about just that topic. The blog post that will give you that answer will contain Clue 2!