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Languager1790

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About Languager1790

  • Birthday 08/16/1990

Converted

  • Currently studying
    Mandarin
  • Native tongue
    English
  • Fluent in
    English

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  1. @melocasa: As someone who's studying languages currently, I'm sure you know that a big part of learning is exposure. So, I'll detail my usual approach for any language. General Plan 1. Locate good Dictionary (book or website will do) -Drill vocab on a daily basis. 2. Find a site or book detailing basic grammar rules. -Learn and use one sentence structure on a weekly-ish basis. 3. Find some movies, CDs, podcasts, etc. to listen to (you don't need to comprehend everything, just listen and get used to how it sounds, I'm sure you've done something similar for your studies of French&Spanish.) -Listen to an hour of this material a day. And make sure to re-listen to it multiple times throughout the week. I guarantee you'll find stuff you missed on the first listen through. 4. Goto Youtube and type in "[Insert Language of Choice Here] 101" (or something to that effect) and watch. -These little lessons will be good for filling in what a dictionary/grammar site can't do. Now, since I've studying Chinese for some time, I know of things you can look up that're good for the beginner. Chinese Plan 1. Mdbg.net -Best dictionary I've found so far. There are others, but none as easy to use. At least in my experience. 2. http://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/A1_grammar_points -Name says it all. Look for what you wanna know about and read. 3. [On youtube] A. Zhong.tv, Chengduraphouse and 湖南卫视芒果TV官方频道 China HunanTV Official Channel. -Zhong.tv and Chengduraphouse have music videos and the like. Pretty much any media out of the PRC/Taiwan has the chinese characters as subtitles with it. Listen and read along if you can. Pause the video at certain sections and identify the words you know and ones you don't. -Hunan TV Official has, well, television shows. A popular one is "BabaQunar?" (Where are we going, Dad?). Watch and see what you can't pick up after some vocab drills and whatnot. [On Netflix] The Kid With the Golden Arm, The Last Tycoon, Empresses in The Palace, The Defender, etc. -Start with these movies in Mandarin and go from there. Watch once with english subtitles and again without. Do it scene by scene if the entire movie seems a bit daunting. -"The Defender" has a scene or two where mandarin is spoken alongside cantonese. Great for practicing identification of the differences in both. I don't speak a lick of Cantonese but I can tell when it's being spoken within just a few words. 4. "YesLingo" and "ChineseClass101" have some good stuff. Plenty more out there, just gotta look and see. 5.(Bonus!) Download Anki (which can be found at Anki.com), follow their directions for importing flashcards from their site and grab a good Mandarin Chinese set. There's more than one and it's great for daily vocab drills. You can do many other languages with this to! Also bear in mind that we here at Linguaholic have compiled whole lists of stuff to use. I'd browse through what's been compiled and see what works best for you. But I hope my tips have pointed you in the right direction. At least in a general sense.
  2. This is great! Just what I need to brush up on my sichuanese while away from... well, Sichuan. Any idea if there are other sites like this dedicated to preserving rare dialects of Polish, Russian, Spanish, etc.?
  3. Forgive me if this isn't the place to ask, but it deals with Chinese Language so I figured I'd post here. Anyways, I was wondering if it was ok to post topics about some popular media sites that are affiliated with China. I love their current music, movies and TV shows and I think that for a student of advanced enough level that purusing through these things greatly aids in learning. I just don't know if there's some rule against posting links to sites that aren't academic in nature or if I have to keep things at a "PG" rating. Some popular movies definitely aren't for kids, after all.
  4. I highly recommend this site. Very fun to sift through the Classics with the English translations right next to the characters.
  5. Thanks for the warm welcome! I hope I'll see you add bold, promising knowledge to the site as well! Do not be so intimidated by character-based languages. What you get in terms of difficulty with writing (memorizing those stroke orders, recognizing traditional and simplified characters, etc.) is offset by not needing to worry about gender or cases like in romance languages. I took italian for a semester once and I found it hard to wrap my head around gender. When to end something with an "o" or an "a" and all that. Numbers are also nice and easy in chinese. Counting to 100 in Italian was hard for me, but it was nothing to get to 999 in Chinese. Give it a shot sometime! Just learn a phrase or two and I'm certain you'll see what I'm talking about. I should get into Spanish like you, though. Pretty useful to have at least a conversational level of Espanol in America.
  6. *looks* That's odd, I could've sworn I edited my post all of two seconds after posting with the link... Oh well, sorry for the confusion, here it is: http://ctext.org/ Twice just for good measure
  7. I personally use a program called "Anki". Free to use, and it has a plethora of flashcard sets already made up. Some deal with just vocabulary, others drill you on grammar. Give it a shot, I find it quite useful. EDIT:: Here's a link for you, sorry. http://ankisrs.net/
  8. This is a nifty little site for studying everything Chinese Classics-wise. It uses old translations in the public domain for it's English Versions (if they have them) but I personally enjoy clicking on "Jump to Dictionary" and reading each character separately. Had to use it for a thesis project or two and found it absolutely integral to the research process. Here's hopin' you get as much out of it as I did.
  9. Hey there, SilverGlyph! I'm new myself and figured I'd say hi. How long have you been learning Korean (it's called "Hungul", right?)? I have some buddies who were interested in learning it and they asked me to point them in the right direction but, alas, I was unable to. Never delved into Korean, myself. Maybe you could share some insight?
  10. Hey everybody, newcomer to the forums here. I'm an American who studies Chinese (Mandarin) and seeks to one day teach English in the PRC as a way to earn a living. I've also been to China before and am itching to go back (Chengdu, Sichuan Province. To be exact). I can't believe I've never thought to look for a forum like this before. I like how there's a multitude of languages under one roof (so to speak). And while Mandarin is my only "serious" study, linguistically, I'm keen to know about other languages as well. I took a semester of Italian once and found it enjoyable. But I'd also like to know more about... rarer languages. So if anyone knows anything Mongolian or Okinawan, I'd love to hear what you know. Anyways, that's me. I hope to learn a thing or two from this place and maybe add some new knowledge someday. Oh, any fans of non-english movies here? None of my friends back home quite share my love of Foreign (to me) flicks.
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