One month of Chinese
Jan. 20th, 2022 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellThe World Science Fiction Convention is going to be in Chengdu, China in 2023. I'm hoping to attend virtually, and I'd like to be able to interact with more than just other English-speaking congoers, so I'm seeing how much Chinese I can learn by then.
I'm up to a streak of over 30 days on Duolingo. It's fine for learning to recognize words, and setting my keyboard to Pinyin and using direct text entry rather than the word bank is helping a lot with word retrieval. I haven't come across any speaking exercises yet, though, even though I have everything set up to allow them to run, and that worries me. There are some nuances of phonetics I can tell I'm going to need some practice to pick up, and I will definitely need to drill a lot on the tones.
Chinese grammar is turning out to be very much like English grammar so far. It's subject-verb-object and root-isolating (meaning that what other languages do declensions and conjugations, it, like English, does with word order and helper words).
The ideographs are another hard part, but having some prior knowledge of Japanese is helping. Also, cognates! I don't know why I was surprised the first time I came across words that resembled Japanese words, since I already knew Japanese had borrowed a ton of vocabulary from Chinese.
I'm up to a streak of over 30 days on Duolingo. It's fine for learning to recognize words, and setting my keyboard to Pinyin and using direct text entry rather than the word bank is helping a lot with word retrieval. I haven't come across any speaking exercises yet, though, even though I have everything set up to allow them to run, and that worries me. There are some nuances of phonetics I can tell I'm going to need some practice to pick up, and I will definitely need to drill a lot on the tones.
Chinese grammar is turning out to be very much like English grammar so far. It's subject-verb-object and root-isolating (meaning that what other languages do declensions and conjugations, it, like English, does with word order and helper words).
The ideographs are another hard part, but having some prior knowledge of Japanese is helping. Also, cognates! I don't know why I was surprised the first time I came across words that resembled Japanese words, since I already knew Japanese had borrowed a ton of vocabulary from Chinese.
