11 months of Chinese to go

[petrea_mitchell]

I am oscillating between "Oh no! Less than a year!" and "I started with about 20 months to go, so I've still used less than half of my time!".

I am continuing to use both Duolingo and HelloChinese and have hit the point where they're having differences about vocabulary and grammar. Minor ones so far, probably no impediment to making myself understood, but I wonder if they're working from different regional dialects, or one is more about formally correct language and one is more about capturing how people are more likely to actually talk.

This might be answered if I can start understanding actual spoken Chinese. Not having been able to get any specific recommendations, I finally just typed "科幻" (science fiction) into YouTube and started selecting videos at random. As I expected, I can't make any sense of the narrations yet. But supposedly it will help.

One thing that is starting to make a difference is practicing speaking with HelloChinese. Now that I've been doing that for a couple months, I'm finding it getting easier to form unprompted sentences when I'm out for a walk and trying to work in a little practice describing what I see to myself.

I've also started to notice that when watching the ending credits of anime, my eyes have started being drawn more to the kanji, trying to decipher them.

Comments

[athenais]

Duolingo says it aligns itself with the CEFR language levels, so that is likely to be more formal than your other program. I am hugely impressed with anyone who can learn such a tonal-based language! I could not do it. I have enough trouble with Swedish vowels

[petrea_mitchell]

Thanks! I've found it not too difficult to learn to distinguish tones when listening, but remembering which words have which tones has been a lot harder, because pinyin keyboard input only requires typing the phonemes, so I don't get nearly as much practice on tones. Whatever stereotypes the Chinese have about foreigners saying inadvertently hilarious things by getting the tones wrong, I'm sure I'm living them.

[thomasyan]

Try watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in Mandarin and see how you fare?

Apparently Mandarin was my first language, but around when I started going to school, my parents were afraid I'd have trouble learning English if I also kept speaking Chinese, so I switched to exclusively English.

For a long time, I said I had passive fluency: I could understand spoken everyday Chinese, but could not speak it. I now can speak some, but have terrible pronunciation, and screw up the tones.

I remember feeling like I understood most of the dialogue in CT,HD and was surprised to hear people complaining about the accents of the two leads. I totally did not notice any accents.