11 months of Chinese to go
Sep. 17th, 2022 04:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellI 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.
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.
