New Ideas for learning Chinese

As You guys already know, learning Chinese is one of my passions in life. With this learning of the Chinese language comes my interest for learning theory. I also try to find out how languages are learned and how to make learning more effective.

Last weekend I found a few new websites that were incredible eye openers and I want to share them with You. Some of the insights in these websites are similar to my ideas, some are new to me, but they mostly match my experiences.

Why do people learn languages?

http://www.zompist.com/whylang.html

The first article talks about the reasons people have to learn a new language. Understanding the reasons can help to modify Your learning environment to make it even more appealing to learn a language, in this case Mandarin. Mark Rosenfelder, the author of Zompist, goes into historical, sociological and psychological explanations what motivates people to learn a language. For example he says that having a girlfriend or wife of a place where the target language is spoken will improve Your efforts, I had already pointed this out last year.

Learn all the time

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/

The second link is a whole bunch of articles on a website. While the site is written for Japanese learners it can be applied equally to learning Chinese. KhatzuMoto, the author of that site, shows all his best ways of learning Japanese. Great examples to follow and all of them make sense and also match my previous experiences of learning a foreign language.

Learning Outlook

I will study both sites and apply the techniques myself. After that I will report back how things turn out. The first measure is to make sure I have constant exposure to the target language. Therefore I will make sure some Chinese TV, radio, podcast or youtube video runs in the background while I do random things. Every week I want to have 5 hours of actively listen to Chinese. Plus 15 hours of Chinese background noise per week. I will listen to anything if I understand it or not. Understanding is not the key in beginning. The main point is to get used to the Chinese sounds and getting more insight into how a Chinese dialogue sounds. This listening is meant to be in addition to my regular Chinese learning, as this is mostly passive listening while I’m doing other things. I can do that while I go to the university, while I eat lunch, or instead of watching regular TV in the evening.

The plan: This will address one of my main weaknesses – my listening skill. Also, once I can understand the natives better, this will open the opportunity for me to analyse the sentence structure of native speakers in far more detail than I can do now.

I also want to sum up the idea stated by the two people I linked so everyone can get them without reading hundreds of articles, stay tuned. It’s Mandarin learning time again

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