Three Months of Learning Mandarin

I started writing this blog just after I decided to commit and start learning Mandarin. In the three months since, I feel like I have made good if a little slow progress. Before people jump up and tell me off for thinking that I have made slow progress. It is not that it is slow, so much as, I haven’t spent and dedicated enough time (that I told myself I would) revising the things I have learnt.

I have certainly thrown myself in at the deep end by starting this blog and forcing myself to keep up with the goals I set myself. Yet, I still find myself wanting to know more, a real craving and frustration that I can’t say anything I want to.

So What I Can Say After Three Months Learning Mandarin:

Basic Greetings,
Basic Colours,
Basic Numbers,
Days of the week,
Months,
Basic Foods,
Basic Drinks,
and some basic actions (eating / running / cooking etc)
Most recently some basic items of clothing, and basic household items.

I can say : thank you, I want, I like, I love etc.

And about 70 Daily Proverbs... Although I would certainly not claim that I remember them off the top of my head.

And this is my current problem, I am learning a lot, but the memory recall of it isn’t strong currently. Hopefully it will get better with time.

Discovering Mandarin:

I intended this blog to be a collection of the things I had learnt as a reference point for myself, and for other people who are learning too. It has turned out that through the daily updates and being busy that I haven’t had time to update with things I have learnt quite as often as I had hoped.

I started out writing this blog because I did not have anyone to practise my Mandarin with, and my housemates were both learning Japanese. Truth be told, they haven’t stuck at Japanese at all and my motivation has sunk a little. The people I have met through this blog are very inspiring and have made me continue with my dream and I want to thank you all for the little bits of help you give me daily.

Learning Mandarin - What Now?

The three months I have been learning Mandarin I have learnt more than I have ever learnt in French that I learnt for four years at school. This is largely due to the fact I wanted to learn Mandarin and never wanted to learn French.

I want to carry on learning and actually stick to my commitment of daily learning. I think I am also going to try out the much talked about Heisig method of learning characters. Although, many of the drawbacks are outlined well in Chris' Mandarin Student blog post. I think I would like the ability to know that I can understand a large amount of characters much like Greg’s experience of the theory in Mandarin Segments blog.

I intend to carry on using Rosetta stone for my basic vocabulary and helping to build it up bit by bit, alongside my other research. Also using Heisig as mentioned to increase my knowledge and recollection of Chinese characters I hope that my writing and reading ability will increase with my spoken Mandarin.

So here is to another three months of Mandarin learning, and to hopefully many years of learning Mandarin happily and as excitedly as these first three months.

I keep finding the odd phrase which when said makes me smile. It isn't that it is actually funny, nor that it sounds funny when in English, or that it is one of the funny things you will have seen written down.

It is just a nice sounding phrase that makes me smile, much like the previous post where I talked about my favourite sounding phrase, here is another one that similiarly is nice to my ears.

我是老师
wǒ shì lǎoshī

It means, I am a teacher. Funnily this week I got an email from someone telling me how much they had learnt through this site, and made me proud that I am making a difference to other people, (and not just helping myself motivate and learn Mandarin). So I guess in fact, wǒ shì lǎoshī. I am a teacher (of kinds). Though I still have a hell of a lot to learn myself, and thank everyone that has bee helping me along the journey so far.

-I am also not as good looking as the picture of a teacher that I found. :D

The way that phrase flows is what makes me smile. I think it must be the two third tones, followed by the homophone 'shi' that makes it so pleasant. To my ears, the third tone is still one of the best things about the language. Which is something I really struggled to get to terms with intially, but have grown to love it already. I will continue to post here my favourite phrases, and hopefully some of them will be better than this one.

This is rather embarressing, and I feel like I have ruined a beautiful language. Whilst on the subject of reviewing my progress thus far. This was my first attempt at Chinese characters. Try and make out what it says. It is a fairly basic sentence. I will put the answer in white font, underneath the photo below of my handywork so you can check it.








Higlight the next few lines to see if you were right or if my writing was legible:

Whilst going over my first couple of lessons again tonight, I revisited some of the first things I learnt, and laughed when I realised my favourite Mandarin Phrase to say (so far) is the following, fairly menial sentence. The reason for it being my favourite is that it just flows nicely and sounds wonderful. This is my (anticlimatic, but) favourite spoken phrase in Mandarin.

I want to learn Mandarin well. I want to be able to talk, read and write in this fantastic language, and today I did a little bit. Twitter with it's #MandarinMonday search term is a great way to communicate to other people and learn more about this language.

I must admit to somewhat cheating with a translation service I have found, but it seems to work remarkably well (as for now) and has helped me devolop some key words and recognise key characters in sentences. I feel a little bit cheeky for having used it, in time I promise that it will become all of my own hard work translating sentances myself.

Today I leave myself, and anyone else in a similar position with this mantra;

Today, is the day where I can say, I have now been learning Mandarin for a Month. Technically I have been learning for almost two, although with holidays and moving house I have only been able to settle down this month to start to properly learn.

Now I started out and promised myself that I would spend an hour a day learning, and to be truthfully honest, it has not happened. Some days I have spent learning for a lot longer than an hour, but more often than not, due to me wanting to read, everything there is out there about Mandarin and Chinese culture, and the various other things I do, I just have not had the time.

However, I have still learnt a lot, and will continue to do so. I can now count in Mandarin, although my pronouciation still needs considerable work, can recognise more characters and can read pinyin infinitely better than I could a month ago.

You hit a stage when you start learning Mandarin after the first barrier, where you bound along learning many new (easy-ish) words. You make real progress, but suddenly you will hit another harder barrier, and it can be easy to stop there. Which I have been guilty of so far. It is so much more pleasing to burst through the barrier and make even more progress.

I cannot wait to bring this to two months of Mandarin. Or six. Mandarin seems to me to be a language you will never stop learning once you start. I was seriously scared and put off this week when Bill posted this link: voicesinshanghai.posterous.com/, which has lots of Chinese natives speaking in dialect as they really do in China, and it is great to hear the people really speaking the language, and not just the studio-learning accent. However it did make me realise how much of an enormous task I have started, and it was rather humbling to see how far I really had progressed this Month.

Charlie.


Photo Source:
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