#chinese progress

[rigelmejo]

11/2/2024 update - chinese:

1. Listening to something "harder" in chinese (poyun audiobook) seems to be helping. I listened to an audio drama today instead, just whatever my recommendation gave me (a crime solving BL which is the genre I'm comfortable in), and since it's an audio drama I definitely know at LEAST 95% of the words. I hear a few unknown words per minute, and when I look them up they're usually what I vaguely guessed when listening (so words I've read but struggle to recognize in listening). Since audio dramas are nearly all dialogue, I understand almost everything (i miss a few details per 5 minutes since theres still a few words I dont know and don't look up). I am not even paying attention, just letting it play as I scroll reddit ToT. I still understand almost all. So I think my quick-understanding speed is improving for more words. Poyun still feels equally hard lol, I catch dialogues mostly and then it's hit or miss if I understand descriptor paragraph's main idea when listening to the audiobook. But just listening to Poyun, while multitasking and just listening-in when I can focus, seems to be helping. So that's awesome! Maybe my test in a month will be if SaYe is clearer to me by then.

2. If you're a beginner learning Chinese, I again recommend dongchinese.com's Pinyin guide and tone pair drills. I'm begging you to spend a couple hours going through it. If you watch cdramas, even if you're watching with english subs, the ability to HEAR a word and type the pinyin into google translate app or Pleco app quickly for the translation is SO USEFUL. Early on, its useful for picking up new words and remembering them. But even now, as I'm listening to audiodramas, the skill of looking stuff up by pinyin as a beginner helps SO much now. I can hear unknown words in audio and instantly hear what pinyin I should type (zhi or zi or si or j or zhe or zha are very clearly different to my ear) and I'm used to expecting most words to be 1,2, or for phrases 4 hanzi long (so 1-4 initial-final pinyin pairs), with most words being 2 hanzi long, so if I hear an unknown word I can quickly identify WHICH 2 sounds are the new ones I just heard and look up the unknown word. These basic recognition skills get developed early on as a beginner, as you look up words and get used to the common patterns, and as you start reading and notice beyond the common 1 hanzi words, just how many are 2 hanzi.

3. If you're learning chinese and don't have the benefit of cognates with a language you know, chinese is still a bit "easier" to guess new words at a certain point. For reading, it's the multi-component hanzi which allow you to start guessimg rough pronunciation and meaning, and the 2 hanzi words which allow you to start guessing meaning is the 2 hanzi combined or perhaps related to the meanomg of the 1 of 2 hanzi you already know. With listening... there is also a benefit. Say you hear xiangfa - xiang think, fa method, you can guess it has something to do with thoughts or ideas or trails of thoughts. Xiang is a common verb so you probably already know it, or can guess it's THAT xiang based on context of a scene, and fa is also a fairly common word so you can guess it might be That Fa. It means idea. So guessing "thought" would be close enough to undersrand meaning. (And of course seeing it written 想法 thought+method xiangfa easy to see hanzi meaning and then guess idea or something close).

4. I'm hoping the comprehensible input/ALG suggestions of a LOT of comprehensible input actually help me with speaking tones. Even though I did tons of explicit study, which ALG thinks "damages pronunciation"... but I didn't actually speak much yet. At a certain point (around a year imto learning?) I stopped studying tones of new hanzi and words and just used audio in pleco or google translate (or TTS, shows, audiobooks etc) to hear how new stuff sounded if I didnt remember. Since I read a lot, so I just felt I needed to add more sound to not learn the wrong pronunciation... so idk how that will go.

[retributory]

kind of irritates me a little bit when people act like it's weird or wrong or ooc for sy to have internalized homophobia as if that isn't probably the most realistic thing about the plot to begin with. he's a chinese man who grew up in the late 90s - early 00s and spent all his time online i would be frankly more surprised if he had ZERO hangups about being gay. this is explicitly presented as a character flaw so i'm not sure why people act like mxtx is homophobic for writing a guy with internalized homophobia. also he like gets over it in volume 4 anyways you gotta give him some time dude he died like 3 times and he keeps getting force-fed blood he's got a lot on his plate

[thebirdandhersong]

???? something something deep discomfort with body image is it generational?????????

[flipflops007]

画一半发一下

[peepersponies]

Oh guys she's SO pretty 😭😭😭 She's amazing. I love her so much. I thought I understood the appeal of BJDs before I held her but actually I had NO idea. I just adore her, I want to dress her up and carry her around with me everywhere.

One thing I wasn't expecting is that she's HEAVY!! She feels so solid and nice to hold!! And also she stands up really nicely on her own, which is always something that amazes me about BJDs.

I'm so excited to do her faceup :') I don't know how I'm going to decide on what it should look like....

[robinsceramics]

Happy Lunar New Year! I've been making dragons to celebrate, and this is the biggest and best of the bunch. Porcelain with copper and cobalt pigment, he'll end up celadon green with blue claws!

image description: an unglazed porcelain sculpture of a Chinese dragon. Its horns, whiskers, mane, and paws are all white, and its scales are colored light green. It sits with its back and tail arched in high loops and its mouth open in a grin.

[thebleedingwoodland]

Another Work in Progress

Mooncake Maker as default replacement for Fortune Cookies Maker from TS3 World Adventures in Shang Simla, China.

As you know, Fortune Cookies are cookies originated from United States of America, which is not correct to portray cakes/cookies/pastries that are supposedly from China.

Not sure to publish it because it feels not finished yet.

In Buy Mode CAS is alright: High resolution (1024), right texture.

After click finish to exit CAS mode, it reverts to Low resolution (default EA texture is 512) and wrong texture (bad UV-Mapping) for preset 1. Other presets have right texture, but in low resolution.

So far the GeoStates (Full, half, empty states) are working.

The mesh of Mooncakes are fine.

I'm not script modder, therefore cannot remove or change functionality of default EA's Fortune Cookies lucky number and paper thing.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

Mid-Autumn Festival is one of important events in Chinese calendar.

Falling on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, it's celebrated primarily in East and Southeast Asia and is a time for families to gather to sample autumn harvests, light lanterns and admire what's believed to be the fullest moon of the year.

In 2024, the Mid-Autumn Festival, or the Moon Festival, falls on September 17. 

Mid-Autumn Festival became an official celebration in China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE).

It was described as a day for emperors to celebrate the year's harvest by giving offerings to the moon and hosting a great feast.

Today, the Mid-Autumn Festival is an incredibly important family gathering – it's when "People and the moon reunite to form a full circle," as an old saying goes.

Mid-Autumn Festival is shrouded in myth. One of the most beloved – and tragic – pieces of folklore tells the story of how a woman named Chang'e became the moon goddess.

One of the biggest stars of the Mid-Autumn Festival is the Mooncake. The term "Mooncake" was first found in 1274 AD in author Wu Zimu's "Book of Dreams," and the first cookbook on how to prepare mooncakes was published in 1792.

While there are many variations of mooncakes, the most famous is the classic Cantonese version: a soft pastry filled with sweet lotus seed paste and savory salted duck egg yolk.

source: CNN

[asiansinboots]

Uniform policy board meeting in progress

[wigglybunfish]

girl and her hawk, a birthday gift for my friend.

Chinese painting Gongbi on rice paper

[iguessitsjustme]

I did a thing...I made this for me but feel free to join me while I track whether or not ql characters keep their glasses

[rigelmejo]

I'm about to make a lot of rough assumptions to get to the point of my notes for myself lol

So this ALG article has the equation for estimating how much comprehensible input it will take to acquire % of a language understanding. And in this case, comprehensible input just means experiences/happenings (or witnessing them) where you understand the main idea of what's going on. Since it's ALG, they assume NO word lookups and no conscious guessing the meanings of stuff, so my estimate is going to be really fucking weird compared to theirs when applied to me as... I did a lot of word lookups, and guessed a lot.

The BASIC LANGUAGE ACQUISITION EQUATION: y = 1-e-kx

where y is how much language they know (1 = native).

x is how many hours they have understood.

k is the acquisition constant: .0018

e is the natural logarithm base:  2.718

The article does go on to say that if you did 100 hours engaged with the language, if you only understood say 50% of what's going on then you would put 50 hours into the equation. Because you want to aim to only count hours worth of time you UNDERSTOOD meaning.

What I find cool about this equation, is 1000 hours is 83% understanding, 1400 hours is 91% understanding (both great goals). 1500 hours is how long Dreaming Spanish estimates learning Spanish will take as an English speaker (less for a Romance language speaker), and it appears this equation primarily made for learning Thai as an English speaker, ALSO estimates good progress by around 1500 hours. At 2200 hours, this equation estimates 98% understanding which is a great goal for doing most anything in a language (and is fairly close to some estimates I've seen of how long to give ALG for languages not similar to your own). Now... since not all hours of study you will understand 100% of what's going on, you're going to want to either double those hours (assuming you understand 50%) or at least assume some of those hours of study only count for 75% understanding. So considering those factors, actual hours of study you understand OR not, is going to be closer to somewhere between 2200-4400 hours to get good enough to understand 98% of the language a native can understand. Now this matches up quite well with people's experiences they've shared, and with the experience of BOOK/classroom/explicit learners, as well as ALG learners. Although... I would guess an ALG method minded person would argue that the explicit learner needs more hours, in general, of comprehensible input, to hit certain milestones. But at a certain point, explicit learners are doing most study hours as just that, comprehensible material they understand the main idea of, like me watching shows/reading/listening to audiobooks now in chinese with word lookups only 5% of the time.

So anyway, for fun, I wanted to see where this equation thinks I'd be so far. So with Chinese, I studied what, 4 years? I'm going to try and underestimate. But I feel like I'm coming up on 5 years, whatever. Let's say 4 years, let's say 2 hours per day on average the first 2 years - so 1460 hours the first 2 years. Let's say 30 minutes on average the next 2 years, because I did take like 3-6 months off of studying to focus only on Japanese, so 365 hours for those 2 years. So a total of 1825 hours. Damn. That's more than I expected! Okay, now lets cut out hours spent not understanding without lots of word lookups (the whole first year of 730 hours. 1825-730=1095. Okay, now let's assume out of the 1095 hours, only 75% of it counts for 'comprehended input' if I don't count times I looked up words often, or I couldn't grasp the main idea. The truth could be closer to 50% or closer to 95% depending on if the times I looked up words occasionally hurt my progress or helped it. 1095*.75=821.25 hours. If we do the conservative estimate of only counting 50% then it's 547.5 hours. Let's see where the equation places me:

1-2.718^(-.0018*547.5)= 63% (rounded)

1-2.718^(-.0018*821.25)= 77% (rounded)

That's pretty good!

Now lets see how that matches up to Thai learners, they're expected to need around 1000 hours for 83% so I will probably hit my next milestone in 200-400 hours of chinese material I understand the main idea of. They're also expected to start speaking around 800-1000 hours, just simple stuff, so I can probably start speaking now or in 200 hours and 'not expect' much damage. (Although I may already have lots of 'damage' ALG thinks concious guessing/translations cause, so I might already be a lost cause there).

My personal guess is that I'll probably need 534 hours, if we assume the stuff I'm engaging with is only 75% comprehensible. Or 600 hours, if we round it up and give me more cushion room for not understanding some stuff.

And for fun for me: if I count my FULL hours studied 1825 hours, I am in Level 7, if I count only comprehended it's 1095 or Level 6 Dreaming Spanish Roadmap's levels wise (which is where I think I feel I am based on skills I can do - around Level 6, Skills include most native media, reading, conversation recommended). If I don't count any of my explicit study, I'm at 821.25 hours or Level 5 (easier native media, reading optional, conversation optional).

[fanning-the-flames]

I always wanted to draw a Jiang Cheng with a dancer’s grace, and Sargent’s El Jaleo is such a lovely and dynamic painting I kept wanting to adapt it. So we have Sandu Shengshou maybe doing a demonstration to his disciples? Or torturing some unlucky (lucky?!) demonic cultivators…

[mejomonster]

How did you learn Chinese, like did you use a specific program like Duolingo or did you take classes? How hard was it to read Priest's novels with where you were at in your language learning journey? I want to get back into learning (been wanting to since I watched The Untamed,) but I gave up about 8 months ago 😭

Hey ovo)/ so uh. That's a big question. I have a studyblr @rigelmejo so if you really want the full on journey lol its on there, steps i took and what I studied and progress and study tools I found and used and stuff I've linked for people.

For the shortest tip I can give you? Would be to check out the Heavenly Path site if you're interested in learning to read novels. You'll need to figure out your own way to study about 1000 common hanzi, basic grammar, and basic pronunciation (I link resources on rigelmejo), but after that point the Heavenly Path site has reading resources for graded reading, easier kids novels, easier manhua, webnovels by difficulty level, all the way up! So you can at that point just follow their recommendations and use reading tools they link (like Pleco and Readibu apps which I suggest you download asap - they include tools where you can click a chinese word when reading for translation and audio pronunciation and pinyin). So yeah at 1000 hanzi, just start reading from their suggestions! (Also consider downloading Bilibili Comics app as it has English and Chinese free manhua, so you can start reading manhua earlier, and youtube/viki.com learn mode and Any platforms with dual english/chinese subs and start trying to look up 1 word every 5 minutes or more as curious and practicing reading the chinese words in subs you've learned). I suggest you check out all pages on the Heavenly site, they link a ton of resources.

The short-ish version of what I did the first year I studied chinese? I fumbled a lot, read through an entire grammar guide summary in a few weeks here http://chinese-grammar.com/, watched some YouTube tone videos and went through a pronunciation guide here https://www.dong-chinese.com/learn/sounds/pinyin which took a week or two and I'd do it every few months, read through the book Learning Chinese Characters: (HSK Levels 1-3) A Revolutionary New Way to Learn the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters by Tuttle publishing in about 2 months (I really liked their mnemonics to help me remember hanzi), started Ben Whatley memrise decks 1000 Chinese common words and 2000 common words (took about 2 weeks to finish one then I took a few months break then studied the other 1000, mainly focusing on studying new words and not reviewing until the last week if I had time - in retrospect I think learners would do better with the Chinese Spoonfed Anki deck but the memrise courses I used worked fine for me). I was watching cdramas as usual most weeks, English subs with the Chinese hardsubs on the video file like most youtube cdramas, with Google Translate app on my phone to look up a word every several minutes as curious. Once I was 3ish months in and learning the memrise Ben Whatley 2000 common chinese words, I read some Mandarin Companion graded readers in Pleco app then some more 300-600 word graded readers in Pleco. That gets me to like month 6ish. Then I started reading manhua and looking up words in pleco or Google translate when I needed to in order to grasp main idea overall (or was curious about a particular word). Kept reading graded readers in pleco.

Around month 8 I tried 天涯客 and 镇魂, both brutally hard. I was reading in Pleco in the Clipboard Reader (from websites) or the Reader tool (i bought it for like $20 dollars along with handwriting recognition, OCR, and expanded dictionaries). Mandarinspot.com has a good reading tool too that can add pinyin if you need it, and Readibu in some ways i prefer to Pleco depending on your particular reading needs on a given day. Tried a few easier webnovels, tried a pingxie fanfic 寒舍 which was hard but easier than priest novels (love that fanfic). I kept bouncing between webnovels then around month 10 天涯客 novels took about 1.5 hours to read through a chapter. At that point I brute force tried to read it or 寒舍 daily with 1 chapter a day, got 28 chapters in before i burned out with 天涯客 and 60ish chapters into 寒舍. It was about a year in. I cram studied 500 hanzi in some common hanzi deck with mnemonics I found on anki over a month, hoping if I improved vocab I'd read easier. I also was gradually trying to watch more cdrama with only chinese subs, around month 6 I finally watched Granting You a Dreamlike life full episodes with no eng subs (about 5-10 word lookups an episode), watched 15ish eps, then after that shows got less daunting to try watching.

A little over a year in Word of Honor came out and I watched it in chinese first because I was too impatient for eng subs. After that went decently I got braver about reading, tried Listening Reading Method (see @rigelmejo for those experiments), more stuff etc like extensive reading with no word lookups.

In retrospect I WISH I'd started with easier novels Heavenly Path recommended. However on the other hand? I've seen people who read their first cnovel with Pleco as early as 3-6 months in which blows my mind. So me picking hard novels to start isn't the Hardest thing in comparison lol. This past year (so at start of year 3 studying lol) I actually read like 10 things on Heavenly Paths easier recommendations and it helped immensely in filling in gaps in vocab and reading fluidity I had. So if you do pick a priest novel as your first novel and manage to chug through it without giving up, be aware "easier" novels may still have stuff you can learn later so don't rule them out as reading materials later on.

I've also seen people do literally no study except maybe some curious Google searches on hanzi or grammar or pronunciation, then brute force read novels in Readibu until they improved. A brutal way to do it but possible. (I really recommend at minimum learning hanzi are made of radicals though as it makes recognizing and remembering them so much easier).

I think the best thing I did for learning to read was just being Brave and Trying to read regularly. And it gradually got less hard.

[malaidarling]

i’ve been stuck at this level in chinese for over a year...

[beneathashadytree]

Gentle reminder that I write for a gender-neutral MC with zero physical descriptions! Only when pregnancy is involved do I write that they’re AFAB. Other than those cases, it’s as vague as possible to make sure that everyone in the fandom feels included!

[more ranting in the tags oops]

[robinsceramics]

BEHOLD! my first dragon of the year

image description: a small gray-porcelain statue of a Chinese dragon.