Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Mandarin chinese progress report

A quick summary of what I have been doing and some of the subjects I will be posting on soon. Despite appearances I haven't just been messing around with podcasts. I am also sorting out some webspace so that I can post more detailed articles and tools etc.

You can also read my next progress report and find out how I am doing further down the line.

I seem to have posted mainly about podcasting so far, but podcasts have been the most help to me and they deserved a lot of focus. I have worked through the first twenty five or so podcasts from Chinespod and am reviewing the material (I am going to sign up to their subscription service for a little while to see how that goes). As part of my review I am remixing collections of the dialogues at a faster speed and without the english. I run each dialogue three times, leaving gaps during the third one to practice speaking in.

I am also working through the podcasts supplied by Serge Melnyks I find the dialogues a little harder as Serge is on his own so it is easy to lose track of who is speaking. I am going to try remixing the dialogues to make one of the speakers sound like a different person (sorry Serge). I won't be able able to share any of Serges material at the moment as I am not sure of the copyright position but I am about to contact him to see if he would consider a Creative Commons licence like Chinesepod.

I have also been learning the pinyin (Romanisation, a crucial help) for the words I have learnt and the simplified Chinese characters. I will be posting much more on this shortly.

Along the way I have discovered a few very useful tools (again, much more on this to come.

In summary I feel to be making steady progress towards my goal despite the immensity of the task :).

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