I kept thinking that my approach must be wrong because people keep telling me it is (you have to have a class, you have to have a teacher, you have to go to China, you have to start learning to write straight away, you shouldn't spend so much time listening to real Chinese etc.) Either that or I have some kind of freaky mutant brain. Whilst I could accept that the approach might not suit everybody I couldn't believe I was that freaky (maybe you can though ;)). If it wasn't for people like Mashood (who might not be doing things exactly the same way but seems to have similar ideas), I probably would have doubted my sanity.
Anyhow I found a little while ago that I am not unique (which rhymes with freak) after all ....
I came upon the site of Steve Kaufman. The site is The Linguist Steve has learned many languages and also now runs a company that teaches English. Steve has a lot of posts on his blog and podcasts. He is not afraid to speak about his ideas in many languages either. I particularly like the stuff he does in Chinese (I can understand a fair amount of that as he probably speaks slightly slower than many native speaker and slightly simpler).
The link I gave above is to the blogs on the site, which is what is of most interest to myself. For example there are a series of podcasts where the Steve talks to another language guy in four languages. Here is the Mandarin version. I particularly like this one as I could pretty much follow the meaning all the way through. I as still a little hazy about some of "language ego" stuff but I will make time soon to have a crack at transcribing it.
I have spent sometime reading his stuff, listening to his podcasts etc. I find that most of his conclusions about language learning agree with a lot of things I have find out for myself (he must be very smart ;)).
There are a few issues I need to think about and may disagree with (I would be highly suspicous of myself if there weren't) but on the whole he seems have a brain that my brain can at least sympathise with. I am sure I will post more about The Linguist as time goes by.
4 comments:
呵呵
謝謝你！
Perhaps I should have posted more often...I actually almost completely agree with all your ideas, and have benefited from them as well, particularly watching real media (it's got me into contemporary taiwanese high school/uni drama's)
Thank you!
Hi Mashood, it is recipricol, I like your idea of the Chinese blogging, so I am setting one up for myself now.
A good way to practice writing etc.
hey,
Well done with the chinese blogging. Just wondering how much time do you get on average to spend time on your blogs?
i've been pretty lazy with the chinese blogging recently, however i'm getting back into it again since i hope to post my ideas/pictures etc from taiwan soon.
i find when i try to write my mind blanks and although i had lots of thougts and ideas in chinese flying around my head...its difficult to express them a lot of the time :D
Not much time to blog Mashood, if only you could see all the posts I almost wrote.......
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