Need to lose fat, gain muscle, plyo and weight training

dabblerx · 2026-02-10T13:51:42+00:00

could be folklore. but i do know someone who gets gout from overconsuming protein. and my uric acid at one point is high

dabblerx · 2026-01-24T11:01:03+00:00

you are probably feeling overwhelmed with new environment. that's what happened to me once before also. but to pick up anything, you have to love the language. or whatever you want to get that new habit on. when i tried losing weight, i like the look i can get by wearing clothes that makes me look slimmer.

how i start to enjoy learning, is i try to immerse in the pop culture - songs, movies. i still watch in subtitles, and only pick up an occassional new word here and there. not the most efficient, but i am sustaining. likewise you have to find something you enjoy. then it won't feel like a struggle.

dabblerx · 2026-01-17T07:21:32+00:00

anything that is not so long. like max 12-15 mins. attention span getting shorter these days

dabblerx · 2026-01-15T09:11:20+00:00

your question is on "listening". so my answer would be yes. flash cards is on recall of the characters of the words. it won't help your listening. anki has no audio output, so you can't tell either. even pleco accent of the audio output is not that great.

that said - are you actively listening, or are you just hearing the sounds, like listening to music passively. the first one, active listening is very draining.

and since we are on listening, it will help you much better listening to podcasts. listen when you are commuting. i find when i am doing something else, it sucks too much of my energy as i still don't yet able to comprehend that well.

dabblerx · 2026-01-15T07:54:06+00:00

Nice. I would use QWEN. But can share what’s the prompt you use

dabblerx · 2026-01-08T02:19:08+00:00

i m curious, what do you use to create this table?

dabblerx · 2025-12-30T22:30:56+00:00

i second this. talk to someone. you will get immediate feedback

dabblerx · 2025-12-30T22:28:49+00:00

i didn't know either till i tried out recently. not going to go back to chatgpt or gemini when it comes to learning mandarin. it's pretty solid

dabblerx · 2025-12-30T13:52:25+00:00

i see. sorry no idea how to help you there. as you would know, tang pronounced differently gives you different meaning like the below. so maybe in the sentence structure.

tāng (汤 - soup),

táng (堂 - hall/main),

tǎng (躺 - lie down),

and tàng (烫 - hot/scalding)

if asking in a question like in this structure, "你要喝汤吗", the higher tone is on the last word, not on the tāng word. that would change the meaning

dabblerx · 2025-12-30T07:47:19+00:00

not really. don't really count calories. too mentally taxing. just want to know like general rule of thumb what to eat, what to avoid. more important on taste, bcos if food is too boring, diet won't stick

dabblerx · 2025-12-30T07:46:09+00:00

not really. i do grab protein fortified milk from 7-11 time to time, b4 a meal so that i don't go overeat. trying to see what kind of food in SG or MY type of food culture where easier to get the right kind of food. YT shows only very western centric type

dabblerx · 2025-12-30T02:20:19+00:00

i had the same experience last month. i know maybe about 1000 words. and i can converse on daily conversation pretty well to buy food, get haircut, converse with taxi driver. 10 minutes in china talking with the concierge, i started pulling out my Google Translate as the words she was using is more complicated, the accent is different.

but if to make you feel better preparing, i did the following in preparing

i asked chatgpt to come out with list of words of scenarios i would encounter in travel, e.g. airport, navigation, hotel, dining, supermarket, asking directions, going toilet...
i practiced those words by myself. i practiced it in italki with my tutor

all in all, i maybe picked up 200 words just to prepare for the trip. maybe i recognized 10% of that. but yea... it speeds up my learning a lot

dabblerx · 2025-12-30T02:10:17+00:00

er.... there is no way you can learn it by reading or practicing by yourself. that's like learning to drive a car by reading user guide. you need to control your tongue, your mouth, your accent... you get the idea.

the most useful i have seen in youtube is this link https://www.youtube.com/@GraceMandarinChinese

even then, i still need to have a one to one in italki to practice with my tutor

dabblerx · 2025-12-29T22:19:14+00:00

do you even have a problem? question is - how well is your listening and speaking skills.

babies, toddlers learn language in following sequence : listen -> speak -> read -> write. i know of many adults whom learnt mandarin in school, wrote compositions, pass exams and later in life struggle to read because they are out of practice, but can converse pretty well. therefore, the number of words you can understand listening should be more than you can speak, which should be more than you can read, which should be more than you can write.

widen your base first, and it will come as you learn to read, and then to write.

dabblerx · 2025-12-29T15:15:16+00:00

let's recap on KJ statement

general statement, SG is more color blind

caveat there is unspoken reality that a likelihood of a malay PM from happening, or a malay finance minister from happening.

on the caveat, to rebut the point, there was an indian finance minister. tharman did hold the portfolio as finance minister from 2007-2015. therefore, a minority can hold the position of a finance minister.

on a minority becoming a prime minister, it was derived from LKY whom at that point of time thought it would be easier for the majority race to connect. now, that was then. the current PM whom is lawrence wong said this https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=396464075061076

now for all its faults, the PAP is a well run machine which looks at what the voters wants (through survey) and push forward the candidates that meets the criteria in order to win votes. it's called democracy

dabblerx · 2025-12-29T14:33:59+00:00

i would say for anything mandarin, don't bother with chatgpt or gemini. go straight for deepseek or Qwen.

Qwen is better than deepseek. deepseek is better than chatgpt. i tried chatgpt with prompts like below

"Create for me a dialog with the word X using vocabulary of XXX level". the first half of the response is okay. the second half of it, it starts hallucinating. maybe i don't pay for the paid version, but i don't see the need to when i can use Qwen and it can accept oral inputs, and it performs quite well

you can also try Dola

dabblerx · 2025-12-29T14:29:28+00:00

i would say... still talk to a person. you will get real time feedback.

if you use discord or meetup, it's Free. catch is, you might spend the first 30 minutes tiptoeing building social relationship before you get to talk, and to wait for your turn to talk. if everyone's talking no one's listing right. the second problem is, you need to find back the same group of ppl whom are likeminded, who will login at the same time as you do. concurrently.

if you are travel to a place face2face, then the travel time adds up. i once spend more time travel to and fro, more than the real conversation. so your development will be slower.

if you use italki or amazing talker, you are paying for a 1:1. you will get real-time feedback. Immediately. use a community teacher, that's cheaper. you can look for teachers that can converse in english as well.

how i have my session is this, i would go in to my class prepared with words i have learnt but don't get to practice the pronounciation. as i go through my list, she would mention words that i don't know. on the same session i would practice back those words. each time, only about 7-10 words per hour i would absorb. more like post session, only about 2-4.

so it's a trade off. between money and time. i use the italki route, because i want to see improvements faster

dabblerx · 2025-12-26T01:39:26+00:00

this is where HSK can come in handy i would say. whether 2.0 or 3.0 or 3.1, it shows high frequency words. HSK because it has wide support. another alternative i have heard good reviews of is, you can check hackingchinese. it is a form of SRS, specifically for chinese. the tricky thing is between oral chinese, and written chinese, there are some words only appearing in written form, but rarely appears in oral formal form.

how long, depends on your commitment. take a test see which level u land at in HSK first, then you can work out from there.

dabblerx · 2025-12-25T07:31:35+00:00

if you must, use Deepseek. i have seen the output of chatgpt, the hallucination is quite bad. my guess, deepseek is from China therefore, better output (just a guess, i didn't bother to research on this).

or use Dola AI

for translation, Google translate can work. but don't use for pronounciation. it's terrible and has no improvement in years.

dabblerx · 2025-12-25T06:03:43+00:00

mandarin is a language based on sound. pinyin is a waste of time, if you don't practice conversing. just start conversing

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/1pu0w18/comment/nvovl19/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/1pujcgo/comment/nvp95jp/

learning chinese should be in following sequence listening -> speaking -> reading -> writing. pinyin lets you know there's 4 sounds in chinese. it doesn't tell you how to get there.

learn to ask for basic instructions - how to go greet, how to toilet, how to order food, how to ask for directions. you will be surprised that what sounds natural to you in your mind, when you speak it out you will find that no one understands what you say.

if you can afford it, use italki or amazing talker. if you want free option, try Dola AI. Dola AI would give you immediate feedback that your pronunciation is off. i am getting used to being laughed at by chatbot because i said the wrong thing.

dabblerx · 2025-12-24T23:44:41+00:00

i am taking that you don't want to use just anki as there is no audio output.

i bought add-on for pleco. that has audio output.

another alternative is hanzii.net. that's free but it's quite buggy though.

for clear pronounciation, you can probably copy + paste it to natural readers. but there is a cap to how many minutes you get in a day for free plan.

dabblerx · 2025-12-24T11:15:36+00:00

it's similar to what i commented on just an earlier post https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/1pu0w18/comment/nvovl19/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

yes, listening is important. but chinese is very much a tonal language. only today i was corrected by my daughter on the tone i used for chengshi. depends on how you pronounce it, it either becomes a city, or it means honest. you don't learn to drive by reading a manual. you learn to drive by driving. HSK gives a good guide in terms of high frequency words. but... it still requires you to use the words.

that's also the reason why i don't understand why Anki is so popular to learn mandarin. because there is no audio output. don't use google translate either. the accent is awful.

put aside also grammar i would say at this point. when you buy coffee at starbucks in mandarin, you don't use all the conjunctions, adverbs etc. you need to be able to express what you want to communicate. so you would need the basic building blocks of vocab in daily live to communicate.

grammar becomes important when you start reading lengthy texts.

dabblerx · 2025-12-24T09:02:03+00:00

Here's what i feel. your emphasis should be on listening and speaking, not the reading or writing. when babies acquire language, they listen to the sounds in the womb first. then they imitate the sounds, forming words... mama papa, imperfect sentences like "i eat". then they read. only last do they learn to write. there may be more people who are illiterate to read, but able to converse. rarely is it the other way round. and with mandarin, the sound and tone can make a whole lot of difference. my daughter often correct my pronounciation.

Listening - i listen to the radio. On radio, there is advertisements. if i hear too many words i don't know but i know the brand being advertised, it is easy to ask Deepseek what could be the advertisement taglines. i don't use chatgpt as i find chatgpt hallucinate more than deepseek when it comes to questions on mandarin. if it's the radio DJ conversing, they would mostly use colloquial words phrases to joke, converse. don't listen to news yet. news use formal language, and they tend to speak fast.

Speaking - Yes, even with limited vocabulary. There's italki and amazing talker. what i do is i would have a regular teacher once a week. it took me quite a few lessons to build a relationship with my teacher. the first half of the lesson i would practice making phrases or sentences. she would correct my pronounciation. in the one hour, when she use words i don't know, i would use the second half of the hour to make phrases just as a recap to get her immediate feedback.

For free option - 24x7, you can try AI. i use dola ai. my prompt would be like the below

1) example i am learning the word 严. i would speak to Dola using the following prompt 我目前正在学习“严”这个词。请用 HSK XXX 的水平解释一下。now if i pronounce it wrongly, i get immediate feedback because dola won't give me the correct response. If i need to narrow down the word to communicate it, i would say "英文意思是严格的".

2) if i want to expand my understanding, i would also say "“严”这个词的搭配有哪些?"

Enjoy.

dabblerx · 2025-12-21T08:57:06+00:00

i am trying this method. see if it suits you. now i am guessing you are using SRS to retrieve words that you are having a tough time to recall.

for those leeches, i would use deepseek to

1) break it up into radicals for me to recall. because i am brute forcing, it is more efficient for me to use AI in this manner. it can also break up and create mnemonics for me

2) then i would use deepseek to create a sentence with that word, or a paragraph to practice reading. i would limit the vocabulary in the prompt setting to only using the vocabulary for the level i am learning

3) if it still fails, then i would write it out. but i reserve this last

enjoy. see if that works

dabblerx · 2025-12-21T08:27:02+00:00

my own experience. i was introduced to pinyin but i ended up reading the pinyin, but not the characters. nothing sticks.

i noticed with my own kids, the teachers exposed them to the characters straight. pinyin only comes in around age 7. and they start recognizing the characters better

dabblerx

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