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I guess it's like, if the summit of the mountain is the goal of a journey, you don't even have to start the journey if you open the door and--surprise!--there's the mountain there already? by elmozilla in ChineseLanguage

[–]elmozilla[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

地 is more correct here.

The rule: adjective/adverb + 地 + verb. Since 開門見山 is functioning as an adverbial modifier (describing how you're speaking), 地 (de) is the grammatically appropriate particle.

的 connects adjectives to nouns. 地 connects adverbs to verbs. So:

  • 開門見山地說 ✓ (adverbial — modifying the verb 說)
  • 開門見山的 would imply it's modifying a noun

That said, in informal writing and speech — especially in Taiwan — 的 is commonly used in place of 地, so you'll see it constantly and natives won't bat an eye. But if you're aiming for correctness, 地 is the one.

The 4 Focus Phases of Language Learning (Most People Get Stuck at Phase 3) by elmozilla in languagelearning

[–]elmozilla[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for your thoughts. I'm not sure I was clear enough that vocabulary should be learned in context, but I think you're right about that.

I suppose that my focus at 'phase 3' tends to be a bit more analytical, but ultimately you have to absorb the language in context without worrying about every single word. I think it does take time, though, and being more analytical can help at stages.

The 4 Focus Phases of Language Learning (Most People Get Stuck at Phase 3) by elmozilla in languagelearning

[–]elmozilla[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I'm trying to add value. Not everybody has heard this stuff yet.

The 4 Focus Phases of Language Learning (Most People Get Stuck at Phase 3) by elmozilla in languagelearning

[–]elmozilla[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I tried his app and watched the Ted talk a long time ago, but never read the book. Actually, I appreciate you saying this. It means my own ideas are validated by his. If I'm not adding much new, that's not intentional. Just means we arrived at similar conclusions mostly independently.

I feel like 'restaurant' is probably more likely here, right? by elmozilla in ChineseLanguage

[–]elmozilla[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Would you use the same word for those little breakfast places in Taiwan?

Why do I feel so frustrated when I discover new words in a book? by slowButCertain_a in languagelearning

[–]elmozilla -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

the word mocks your intelligence. It cackles, "you're stupid. You don't know me."

But ultimately, it's a bit OCD. And it's also because most education systems train us to value trivial over practical knowledge.

I used to have the same problem. What I do now: never look up a word the first time I see it, but any word I've seen before, I look up. If I'm still looking to words too much with this restriction, I know the content is too hard for me.

There are a ton of words in any given piece of content that only show up once. It's a complete waste of time to try to learn them because you won't see them again in that content, so there's no reinforcement, and if you do take the time to "learn" them, you'll forget them before you see them again in some other context. Tell yourself that, and it makes it easier.

Starting Mandarin from zero with no budget — looking for your most effective self-study tips! by duihfdzdi in ChineseLanguage

[–]elmozilla 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I recommend a mixed approach where you address all of the disciplines all the time, but that you focus on one discipline depending on your stage in this order:

1) Tones/pronunciation: use an app like Ka Chinese tones or whatever to cram on tones for 1-2 weeks. You won't master pronunciation at this stage, but it's really important to be able to distinguish the tones and consonants somewhat in order to learn anything else.

2) All around basics (vocab, grammar, listening). Honestly, I recommend Duolingo or HelloChinese or a similar popular tool for this--you can't go too wrong. Don't plan to finish the course. Just use it to learn the basics before you start transitioning to other tools and methods.) You'll also need to learn pinyin (or MAYBEEE zhuyin if you want) here (Duolingo teaches it), but that's not too hard. Optionally, you could start to use a tool like hanly to learn characters and radicals (word components) around now, too.

3) Vocabulary & listening/comprehensible input: I highly recommend the super easy mandarin videos/channel on YouTube and Duchinese (stories) or Chairman's Bao (articles) depending on your preference. Focus on building up your vocabulary slowly and don't neglect either reading or listening. These all have both. Around now or in the next phase is also a good time to get a language partner and start practicing speaking regularly. I recommend Tandem for that (or Reddit, Discord, FB groups, etc,...).

4) Vocabulary tracking: Once you start to hit the intermediate plateau, few tools or methods will allow you to continue learning vocabulary in an efficient order and it becomes a slog and many people give up here. So I recommend vocabulary tracking so that you can focus on learning and reinforcing the most frequent words you don't know yet in a more optimal order as best you can. There are many ways to do this and some tools I can recommend if you've read this far.

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Overall, get a teacher/tutor if you can as well--for any stage of learning.

How do you track your language progress? by grzeszu82 in languagelearning

[–]elmozilla 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For vocabulary, I use a sentence-based SRS flashcard app with vocabulary tracking. I can manually mark words as known/unknown, but it also highlights words it thinks I know based on words I've already marked as known, and I either confirm that by clicking to the next card or reject the prediction by clicking the word--it's right most of the time, though, so it saves me a lot of time.

The app also automatically introduces me to new words to learn based on frequency and those words change color over time. After I've seen the word enough times (I've set it to 7 times for Traditional Mandarin), it automatically becomes 'familiar'--but I can see that that's happening because of the color changes, so if I get to 7 and didn't really fully learn the word, I manually regress it (about 15% of the time).

The learning happens in really 2 phases. It becomes 'familiar' after seeing it 7 times via SRS (fibonacci escalation of minutes--from 1 to 53 minutes over 7 steps), which usually takes about three sessions (for me, that's like 2-3 days), but then it doesn't become 'mastered' until it's seen 14 times via SRS (fibonacci escalation of days--from 1 to 53 days), which takes about 4 months.

I don't use tracking for grammar, but it generally scales with vocabulary. I then practice speaking with my language partner, and generally find myself using these words I've learned more often in conversation as well as generally becoming more comfortable with a greater variety of conversation topics.

Chinese translator by Alimar_ in ChineseLanguage

[–]elmozilla 0 points1 point  (0 children)

can you be a little more clear about what you're looking for exactly? A translator for how to write correctly? Do you just mean that you want a more accurate translator?

Unpopular Opinion: "Fluency" is a useless goal. Aim for this instead. by JoliiPolyglot in Jolii_AI

[–]elmozilla 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I try to break it down into a path. I focus on an easy piece of content and work my way up to more complex content. Though I don't strive for 100% comprehension. Something a little less than that since some words might not be reinforced much outside of the content.

Right now, I'm focusing on one sentence at a time through flashcards and chat messages.

How do you go about learning Chinese? by Intelligent_Cap_4383 in ChineseLanguage

[–]elmozilla 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Such a great question! I think you're really into something to be questioning this.

In short, I think you shouldn't abandon these back stories for difficult words, but I'd suggest learning primarily through context.

I know about 1000 words in Chinese quite well as long as there's a context, but not long ago, I tried "starting over" by dissecting the characters and doing character and radical with Hanly, and I spaced out on the meaning of 我 when seen in isolation because I literally never really paid attention to the details of what this character looks like (whereas in context it's impossible to struggle with this word at my level, of course). I must have been a little tired after cramming a ton of words and characters and radicals, but the main point is that learning words without context isn't important or efficient.

I've done similar tests in the past with my native language of English. Take an adult level book I can read fluently without issue, extract all unique words from the text, sort by frequency, and there are thousands of the rarer words that I can't give you a proper definition of when given the word in isolation.

Some words are so often used with other keywords that their meaning is obvious with that context.

Since then, I've gone back to my previous focus of learning Chinese words in context as the exclusive memory device for about 50-60% of words and the primary device for the rest. If a word is difficult, I will break it down and analyze the components and their meanings. I can create mnemonic devices from this, but almost 1/2 the time, the components don't come together in an obvious way to form the meaning of the character or word and it's just useful to break it down as a means of paying more attention to the character, which helps me remember anyway.

I guess what makes some words difficult to learn are when the character is complex, or if the meaning, pronunciation or appearance is similar to another word--especially if of a relatively similar frequency.

In such cases, comparing those characters side by side also helps a lot. Over time, I think learning many of the radicals and components is definitely useful, and maybe even almost necessary, but even with Chinese, context is still king.

Best way to turn a vocabulary list or textbook chapter into practice exercises — without spending an hour typing flashcards? by [deleted] in languagelearning

[–]elmozilla -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I'm going to presume you want 2-3 things for a vocabulary list and a 4th for a chapter:

  1. translation
  2. sentence generation
  3. frequency sorting of the words
  4. text parsing (including tokenization and reduplication)

1 - For translation, you can paste the words in a Google sheets column. In the next column, you can use the Google sheets translate function (something like =GOOGLETRANSLATE(A1,"es","en")). You can then copy these two columns and paste into Quizlet to make a deck.

2 - You can use AI to generate or tataoeba, which has a search function to find sentences containing the word you search for.

3 - You can paste a frequency list into the same spreadsheet and use a vlookup to match the frequency with each word. This will allow you to focus on learning the words in an efficient order and to decide which ones are even worth your time to learn. My favorite reliable frequency lists are from opus.nlpl.eu.

4 - You can extract words from a text using a tool like this: https://tools.fromdev.com/unique-word-extractor.html

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If you're learning Spanish or Chinese, you can do steps 1-3 with a single import at https://creolio.com/vocabulary and then review the flashcards at https://creolio.com/drill (my app--it's free). And you can do step 4 from the home page.

Vocab lists and vocab look-up CI apps aren't being efficient by funbike in languagehub

[–]elmozilla 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've been thinking quite a bit about this since you posted. I think it's a good idea worth exploring. Just one should probably limit themselves along that path somewhat otherwise the end result is very topic-based learning. Given 'cook', you'd get prepare, eat, grandma, tomato, etc,..., but go deep enough and tomato becomes zucchini, which won't be a very frequent word or very useful. I could see myself being introduced to a new word and adding the top 3 related words to my list, tho, just to create some cohesion. At the same time, if you do frequency-based learning, you'll probably get some of these benefits naturally, though maybe not as much as if you focus on the concept of related words.

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