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大家好! Hello everyone!
我学中文15天了。 I have been learning Chinese for 15 days.
这是我的第2个录像。 This is my second video.
我中文说的还不好, I still don't speak Chinese well,
可是我的中文进步了。 but my Chinese has improved.
事实上,我最近搬家了。 Actually, I recently moved house.
我现在这样非常忙。 So I am very busy at the moment.
可是我努力每天学习中文。 But I am making an effort to keep learning Chinese every day.
Hello, and welcome to my 15-day update!
So let me just tell you what I've been doing over this last week and a half.
[musical interlude]
Grammar!
Lots and lots of grammar.
Lots more grammar.
I'll give you the websites I've been using down below in the video description box.
But after grammar, one of the things I've been using is a technique called sentence mining.
So I've been mining sentences for information.
Let's say, for example, I want to say "I go to Beijing".
Well, I know how to say that. I can construct the sentence "I go to Beijing". That's fine. That's a simple sentence.
What if I now want to say "I decide to go to Beijing" or "I think that I will go to Beijing" or "I'm not sure whether I will go to Beijing"?
Actually, these are things that are best learnt from example sentences.
There are lots of very simple example sentences online -- in fact there are lots of complicated example sentences online --
and I'll give you some websites again down below which have lots of example sentences on them.
One of them is Tatoeba which is -- so, 'tatoeba' means 'example' in Japanese --
it's a big collection full of example sentences translated to and from lots of different languages.
It's also open for contributions, so if you speak two or more languages,
please go over and contribute -- it's a fantastic resource.
(I'm not affiliated with them, by the way. I just really like them!)
So there's Tatoeba. There's nciku, which is a Chinese-English dictionary. There's yellowbridge, which is a Chinese-English dictionary.
One of the most valuable resources I've found, though, is Ting -- which is Chinese for "listen".
It is a website run by, I think, the University of Maine.
And it's again a Chinese-English dictionary,
but, very importantly, it contains lots of audio recordings of native Chinese speakers and native English speakers
reading the sentences out loud,
some slow, some fast, all in their own pitch and in their own natural speed.
That's been an incredibly valuable resource.
I've had the opportunity to find useful sentences, to come up with interesting new constructions that I didn't know how to say before and now do,
and I've been able to hear them pronounced by native speakers, and I've been able to copy them,
and hopefully that's improved my pronunciation a bit.
(Maybe it hasn't, I don't know. We'll find out. But it'll have a cumulative effect.)
That's been incredibly useful, because the only thing I could find anywhere else was
either recordings of individual syllables just sort of put side-by-side,
or computerised recordings. And both of those are very bad, because both of those end up sounding very mechanical.
I'm sure that's how my Chinese sounds at the moment, but it's not how native speakers' Chinese sounds. The tones are all over the place.
One warning, by the way: Tatoeba has an automatic character-to-pinyin system which is half wrong. Ignore it.
So, Ting has been a very valuable resource.
Finally: sorry. I failed at Anki.
Well, I was doing it on and off for a little while, but... yeah.
I was doing it off far more than on. And so I quit and restarted.
I started yesterday, so I've now done two sessions of Anki, and I'm going to be aiming to learn about 20 words a day.
So hopefully over the next 65 or something days -- which is how long this challenge is going to last, mine's only 80 days --
over the next 65 or so days, I should learn over 1000 words, even if I miss a few days.
(Which I don't intend to, by the way!)
20 words a day. That's my goal. Mmm.
Okay. I think that's all I have to say for today, so: bye!