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I want to speak with my SO in her native language.
Should you be including some work on hearing and speaking Mandarin as well as reading and writing?
I'm heavily constrained by what I can test/grade. Writing code to grade the correctness of my Mandarin pronunciation is hard.
Listening exercises are easier to grade and they are definitely on my TODO list.
In response to
Language Learning and the Dark Arts.
patio11 on language learning:
"...A lot of people have vague goals like "I want to learn French" or "I want to be fluent in Japanese." There is no defensible definition of the word "fluent." Instead, you should have specific goals which test ability to complete tasks that are representative of the larger set of tasks you need to be good at to achieve metagoals which are important to you.
This is why I care relatively little about "fluency in Japanese" and quite a bit about "what percentage of commercially significant terms in my apartment lease did I understand without having to ask a Japanese speaker to explain them to me?"
That task is roughly representative of many tasks required to achieve my metagoal, which is "being a functioning adult / educated professional in Japanese society."
Now how do I measure progress? Well, I have some notion of groupings of tasks by difficulty level. The "apartment lease" task is in the same grouping and difficulty level as the "employment contract" task was or the "extract the relevant rule for recognizing SaaS revenue from the National Tax Agency's docs" was. Given roughly comparable levels of difficulty, if I start doing better on a task where previously I did poorly, then I'm progressing.
Why don't I just take Japanese tests yearly? Because my metagoal is not becoming the best Japanese test-taker there is. They are good from the perspective of many decisionmakers, since they allow decisionmakers to compare me against other people in a reproducible and cheap-at-the-margin fashion, but that doesn't get anything that I value. I don't care how I compare to Frank or Taro -- being better than Frank will not save me social embarrassment if I have to ask an accountant "Here is my... um, I don't know what the word is, but it's the piece of paper that records the historical prices I purchased by assets at and then their declining present value representing their worth diminishing over time as calculated by the straight line method. There's an accounting word I'm searching for here and I bet it is followed by the word 'schedule.' DEPRECIATION. Yep, that's the one, thanks."
I'm not sure how to use his comment. I do feel that I have sensible goals and I'm pretty good at keeping track of my progress. Achieving my goals requires a significant amount of legwork and I posted here to ask if there were any ways of making it a bit easier.
In response to
Language Learning and the Dark Arts.
Having just moved to China I am interested in this
If there's anything I can do to make your experience better, let me know.
In response to
Language Learning and the Dark Arts.
Why do you want to learn Mandarin in the first place? Why is it worth the enormous amount of time to require the language? If you are clear about the reason your prospects for motivating yourself are better.
Hm, I like this. Perhaps an automated email, sent once per week, saying something like:
My goal is to pass the Chinese proficiency exam by 2017. I have X days left. In the last week I've spent X hours practicing.
I want to learn Chinese because:
- I want to work in Singapore/China/Taiwan after I finish University.
- I want to prove that I can learn a foreign language.
- I want to speak with my SO in her native language.
I fear that I would start ignoring the emails after a few weeks. It feels similar to Tony Robbins' advice to keep telling yourself why you do what you do everyday. Sounds good on paper but I can't for the life of me implement it in my daily routine.
I'll give the emails a try and see what happens. Thanks.
In response to
Language Learning and the Dark Arts.
Cool site!
I think you should have a more efficient UI for either skipping a word or showing the hint. For apps where the user is expected to interact intensively with the system, it pays off to have special ways to save even a few seconds of time per interaction. For example if I were going to use the system for five hours, I would guess that I would waste 10-20 minutes in aggregate time moving my hand to the mouse to click on the "show hint" button.
Hitting the 'escape' key is the same as clicking on 'Show Hint'. It isn't explained very well on the site; I will do better.
I agree very much with your sentiment. Once you start practicing, your hands should not leave the keyboard.
Language Learning and the Dark Arts.
I've been wanting to learn Mandarin Chinese for years now and just recently I wrote a small website to help me practise.1 All of the exercises are gap sentences that require you to type the correct answer before you can move on. I chose this kind of exercise because of the convincing evidence for the spacing effect and the testing effect.
Knocking through a bunch of exercises every day feels efficient but it's not exactly fun and I put in less time than I should. I've found two things that help with this: setting small and achievable goals, and reading short stories once I'm proficient with the vocabulary. And if there are two ways to make practicing more fun, there gotta be a lot more that I haven't thought about. So, how do I make myself work harder? Are there are any of the so called Dark Arts that are more than hearsay and could work in my favor? How do you people out there learn foreign languages and how do you keep yourself from giving up or slowing down? Do you use the pomodoro technique?
Cheers, David.
Edit: more on -> move on.
In response to
Efficient Food
Are you only interested in solid food or would you want to buy Soylent/Joylent as well? Soylent/Joylent and Meal Squares are so simple that you wouldn't need new restaurants. They could easily be sold at, say, Starbucks.
On a related note, drinking Joylent has improved my feeling of well-being more than anything else I've done. The low price is just an added bonus.
Cool bro. Are you interested in meeting?
I am also in Zurich.
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Another thing: If you're looking for more text to use for your site, I would certainly enjoy being able to study off of the HPMoR Mandarin Chinese translation. :)
(You should probably ask the authors for permission, though.)
Do you know how I can get in contact with the authors? When I try to send a message on lofter, I'm just redirected to the frontpage.