Like how do you fit all the Chinese characters on a Chinese laptop, wouldn’t that take up a shit ton of space?
Sorry I’m a big ignorant American who barely speaks English so I got no fucking idea.
Like how do you fit all the Chinese characters on a Chinese laptop, wouldn’t that take up a shit ton of space?
Sorry I’m a big ignorant American who barely speaks English so I got no fucking idea.
Sorry I didn’t want to discourage you. I want to give some targeted grammar tricks to say the same sentence in a smoother way. I also went through the same learning steps as you and would have previously constructed my sentences in the same way, til I encountered the more ‘natural’ sentence constructions
(Also, I tried to give my feedback in Chinese cos I know you’d be able to handle it, rather than Englifying it for you)
May I ask what methods you use to learn? I’ve been plateaued for over a year.
Language classes and tutors. I can’t self study. I need an external teacher or tutor, and classmates, to keep my nose to the grind stone.
Unfortunately that’s it, I’ve learnt that I am not motivated to download and use apps consistently (Anki, HelloChinese), or go through online materials. I can’t even get by on ‘change your UI to Chinese’ or ‘Play videogames in Chinese’ (both of which I did) because my brain just glosses over the words to skip the effort.
The only apps I used were Hellotalk and iTalki to meet language partners who may have incidentally been Chinese teachers, or who were patient enough to try to break the grammar down for me.
When I was in-country I also did extra tutoring as a ‘volunteer student’ at a private teacher training college.
I also picked up some hobbies (both in China and here) that were 100% in Chinese. Even if I my Chinese was shit, I still got social value out of it.
Cool. I did have a couple of Chinese teachers a few years back but I fell out of the habit. I’ll be in China again next year so hopefully I can make it stick. The apps I use are basically useless.
Apps are a trap. Especially Duolingo. They give the illusion of progress but no effective learning.
In my experience, I think an ounce of output is worth a pound of input. By which I mean for example, talking to someone for ten minutes entirely in Chinese is probably worth about two hours of watching a variety show or playing Black Myth Wukong.
Output forces you to consolidate your learning in real time to communicate, rather than just getting by with ‘I know or think I know what this means enough to enjoy the show’.
You can even force output by journalling, talking to yourself in Chinese (e.g. narrating what you’re doing as you do it), or recording videos of yourself and watching. You don’t get the feedback, but you’re still forcing some of those neural pathways.
To a lesser degree you can also tune your ear, pronunciation and accent by ‘shadowing’ (watching/listening to a show and repeating exactly what you hear immediately, like you’re a ‘shadow’ following the speaker’s words). It’s not as effective as conscious output but it is still forcing your brain and tongue to speed up and anticipate what is being said.