User Comments - mickeytoon
mickeytoon
Posted on: Podcast Language 2
June 3, 2009 at 6:30 PMSpeaking without understanding. Ha Ha sounds like a few product managers I know who "talk a good game"...
Posted on: Podcast Language 2
June 3, 2009 at 5:56 PMGood point Henning,
the omission of the written element makes a big difference, but even so, the claim that learning spoken Chinese is less than 3 times as hard as French or other european languages just seems way off reality... But I haven't done the research...
Posted on: Podcast Language 2
June 3, 2009 at 5:14 PMMikeinewshot
http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Ewbaxter/howhard.html
This website ranks French Russian and Chinese learning difficulty as follows :
French : Russian : Chinese = 1 : 1.5 : 2.75
based on hours of instruction required to reach a given spoken proficiency level.
This personally seems like a very conservative estimate in my experience.
Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 11: Wang in the Doghouse
June 3, 2009 at 1:51 PMHa Ha - keep sniffing the Mercury Raygo
Posted on: Why are You Studying Chinese?
June 2, 2009 at 4:31 PMWhy learn Chinese? Because it's there!
A lifetime challenge!
Posted on: Podcast Language 2
June 1, 2009 at 9:04 PMAs Raygo points out, one of the challenges with Cpod is finding a way to best use the plentiful resources to optimise personal learning.
I've found the content of the "Study-Strategy" group quite helpful - particularly a post by Henning and follow up discussion on personal study schemes.
No shocks though to hear that nobody is suggesting that learning Mandarin is easy or doesn't involve a degree of painstaking repetition.
Posted on: Podcast Language 2
June 1, 2009 at 6:57 PMGood point Timsism and thanks for the recommendations
The very early intermediate lessons do make good step up material from ele level. "Chinese Tea" (not to be confused with the recent "Tea Tasting") is also a fairly basic lesson - Quite slowly spoken, simple vocab, from the Ken Jenny archive.
Posted on: Podcast Language 2
May 30, 2009 at 8:48 PMYes this exception with QW is truly baffling. I recall Auntie listing this as one of her gripes months ago. Surely not a hard thing to fix?
Posted on: Podcast Language 2
May 30, 2009 at 8:41 AM系列 xì liè - Series! I've struggled with this for ages!! Thank you.
Posted on: Podcast Language 2
June 4, 2009 at 7:52 AMGood old Miura-san. I am inspired by his example to learn Chinese twice before I am 75 (having forgetten it all the first time round). Just hope I don't do things too quickly and end up like the human firework in Baba's picture