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twovests OP wrote

Reply to comment by Moonside in (Mandarin simplified) Chinese is such a rad fucken language u should learn it by twovests

Oo good post! I've been focusing more on speaking and listening comprehension so it's good to know I'm on the right track there.

Do you speak / are you learning Chinese?

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Moonside wrote

Yeah it's a solid choice, however, you could try finding texts in pīnyīn for reading practice. Reading has benefits and you can circumvent the usual scripts for the most part with tech. Functional literacy needs thousands of words in your vocabulary anyways and you can start grokking the characters later.

I actually neither speak nor am I learning Chinese, I've just had some casual interest into CJK scripts. I've read Chinese philosophy and literature in translation where some passing knowledge of the script is useful. But honestly after seeing this thread... Maybe I should start it too. I've got my previous hobby languages, French and Swedish up to the point I can read them just fine and I don't have atm access to speech practice without, like, effort.

I just have a few resources in my mind that you might not be aware of that I've found useful for language learning:

  1. Paul Nation's What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?. It's only 56 pages of lucid prose and by far the best source for solid strategies for learning. Nation is apparently one of the biggest names in second language vocabulary acquisition.
  2. Nation also offers survival vocabulary lists. These are 120 words and phrases that are the most important ones for a person going on a brief visit. Here's the one for Mandarin. This is the original paper that outlines the methodology for how it was constructed and tips for usage.
  3. Some of the very best public domain foreign language courses are those by Foreign Service Institute, who train US diplomats etc. The Mandarin one is probably good if somewhat outdated. There are tons of hobby pages dedicated just to hosting these courses.
  4. I'm big into Anki the spaced repetition flash card software. I've got 10,000 cards atm. Flash cards are like outrageously good for vocabulary.
  5. Learning With Texts is a quirky yet cool tool for reading practice. You copy paste a foreign language texts, you can add dictionaries to translate each word by clicking them, you can collect words and make flash cards out of the sentences. It shows which words you haven't encountered yet and so on.
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