what to do to stay focused

Thomas has asked a good question in the comment of the last post and I started replying to it there but my reply is so long I think it'd be better to make it a post.

Hello. I thought your TV method sounded pretty cool so I started it with Thai recently (well, yesterday). I'm not going as hardcore as you are, but I'm trying to watch at least one drama episode per day.

Naturally I understand almost zero of what is said in the Thai dramas. My ears are still getting used to the sound and rhythm of the language. I don't expect to pick up many words for a long while yet, so I'm not stressing it. I actually enjoy it. It's mysterious and musical.

Anyway, I have a question. When I watch, I find myself spacing out a lot from time to time. I try to concentrate and really listen the whole time, but it's my mind's tendency to wander away from the mystery talking and towards thinking about everyday things. Sometimes I'll snap back and realize I wasn't really listening to the drama for the past 5 minutes or so. When you watch your DVDs all in one go like you do, does this happen to you too? Any tips on how to counter this?

Thanks!

Hello Thomas! I'm excited to hear you are giving the TV method a go. Right now you are in an adjustment period. It will take some more time before the language becomes clearer and until then it easy for your mind to start wandering. You also will be getting used to this style. That is, instead of being occupied with a task like studying does for you, you will become an observer. You will adjust to this observer mode.

At this early stage, you will observe what is happening. To keep your attention on the story, you can use your imagination. If you see a man and woman arguing, you will just imagine what it is they are arguing about. You will guess what their relationship is and keep your eyes open for clues that will tell you whether you are right or wrong. By the end of the series, you will know more than you did about it when you started. When you watch it again, you'll understand better what is going on and try to look for things you missed the first time.

Another thing to do when you feel like it is to listen to all the different sounds the language has. When you do this, think about how in the world these people can make those sounds. How much air or friction do you hear in each sound? When you find a peculiar sound, listen for it again.

I have heard (or rather read) people say that they need a description of how sounds are made and that they would never be able to get the sounds correct even if they listened to the language for hundreds of hours. Of course, they never tried listening for hundreds of hours. They are the people who give up right away and cling to something which they can "do" in order to give them some sense of progression.

In my experiences, the sounds will sound differently after you have heard them long enough. The sound you may have first thought was just like an English "sh" sound will become distinctly different after you've listened to it long enough. Sounds that are similar to English become noticeably "not the same."

Another thing I did sometimes was to look at the decorations in the background of the scene. How are the houses or apartments furnished? Do dramas always revolve around wealthy people? I also looked at the people in the crowds or walking on the sidewalk in the background. Sometimes you can find editing inconsistencies. Such as, there was a scene where the character in the story was writing on a big piece of paper, and then the angle changed but the paper was small. Just funny things like that are mildly interesting. I was surprised at how many there actually are!

If you want to notice words, you should be able to recognize greetings. Do the people greet each other when they meet or leave? Is the greeting the same? Some languages have the same words for hello and good-bye. What do they say when they answer the phone? Greetings are really a prime example of where a translation is unnecessary clutter. As a beginner, all you need to do is to recognize the fact that it is a greeting. The actual meaning of the words doesn't matter.

In the beginning it is better to not know what each word means so that you don't start asking questions that don't have answers. For example, in English we say, "Good Morning." Now, a student from a language which doesn't talk like this might ask, "Why do you always say good morning? What if it's a bad morning, then what do you say? How come this other guy just says Morning? Why doesn't he say good? How am I supposed to know which one to use? Is one more polite than the other?"

One more thing I tried was to see how well and how long I could hear the language. If you can just hear each syllable and then let it go so that you hear the next syllable you'll find that what is required is an ability to not get caught up on some word. I don't know if this might be easy for you since you don't yet know words or if this will be challenging. The language is kind of a blur in the beginning. It's interesting to notice how the clarity of the language will change for you over time.

So those are some ideas for keeping your attention on the dramas when you don't understand much yet. This adaptation stage is letting your brain know that these foreign sounds are important. Your brain will do the work for you, so just let it happen. Remember, your brain is one smart cookie!

P.S.
Let us know if you start a TV method blog! Yours would be the first to go from zero knowledge of a language using the TV method.

石头剪刀布

I've finished watching yet another Chinese TV drama. It has 24 episodes on 3 discs and is 16 hours long. I watched the first 2 discs yesterday and the 3rd disc today.

This drama had less dialogue in it and it seemed to drag on and on. Therefor, I won't be able to watch this one again for a long, long time. I'll watch it again once I can understand Chinese pretty well and have forgotten most of the story.

I enjoy acquiring Chinese through the TV method. For me, it is more satisfying to know new words from observing how they are used. This method also gives the words real meaning as I acquire the words through feeling. I can feel the meaning of the words and they hold real value to me.

Whenever I have studied and memorized words, they don't feel real. You can say the words and know what they mean but it takes a lot of time to actually feel the meaning of those words. Until then, the words don't mean anything to me.

I consider my TV method to be 99% reinforcing known words and one percent acquiring new words. It's fun because the words I know show up all the time. I hear them again and again and they sink deeper and deeper into me. I think this builds a strong foundation for acquiring more words. I don't think that the one percent of acquiring words is slow because I am acquiring multiple words simultaneously, not one at a time.

I don't consider the acquisition of a word to be a one moment event. What I mean is, a word is not unknown one moment and then suddenly acquired the next moment. The language is gradually acquired. At first you start to recognize a new word. But you are not ready to know what it means. When you are ready, you will be able to start guessing at the possible meanings.

After that, you'll find it in more situations and you'll narrow in on what it means. Your understanding of the word develops gradually from your encounters with it. You'll find it used in unexpected ways and you'll adjust your understanding. You'll be able to adjust because you didn't look it up in a dictionary and get fixed on a definition. When you start using that word yourself, you'll use it just the way you've seen it used. You'll have had a lot of exposure to it and it should feel pretty natural to you when you use it.

That's what I really want; to be able to use the language and for it to feel natural and to have the confidence that I am using it naturally. I'm not comfortable speaking a language when it doesn't feel natural and when I have to wonder if what I am saying is even correct.

Last Agent

Yesterday and today I watched Last Agent, not for the last time, but for the first time. It has 22 episodes and is about 15 hours and 20 minutes long. This is the first Chinese TV drama on DVD that I've watched where nobody mentions the word "emperor." It's a modern day drama, complete with computers and cell phones. It is a drama with affairs and relationships and a conniving woman. It is very easy to get the general picture of what is going on and to generally follow the story.

It has just about every word that I have ever learned in Chinese. Well, except for "emperor." So I certainly get a lot of reinforcement by watching it. One of the words I learned from watching the 2nd drama that I bought was "hate." Of course, that word was used a lot in this drama. Hate is easy to learn. You don't need a dictionary or flashcards or an SRS. I picked up on it when one person had asked, "Do you hate me?" And the other person replied, "I don't hate you." When I first saw this situation, I knew the other words in the sentences. I also knew about the situation. I knew why the one person would hate the other. That's about all you would need to know. Of course, in reinforcing situations, a person will say, "I hate you!" and you can see the emotion.

And yes, in this drama too, somebody said one time, "I'm going to kill you!" It's surprising what kind of vocabulary gets reinforced! You can bet too, that I can say that in Chinese without hesitation. Ha ha. Hey, now I know just what to say the next time someone tells me to say something in Chinese!

This is also the first drama where nobody spit up blood. That happened quite a bit in the other dramas. An interesting thing of culture in this drama was that the people had marriage documents that were similar to passports. Each married person had one and when they got a divorce the official stamped the picture of the couple inside. It must have been a big CANCEL stamp.

tips for hiding hard-coded subs

This post marks the completion of my sixth viewing of the above-pictured drama (雍正王朝). This was the first Chinese TV series drama that I bought. I purchased it on 11/18/2008 which was 4 months ago. I have watched it 6 times already because I did not have very many dramas. Since then, I have watched 3 other Chinese dramas and I have 2 new ones that I will be watching next. Not only that, but I have 4 more on the way from Amazon China. From here on out, I won't need to watch each drama so frequently.

The first three dramas that I bought have hard subs in Japanese. I have tried to avoid catching any glimpse of the subtitles. This time around, I found two ways in which I can effectively hide them. However, it also means hiding that part of the screen as well.

The first way to hide them is to not play the drama in full screen on the computer. Take another window, like the finder window, and cover up the bottom of the screen where the subtitles appear. This will be about the lower 1/4 or 1/5 of the screen. So the DVD player application is not the front window.

The second way applies to my Portable Language Acquisition Input Device (PLAID). On my portable DVD player I can zoom the screen to 2x. Then I can slide the screen down so that I see all of the top. This is just enough to hide the bottom portion where the subtitles appear. Of course the video becomes a little pixelated with the zoom and the right and left edges of the picture also get cut off.

My 2 new Chinese TV dramas that I will be watching next also have hard subs, but there are two differences. The first is that the subs are in Chinese, the same language as the audio. The second difference is that the subs are not actually on the picture. The picture is letterboxed with the subtitles appearing below the video. So if I use method 1 to hide the subtitles, I won't be missing any of the picture. Also, it will be easier to not see the subtitles when they are not directly on the picture anyway.

Even though the new dramas will have Chinese subtitles, I think it is better for me to not be looking at them now. Later, after I have acquired listening and speaking and want to focus on reading, I can use the Chinese subtitles to learn to read, I think.

I'm looking forward to watching all of the new dramas that are coming. I believe that in each drama series, there will be certain words which appear more often than in other series. For example, in this drama, from the very first time through it, I learned the word for "emperor" because the emperor is the main character that the whole story revolves around. In the second and third dramas, that word was also used quite a bit. In the fourth drama, that word is used just a few times and because I knew the word I knew exactly who they were talking about the first time it was spoken in the drama. In that fourth drama, the emperor doesn't appear until near the end. The emperor is just a small part in that series. But from that drama, I learned the word for "kill." People kept saying, "I'm going to kill you!" I had noticed the word previously, but I didn't know if it only meant "stab." But then when someone was killed by a gun, I knew that it was not a word used only with swords and knives.

So I do think it is best to get a wide variety of exposure to your target language. You don't have to guess at what every word means. Somewhere, there is a situation that will make it patently obvious what a certain word means.