There is a new entry into the world of the TV method! His name is David and he is going to learn Japanese by watching TV. He emailed me and asked me some questions regarding the TV method and we exchanged a few messages. From his email I can see that he understands the principles of Automatic Language Growth and he knows what to expect.
You can read David's story at Sushi and Sumo. I think we'll be getting some exciting reports from him soon. He's currently at 3 hours with the TV method.
I'd wish him good luck, but luck isn't needed with Automatic Language Growth. He just needs to watch TV. Well, maybe he needs luck finding good dramas to watch.
Good Luck, David!
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Saturday, April 11, 2009
old TV dramas and cartoons
In my quest to be the best, I have passed a milestone. That is, the 500-hour mile marker. I now have 530 hours of viewing Chinese TV. I have done the 500 hours in 6 months. I wonder what my ability to understand Chinese will be like after another 500 hours. It's hard to say exactly, but I feel that overall, I am understanding about 25% of the language now. So I miss out on the details of what is being said, but there are so many phrases that are used over and over that I understand, so perhaps it's not surprising to get about 25% comprehension after 500 hours.
Since my last post, I have watched the complete 39 hours of an old TV drama and 19 hours of Doraemon in Mandarin Chinese.
The old TV drama is called The Legend of the Condor Heroes and is based on a novel. This TV series was aired in 1982 and is not the only one that was made from that popular 1957 novel. The drama I watched is actually a Hong Kong drama in Cantonese but I have the Mandarin dubbed version. It says in the Amazon China page as well as is printed on the discs that the product has Chinese subtitles when in fact there were none! I was glad that the subtitles were missing. The only bad thing was that the audio would sound like your speakers were breaking whenever an actor would yell or hit a syllable loudly. But I think it was not my speakers because even adjusting the volume of my speakers did not affect the problem. It was not a big problem though.
The Mandarin dubbed over the the Cantonese speaking actors matches up very well. So well, in fact, that I was able to forget that it is dubbed. And since this was a period drama, there were no English words or phrases used like there was with the modern drama that I watched prior to this one. I've gone through several pages of listings for the HK dramas on Amazon China and apparently they don't sell bilingual Mandarin/Cantonese dramas.
I placed an order yesterday for 1 item and I realized that the shipping is not 80% of the item price. It appears to be a flat 20 RMB per item which is about 294 JPY.
After finishing the 27 year old TV drama, I started watching a Japanese cartoon in Chinese. The cartoon is called Doraemon. This is some kind of 36 year anniversary pack or something. It has 6 discs in all. 3 of the discs each have 2 90-minute Doraemon movies on them was well as old episodes of the cartoon as a bonus.
So far, I have watched the first 5 discs. Not all of the episodes and movies have included the Japanese audio and not all of them can turn off the subtitles. It seems to me, that in the older episodes, Doraemon has the same name as in Japanese. But in other epsisodes, which looked newer, he goes by a different name.
In one of the movies which has both Chinese and Japanese audio, there was a short silent period and then when the sound came back it was out of sync. Then a funny thing happened. The voice of Doraemon changed. I thought it was strange that his voice would change in the middle of a movie. Then I noticed that his new voice was speaking Japanese! I hadn't noticed it right away. And shortly after that it went back to the Chinese audio and everything was back in sync.
Amongst the various episodes and movies of Doraemon, the voice of the characters was not done by the same people. I found that to be really odd. Especially in one of the movies, the Chinese voice for Doraemon does not resemble the high-pitched Japanese voice at all. If Doraemon doesn't have the right voice it just doesn't sound like him.
Most of the cartoon episodes seemed to be about 6.5 minutes. I found this short span to be ideal. You get a lot of different situations which is ideal for language learners. Also, what is happening in those episodes is pretty transparent. I think you don't need to understand the language at all to be entertained by it, which is probably important for toddlers watching them.
I was pretty bored by the Doraemon movies. In a way, they are completely different from the regular Doraemon episodes. You see, in the episodes, Nobita is always trying to take advantage of something that Doraemon has given him. His plans always backfire and get him into trouble which he hadn't considered before getting carried away. But the storyline in the movie is long and drawn out.
I think I will rewatch only the first 2 discs. It will likely be the last couple of days in a month when I don't want to start on a long drama but I want to get a few more hours in. I will just update my spreadsheet but I won't write a post everytime I rewatch Doraemon.
I have one more Doraemon disc to watch which is 8 hours long, but I am going to go onto the next drama first. The next one for me is a Korean drama which I will only be able to watch 78% of because of the problems with the last disc. I put it in my spreadsheet as 19 hours but the real length of the series is longer.
Since my last post, I have watched the complete 39 hours of an old TV drama and 19 hours of Doraemon in Mandarin Chinese.
The old TV drama is called The Legend of the Condor Heroes and is based on a novel. This TV series was aired in 1982 and is not the only one that was made from that popular 1957 novel. The drama I watched is actually a Hong Kong drama in Cantonese but I have the Mandarin dubbed version. It says in the Amazon China page as well as is printed on the discs that the product has Chinese subtitles when in fact there were none! I was glad that the subtitles were missing. The only bad thing was that the audio would sound like your speakers were breaking whenever an actor would yell or hit a syllable loudly. But I think it was not my speakers because even adjusting the volume of my speakers did not affect the problem. It was not a big problem though.
The Mandarin dubbed over the the Cantonese speaking actors matches up very well. So well, in fact, that I was able to forget that it is dubbed. And since this was a period drama, there were no English words or phrases used like there was with the modern drama that I watched prior to this one. I've gone through several pages of listings for the HK dramas on Amazon China and apparently they don't sell bilingual Mandarin/Cantonese dramas.
I placed an order yesterday for 1 item and I realized that the shipping is not 80% of the item price. It appears to be a flat 20 RMB per item which is about 294 JPY.
After finishing the 27 year old TV drama, I started watching a Japanese cartoon in Chinese. The cartoon is called Doraemon. This is some kind of 36 year anniversary pack or something. It has 6 discs in all. 3 of the discs each have 2 90-minute Doraemon movies on them was well as old episodes of the cartoon as a bonus.
So far, I have watched the first 5 discs. Not all of the episodes and movies have included the Japanese audio and not all of them can turn off the subtitles. It seems to me, that in the older episodes, Doraemon has the same name as in Japanese. But in other epsisodes, which looked newer, he goes by a different name.
In one of the movies which has both Chinese and Japanese audio, there was a short silent period and then when the sound came back it was out of sync. Then a funny thing happened. The voice of Doraemon changed. I thought it was strange that his voice would change in the middle of a movie. Then I noticed that his new voice was speaking Japanese! I hadn't noticed it right away. And shortly after that it went back to the Chinese audio and everything was back in sync.
Amongst the various episodes and movies of Doraemon, the voice of the characters was not done by the same people. I found that to be really odd. Especially in one of the movies, the Chinese voice for Doraemon does not resemble the high-pitched Japanese voice at all. If Doraemon doesn't have the right voice it just doesn't sound like him.
Most of the cartoon episodes seemed to be about 6.5 minutes. I found this short span to be ideal. You get a lot of different situations which is ideal for language learners. Also, what is happening in those episodes is pretty transparent. I think you don't need to understand the language at all to be entertained by it, which is probably important for toddlers watching them.
I was pretty bored by the Doraemon movies. In a way, they are completely different from the regular Doraemon episodes. You see, in the episodes, Nobita is always trying to take advantage of something that Doraemon has given him. His plans always backfire and get him into trouble which he hadn't considered before getting carried away. But the storyline in the movie is long and drawn out.
I think I will rewatch only the first 2 discs. It will likely be the last couple of days in a month when I don't want to start on a long drama but I want to get a few more hours in. I will just update my spreadsheet but I won't write a post everytime I rewatch Doraemon.
I have one more Doraemon disc to watch which is 8 hours long, but I am going to go onto the next drama first. The next one for me is a Korean drama which I will only be able to watch 78% of because of the problems with the last disc. I put it in my spreadsheet as 19 hours but the real length of the series is longer.
Friday, April 03, 2009
dubbed into your target language
The name's Bond, LOVE BOND.
As it turns out, all 4 items that I bought from Amazon China are not originally Mandarin TV dramas. I knew that for 2 of them. One is Korean and the other is Japanese. But for the other 2 I didn't know that they were Hong Kong Dramas. For the 2 that I knew about, they have both the original and the dubbed audio tracks. I didn't want to buy dubbed shows unless the original track was also included. Looking back at the product pages, the only way to tell that the other two shows were originally Cantonese is to look at the categories which they fall into. At the bottom of the page is the different categories that the product can be found under. I used the search function of the browser to search the page for the word 'Hong Kong' in Chinese characters in order to find this information. Now I'll know where to check. Live and let learn.
So now I have finished watching the first of my four titles from Amazon. The English title of the drama is LOVE BOND. It is 30 episodes and came on 4 discs. The picture quality is not great but the price is cheap, so that's fair enough.
The discs came in disc sleeves with a box sleeve but no box. This makes the packaging very flat. I put the discs into this 4-disc case.
And I took the box sleeve and put it under the plastic outside of the DVD case.
Who is this old man?
One thing I wasn't particularly too fond of is that a few English sentences and words are used. I suppose this could reflect reality in Hong Kong. I don't know, but now I am guessing that most modern-day dramas from Hong Kong will be like this. The first sentence in English that I heard was, "Who is this old man?" It was said by a woman who was apparently annoyed by the old guy and she kept calling him "old man." At one point he says to her in English, "shut up!" The other parts of the dialogue were in Chinese. There were other instances of whole English sentences being used as well. I find that it annoys me. I think I won't order any more Hong Kong dramas unless it is a bilingual version. Of course, when I start learning Cantonese I won't have any choice.
Vocabulary Explosion
There is an article on the web about why toddlers experience a vocabulary explosion. There are two reports of the same research. Here and here. Here is a quote from the article:
I think I may be at the beginning of my own vocabulary explosion. It could just be that this drama was special, but I had a larger frequency of new words that I picked up on. It happened much more often during this series than anything I've experienced in the past. I mean I could really tell a difference. I can credit the vocabulary explosion to 2 things for sure. One is that my listening ability has risen to what it is now. I couldn't have gotten to that level without the hours and hours that I have put in so far. The other thing is that my understanding of the language has also risen. Both of these allow me to start understanding more new words at an increased rate of acquisition.
If this drama is any indication, I think I've switched into a higher gear. I've gone from 1st gear to 2nd gear. I'm still fighting the translation demons. But my understanding of Chinese is improving.
Targets for daily input hours
I'm going to try my best to get as many hours in as possible in the next 2 months. I'm not satisfied with the averages I've attained in past months. I can't remember if it was last month or if it was in February, but I had the idea to get a minimum of 4 hours in a day. I thought I should shoot for 5 but not accept less than 4. I didn't really aspire to that idea, but I ended up with just under an average of 4 hours a day last month. I did 122 hours. I should have guaranteed myself 124 hours. Basically, a 6 hour day would make up for a 4 hour day and average to 5 hours. With every day having at least 4 hours, and most days having 5 or more hours, I should be able to get 150 hours or more a month. So this month and next I need to keep myself in check.
This may sound like a lot, or it may sound like no fun to have strict targets, but it is necessary in order to keep from wasting so much time. A lot of time is lost due to the world wide internet. If you're not careful, a whole day can slip away. You can't go back for a "do over." Once you've squandered your time, it's gone. And for what? Nothing! It's time wasted. If 150 hours of TV method is doable for me, then I must have wasted 30 hours last month. I probably wasted more than that.
Focusing on the future
Today is a result of the past. I can never get the past back. I am where I am at now because of what I did in the past. I will give up today so that I can have a better future. I would like to enjoy a future where I can understand Chinese. Once I can understand Chinese, I will never lose it. I can lose physical possessions, but a language is not physical. I carry language with me wherever I go. I don't need to remember to bring my language. It is always inside me. So even if I am not expecting to use it that day, I will have it with me.
As it turns out, all 4 items that I bought from Amazon China are not originally Mandarin TV dramas. I knew that for 2 of them. One is Korean and the other is Japanese. But for the other 2 I didn't know that they were Hong Kong Dramas. For the 2 that I knew about, they have both the original and the dubbed audio tracks. I didn't want to buy dubbed shows unless the original track was also included. Looking back at the product pages, the only way to tell that the other two shows were originally Cantonese is to look at the categories which they fall into. At the bottom of the page is the different categories that the product can be found under. I used the search function of the browser to search the page for the word 'Hong Kong' in Chinese characters in order to find this information. Now I'll know where to check. Live and let learn.
So now I have finished watching the first of my four titles from Amazon. The English title of the drama is LOVE BOND. It is 30 episodes and came on 4 discs. The picture quality is not great but the price is cheap, so that's fair enough.The discs came in disc sleeves with a box sleeve but no box. This makes the packaging very flat. I put the discs into this 4-disc case.
And I took the box sleeve and put it under the plastic outside of the DVD case.
Who is this old man?
One thing I wasn't particularly too fond of is that a few English sentences and words are used. I suppose this could reflect reality in Hong Kong. I don't know, but now I am guessing that most modern-day dramas from Hong Kong will be like this. The first sentence in English that I heard was, "Who is this old man?" It was said by a woman who was apparently annoyed by the old guy and she kept calling him "old man." At one point he says to her in English, "shut up!" The other parts of the dialogue were in Chinese. There were other instances of whole English sentences being used as well. I find that it annoys me. I think I won't order any more Hong Kong dramas unless it is a bilingual version. Of course, when I start learning Cantonese I won't have any choice.
Vocabulary Explosion
There is an article on the web about why toddlers experience a vocabulary explosion. There are two reports of the same research. Here and here. Here is a quote from the article:
"Children are going to get that word spurt guaranteed, mathematically, as long as a couple of conditions hold," McMurray said. "They have to be learning more than one word at a time, and they must be learning a greater number of difficult or moderate words than easy words. Using computer simulations and mathematical analysis, I found that if those two conditions are true, you always get a vocabulary explosion."I don't know if the research is well conducted or not. Most research conclusions are more theory than fact.
I think I may be at the beginning of my own vocabulary explosion. It could just be that this drama was special, but I had a larger frequency of new words that I picked up on. It happened much more often during this series than anything I've experienced in the past. I mean I could really tell a difference. I can credit the vocabulary explosion to 2 things for sure. One is that my listening ability has risen to what it is now. I couldn't have gotten to that level without the hours and hours that I have put in so far. The other thing is that my understanding of the language has also risen. Both of these allow me to start understanding more new words at an increased rate of acquisition.
If this drama is any indication, I think I've switched into a higher gear. I've gone from 1st gear to 2nd gear. I'm still fighting the translation demons. But my understanding of Chinese is improving.
Targets for daily input hours
I'm going to try my best to get as many hours in as possible in the next 2 months. I'm not satisfied with the averages I've attained in past months. I can't remember if it was last month or if it was in February, but I had the idea to get a minimum of 4 hours in a day. I thought I should shoot for 5 but not accept less than 4. I didn't really aspire to that idea, but I ended up with just under an average of 4 hours a day last month. I did 122 hours. I should have guaranteed myself 124 hours. Basically, a 6 hour day would make up for a 4 hour day and average to 5 hours. With every day having at least 4 hours, and most days having 5 or more hours, I should be able to get 150 hours or more a month. So this month and next I need to keep myself in check.
This may sound like a lot, or it may sound like no fun to have strict targets, but it is necessary in order to keep from wasting so much time. A lot of time is lost due to the world wide internet. If you're not careful, a whole day can slip away. You can't go back for a "do over." Once you've squandered your time, it's gone. And for what? Nothing! It's time wasted. If 150 hours of TV method is doable for me, then I must have wasted 30 hours last month. I probably wasted more than that.
Focusing on the future
Today is a result of the past. I can never get the past back. I am where I am at now because of what I did in the past. I will give up today so that I can have a better future. I would like to enjoy a future where I can understand Chinese. Once I can understand Chinese, I will never lose it. I can lose physical possessions, but a language is not physical. I carry language with me wherever I go. I don't need to remember to bring my language. It is always inside me. So even if I am not expecting to use it that day, I will have it with me.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
ALG Thai
ALG World has uploaded a 3-part video from an advanced class. In the title it says 'Famous People' so I guess that is what the class was on.
I believe the students need to complete 200 hours for each level, so that means the students in the class have put in about 800 or more hours of ALG World Thai and understand 60% or more. The students are also allowed to speak Thai and you can hear some of them answering the teacher. Also, I think in the advanced levels there is only one teacher instead of two, which is what I see in this one.
If you don't understand Thai, the third video is the most interesting one.
Here are the links if you need them:
ALG World's channel
I believe the students need to complete 200 hours for each level, so that means the students in the class have put in about 800 or more hours of ALG World Thai and understand 60% or more. The students are also allowed to speak Thai and you can hear some of them answering the teacher. Also, I think in the advanced levels there is only one teacher instead of two, which is what I see in this one.
If you don't understand Thai, the third video is the most interesting one.
Here are the links if you need them:
ALG World's channel
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)