西太后の紫禁城 3

I did it! I finished the third viewing of this Chinese drama before the end of the month. Just an hour to spare! Each episode is 50 minutes long. I had to watch 13 episodes yesterday and the remaining 11 today in order to finish it off this month because unfortunately, I couldn't watch any on Wednesday and Thursday.

I just like to have things wrapped up so that it's easy to calculate numbers. This month, I watched about 106 hours of Chinese. That's 2 viewings of this drama and almost 2 viewings of the other one. Shall we say that's too too much? Even though I watch one whole drama in between each, it feels like there is no time between viewings of the same drama.

I've ordered 2 more Chinese dramas online that I'm waiting for. I don't think either of them is as long as one of these two because they don't have as many discs. But we'll see when they arrive. Neither will have Japanese subtitles. Yaay! They both have Simplified Chinese subtitles, but I hope they can be turned off. It's easy to get the wrong idea when seeing subtitles, especially since I know Japanese Kanji. But also, I'd be likely to think of the meaning of the words if I see their characters.

I've been trying to not think about the meaning of the words I hear and I believe I'm making some progress in that area. You can hear more too, when you don't think about the meaning. It's encouraging for me to hear sentences that I can understand but never picked up on in previous viewings.

I believe the most basic words in a language are the ones that are constantly repeated and that those are the words you should firmly know and easily be able to hear before expecting to add more vocabulary to your knowledge. I also think that natural acquisition is the only way to accomplish this correctly. Any kind of deliberate study would force too many words on you too quickly. Through natural language acquisition, you do more reinforcement than addition. You understand new words when you are ready. Could I have done 106 hours of study in one month? Never! But I did get 106 hours of input. Even though natural methods seems to require a lot of hours, they require less toil than traditional study methods. It's just a matter of priorities.

sounds familiar?

As I have been saying, the language you hear and don't understand is not wasted time. Natural acquisition begins with a large amount of input that you won't be able to comprehend but still is needed to become used to the language. All the time exposed to the language is a preparatory period that is vital to later acquisition.

The Foreign Language Doctor has found this article that was published just today.

Sound patterns boost language learning - study

4:00AM Wednesday Jan 28, 2009

Exposure to the sound patterns of another language, even if it is initially meaningless, could hold the key to quickly picking up a foreign tongue, says a researcher.

Victoria University PhD graduate Paul Sulzberger made his discovery while trying to find out why many students dropped out in the early days of trying to learn a new language.

He believed his findings could revolutionise language teaching.

Listening to a language's sound patterns was critical as it set up structures in the brain required to learn the words, he found.

"Our ability to learn new words is directly related to how often we have been exposed to the particular combinations of the sounds which make up the words," he said. "Neural tissue required to learn and understand a new language will develop automatically from simple exposure to the language - which is how babies learn their first language."

He was interested in what made it so difficult to learn foreign words when we were constantly learning new ones in our native language. He found the answer in the way the brain developed neural structures when hearing new combinations of sounds.

"When we are trying to learn new foreign words we are faced with sounds for which we may have absolutely no neural representation.

"A student trying to learn a foreign language may have few pre-existing neural structures to build on in order to remember the words."

Extending exposure to foreign languages had been made easier by globalisation and new technology.

Listening to songs, movies and even foreign news reports on the internet were all easy ways to expose the brain to foreign language sounds, Dr Sulzberger said.

- NZPA

Copyright ©2009, APN Holdings NZ Limited

雍正王朝 4

After 13 days, I have finally finished watching 雍正王朝 for the 4th time. I don't know if there was any improvement this time through. But that doesn't mean there wasn't. It's easy to notice an improvement when you go from 1% understanding to 2% understanding because you've doubled your comprehension. Then with the more you know, a one percent improvement isn't going to be noticeable. Plus, it's hard to feel an improvement when that other drama I watch is so much easier to understand.

Perhaps I'll watch a movie in Chinese before I start watching the other drama. I still need to place an order for a new drama.

I've added a display of the number of hours I have put into the TV method. It is visible on the right side of the blog page. Looking at it now, you can see I've put in 223 hours. I can only imagine what a big difference another 200 hours will make. And another 200 after that. The number of hours I have now seems so small. It's like I haven't even done anything yet.

what is fluency?

What does 'fluent' mean? Does it mean, "getting by" using just your foreign or second language? Are you fluent if you can carry on a conversation? Does somebody who has an office job and has to communicate with coworkers in their language only, qualify for the title "fluent?"

I do all of the above in Japanese. However, I don't consider myself to have reached fluency. I always run into things I don't know how to express. Every time that happens, it reconfirms to me that my knowledge is lacking. I can surely fix that with a lot of input just by watching TV. But since my focus is on Chinese now, the Japanese can wait.

I bring this up because I recently had a conversation with a Japanese tutor at LingQ. I signed up for a 15-minute 1-on-1 conversation that lasted 25 minutes. At 18 minutes and 40 seconds into the conversation, she stated that I was fluent in Japanese. While I wouldn't say it about myself, I guess she has every right to say it. I've made a lot of improvement in the last 1½ years in my ability to speak.

Here is a small mp3 file of the statement the tutor made. It is about 4 seconds long, in Japanese.