20 Responses to “Motivation”

1. 1 Bazza Dec 21st, 2006 at 5:59 pm

   Get a Chinese girlfriend?

2. 2 Bazza Dec 21st, 2006 at 5:59 pm

   I’m only assuming that helps though.

3. 3 chris(mandarin_student) Dec 21st, 2006 at 6:09 pm

   err Bazza I think his wife wouldn’t like that idea (I know mine didn’t).

4. 4 海宁 / Henning Dec 21st, 2006 at 6:20 pm

   But if it is a Chinese wife the resulting complications might double the need to be able to transport subtleties in Mandarin.

   Be aware: I once met a guy who came back with a girl from a 6-month-internship in Inner Mongolia - married (Motivation to learn Mandarin = very high). But it took her an increadible 6 month in Germany and she spoke German *fluently* and without *any* noticable accent (Motivation to learn Mandarin = significantly lower). She became one of the top students in Business Administration in Cologne later…

5. 5 michael butler Dec 21st, 2006 at 6:23 pm

   I have no words to motivate these chap only congratulations for having come so far outside of a structured environment and outside China. He deserves a pat on the back. I’ve gotten as far as I have because I’ve been living in Taiwan/China. I would never have been able to do what he did alone working from the computer.

   As for motivation, I’d say plan a trip to China. The trip need not be soon but the more concrete you make the plans the better. Take a break from Chinese study to make these plans and return to your study with this goal firmly in mind. Then envision yourself using all the Chinese that you’ve studied on your trip in China. Chinesepod should build a shrine somewhere in China for these kinds of people where they can go on pilgrimage.

   This last is no tongue-in-cheek suggestion.

   Keep pushing yourself to understand the C-pod lessons and continue following the slow upward curve!

6. 6 kmk Dec 21st, 2006 at 7:00 pm

   Is Jeremy Uriz a pseudonym for Aric the producer ?
   I’m sure Aric also like Elvis Costello and Patty Griffin.

   …good luck Uriz.
   Don’t worry about test or grades but concentrate on the pleasure you’re taking in this learning process.

7. 7 Brendan Dec 21st, 2006 at 7:26 pm

   All I can say is that we’ve all been there. I’ve long maintained that Chinese is easy, provided that one has a few years and an almost monomaniacal devotion — but the less flippant version of that is that if you just keep chip-chip-chipping away at Chinese, you’ll eventually crack it. It’s hard at the beginning, and then it goes on being hard - until eventually it isn’t anymore. Good luck!

8. 8 Fu Da-Wei Dec 21st, 2006 at 7:51 pm

   Any time I get discouraged, I reflect on the embarrassment of riches the InterNet has provided for the language learner. It almost makes me feel guilty not to study harder. I don’t think people born into the information age can fully appreciate the astounding opportunities they suddenly have. (And it’s not just the technology — the entire approach to language acquisition has changed significantly for the better). I’ll wager that when Ken himself was studying Chinese, he MIGHT have had a stilted and overly formal textbook that was closer to a Berlitz phrasebook (if he was lucky). He probably had a small dictionary that was stodgy, inadequate and probably required a rudimentary knowledge of Chinese before he could even make good use of it. If his experience was like mine (studying a non-European language), he probably relied heavily on Xeroxed classroom handouts.

   What a difference a few years make, eh? Now you have a bazillion websites packed with information. You have ready access to real Chinese. You have audio, video, radio, TV, DVDs, online newspapers, books, chatrooms, blogs, skype — and Jenny Zhu.

   And we’re still in the early stages.

9. 9 Lantian Dec 21st, 2006 at 10:26 pm

   OLD STUFF - Look thru some old stuff. When you go “Ohh yah, ah huh. That’s easy. I understood that.” Hey! Remember when you didn’t. I like listening to Chinese songs that I know for sure I didn’t used to understand at all. A couple tips for ‘measuring’ unstructured progress.

10. 10 Lantian Dec 21st, 2006 at 10:38 pm

    ACQ - I’m kinda having an alt-intermediate plateau non-problem. I seem to be acquiring a lot of vocab lately. And I’m not really studying (in the traditional sense). I listen to the Cpod casts, watch tv, surf the net, write a little in Chinese on the blog, text my friends to meet up, but that’s about it.

    Now I’m not saying I’m picking up like 20 new words a day, but I figure at least 2-3 in the course of a couple few days seem to stick. I can remember times when nuth’n seemed to stick. It’s kinda freak’n me out.

    Then I read Brendan’s post “then it goes on being hard - until eventually it isn’t anymore.” I’m riding this wave till the next wall! Anyone that’s discouraged, go have some fun with the Chinese, watch some YouTube Chinese videos, get a new DVD of some epic, turn up the iPod and belt out a few ‘jia you, jia you!’

11. 11 Clever Dick Dec 21st, 2006 at 11:01 pm

    I noticed on his blog profile, he has listed only one interest : “Life”.

    Maybe expand this section to make it more goal-specific such as “Become a Professor in Chinese Linguistics within 2 years”. When one has realistic goals identified, one is more likely to realize those goals.

12. 12 海宁 / Henning Dec 22nd, 2006 at 12:12 am

    It is a game, and the game is about breaking a code. Try to understand that secret language and decrypt those hyroglyphs. Each bit of vocab, each character, and each construction is like a jigsaw puzzle piece fitting in. A jigsaw puzzle would not be fun if it was be finished immediatly; the entertaining value comes from merging pieces into larger units and from seeing how seamingly arbitrary lines and colors suddenly fall into into larger patterns and structures.

    Practice with your own level but take a handful of lessons one level above your head for the puzzle-decryption mode. Only then you feel the exitement when you piece together the first units of meanings from the Dialogue. As you proceed those isolated islandes of understanding will blend into a coherent flow of information .

    For me that is a lot more rewarding than most other hobbies.

13. 13 Scott Schaffer Dec 22nd, 2006 at 1:32 am

    Wow. His experience sounds eerily similar to mine; understands all the Newbie stuff, chipping steadily away at the Elementary, no classes, no ’structure’, unsure of how far he’s come while being easily distracted from his lessons by shiny objects.

    As mentioned above, I’d recommend looking over past lessons you found difficult at the time, listening to them, and suddenly discovering ‘Hey, I understood every word of that!’ This works superbly well when you’ve just listened to a NEW lesson and understood every word, especially in the Elementary level, but it’s still very encouraging to listen to lessons from the past and remind yourself that, yes, you [I]do[/I] know some Mandarin, however much of a newbie you are.

    Oh, and kidding or no, getting a girlfriend who speaks your target language is really, really effective. I call this the ‘Les’ strategy, after a friend of mine who picked up pretty decent French, Russian, and Japanese in sequence just by moving to France/Russia/Japan for a year each and getting a French/Russian/Japanese girlfriend. I’m not speaking for the morality of it, of course (since he lost interest in each respective girlfriend surprisingly quickly afterwards), but very effective.

14. 14 Brent Dec 22nd, 2006 at 6:16 am

    watch “Karate Kid” and aply it

15. 15 Ron in DC Dec 22nd, 2006 at 8:38 am

    Take a week and let the Chinese come to you. Watch a Chinese movie or two; listen to a podcast without reading the transcript; go to a chinese restaurant without any notes or rehearsal. When that week is over, then you’ll be ready to dig back into it.

16. 16 RedViolin Dec 22nd, 2006 at 11:00 am

    If your goal is something like –Speak Mandarin like a native in three years time– then you are setting yourself up for discouragement and failure. I think you should just enjoy the whole process of learning a language and not dwell on how much there is still to learn.

    Studying a language does something good for the brain that I find difficult to describe. You become much more aware of, and sympathetic to the problems non-native speaker have with English. You gain a certain mental flexibility that mono-linguals don’t have. You become much more aware of your own language, its idiosyncrasies, and how arbitrary some of it’s conventions are.

    If I stopped my study now and never learned another word of Chinese, I would not consider my time to have been wasted.

    Henning is exactly right in comparing learning a language to putting together a puzzle. With a really big puzzle, you will be very slow in putting the pieces together. But as you progress, you will very slowly find that your progress in fitting the pieces together accelerates. With Mandarin, you should expect to spent much longer in the elementary stages than in European languages, because it has so few connections to English. But once you are through these stages, you might find that you actually progress quicker than you expect, because of the simplicity of its grammar and “build-up” nature of its vocabulary.

    I also think you should take full advantage of the embarrassment of riches that Fu Da-Wei talks about. You need to see words in a LOT of contexts before you possess them. So don’t just rehash old lessons. Find new ones at the same level. You will find words you already know, but in different contexts. You will probably also encounter new words of course. And you will retain them better because they are not embedded in a thicket of other new words, as they would be in more advanced lessons. Learning new lessons will keep your interest up. You will know it is time to move on when acquire a new lesson at a given level and you find it so easy that its boring.

    Learning a language outside the country can actually have its advantages. Your friend who goes to the country without any knowledge of the language and tries to learn by swimming in the native speaker ocean will likely acquire a mass of bad habits that he may never be able to get rid of. You however, can take your time and do it right. You can perfect your pronunciation and learn to understand and imitate all the material that is now so readily available. And when you finally do go to the country, the solid base that you have acquired may allow you to quickly catch up to and surpass your friend.

17. 17 Anne M. Dec 22nd, 2006 at 11:02 am

    Henning,

    “A jigsaw puzzle would not be fun if it was be finished immediately”

    oh ist das schön gesagt!
    that’s it, exactly.

    Any foreign language is sometimes frustrating. But Chinese seems special to me, like a game, a jigsaw puzzle. As if Jane Siberry’s song “Calling all angels” was just about learning Chinese…

    “if you could only crack the code
    You’d finally understand what this all means.
    Oh but if you could, do you think you would
    Have traded all the pain and suffering?
    Oh, but then you would’ve missed the beauty of the light upon this earth
    […]
    We’re trying, we’re hoping but we’re not sure… ”

    well… a bit too solemn… But Henning hits the nail right on the head (as we say in Germany).

18. 18 acmepost Dec 22nd, 2006 at 12:10 pm

    http://www.china.nafsa.org/chapter1.pdf is the first chapter of a booklet designed for Chinese grad students coming to America. The whole booklet is an interesting read, and you can substitute your learning Chinese instead of English.

    Chapter 2 has a good outline of how to conduct brief conversations with even strangers (it may just be a question about a word or two in the beginning!). The lady who works at the donut shop, the waiters in the Chinese restaurants, etc. all respond to the approach in the booklet. I’ve learned interesting things about the language and about people I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

    Maybe those things are the ‘payoff’ for learning to speak Chinese, instead of the 100% fluency and perfect grammar. The important thing for most of us is connecting with people, not passing a test.

19. 19 Clever Dick Dec 22nd, 2006 at 2:09 pm

    To keep motivated, one can use the “learning is a journey” analogy, where you take a language trip full of wonderous adventures and discoveries. Of course, everyone travels at their own speed and through different modes. Some learners travel by air, gliding effortlessly over all obstacles that the difficult Mandarin terrain poses. Others struggle through their journey, usually travelling painfully by foot, stepping on many linguistic landmines and butchered tone pronunciations. Still others, are more optimistic, preferring to travel leisurely by sea, but mistakenly choosing the Titanic as their vessel, with futile, last-ditch attempts to re-arrange the deck chairs. Still others prefer the subway, but through their tunnel vision, mistakenly focus all of their efforts on learning characters. The optimal approach, however, is the space shuttle vector, where language learning is equivalent to a multi-stage rocket, with each stage necessary for growth in fluency, where the sky is the limit, and crash landings resulting only once in about 100 flights.

20. 20 Jeremy Uriz Dec 28th, 2006 at 9:40 am

    Wow, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who commented on my blog and to Ken for taking the time to link to it.

    My wife was not crazy about the girlfriend part.

    I incorporated a bit of the advice. One thing I did was take it easy. The only CPod I listened to was the Saturday show (which I enjoy every Saturday morning before going to class).

    No, I am not Aric, but we probably do have some similar interests in music.

    I also took the advice of another poster who mentioned learning Hanzi. For the last few months my attitude was “i only want to learn to speak the language”. Recently it has broadened into speaking, reading, writing, etc. They are fascinating and fun to learn. Like a secret code.

    It was interesting to note the completely contradictory advice I was given. One person said to just take it easy, enjoy the trip up the mountain instead of focusing on the peak. Someone else said to have a firm goal. As someone else commented about having the goal of speaking like a native in 3 years, I agree, probably unrealistic. Except for John P. My goal is to spend the rest of my life discovering the language, hoping that I will become fluent enough to speak to natives without sounding silly.
    I agree that learning Chinese has given me a new respect for those who learn English.

    Goals. We plan on adopting from China. Due to some unforseen circumstances we don’t know when that will be but hopefully sooner than later. For the divinely inspired please pray this will happen!

    Enough for now. Time to spend time with my non-Chinese wife.
    Feel free to stop by my blog sometime.

Leave a Reply