When people ask me why I started to learn Chinese, I’m reminded of that moment in Dead Poets Society where Mr. Keating (played so expertly by Robin Williams) tells his students the purpose of language: “To woo women.”
Now, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it does have some kernel of truth. I’ve always wanted to be fluent in a second language, and during my last long stint as a single man, I found myself meeting a lot of women who spoke Chinese. I picked up a phrase here and there, learned a thing or two, and then… one fine day… I happened upon ChinesePod. The rest is history.
But now, a little over a year and a half later, I find that the sentences I try to build in my head come to a grammatical brick wall when I try to string together anything that involves more than one person. For example, “Did you go to the movies?” is easy enough. But when I try to say, “Did you go to the movies with your sister?”, I get a little befuddled. There’s definitely some confusion in regards to when I should use 和 and when I should use 一起. Know what I mean? How do I get more people to the party?
Another problem I’ve been having lately is the concept of “when.” It’s this whole 时候 (shihou) thing. I see it tacked onto other characters like 小 (xiao) to indicate a point in time (小时候 = when I was little), but I’m wondering if that could also be a predictive time thing. Like… 老时候。Does that mean “when I get old,” as opposed to “when I was small?”
And how do you use that 时候 thing in other cases, like…. “We can talk when I get back from lunch.”
Any and all advice is welcome. Point me to lessons, write some sample sentences… anything is good. Thanks!
And how are you folks doing out there? What are your stumbling blocks?
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Hey Frank..
For the past few days I’ve been transcribing an episode of a Chinese tv series that I downloaded. I’ve only transcribed about 7 minutes so far but it amounts to a huge amount of dialog. Also split the rmvb file into an mp3 to listen to in the car/at work… learning tons… fun stuff…
Wow. Color me impressed. That sounds like a TON of hard work. Good for you! Let me know how it goes, huh? Keep me posted!
My stumbling block hangs over from my first few days of learning Mandarin. Using the honoured method of “just listen and see if you can work out or guess what it means”, I found two words that had to mean “me” and “you”. Great, I was right. But I got them around the wrong way. It’s a good way of learning because what you work out for yourself sticks, as proven in this case. Now, a long time later, I still switch “me” and “you” in conversation, with embarrassing results, and as far as I can tell you always will.
AuntySue, I’ve actually done that on occasion but my imaginary Chinese friend didn’t seem to mind.
Would it be possible for writers to insert Pinyin when you write in chinese? Wǒ shí Jianada rén starting to learn Mandarin and find Pinyin easier to remember and write (with tone marks, not numbers) but don’t have the memory to remember the symbols (the loss of too many brain cells partying in my misguided youth has now returned to haunt me). I know this will skew my learning process but am willing to take the risk in exchange for immediate understanding of your discussions. Thanks,
Baolong (chinese name)
You should understand it’s easier type characters than pinyin as pinyin input system are pretty rare. You could always install an annotation plugin for reading characters. (ie. Hanzibar or ChinesePera-Kun).
Also speaking personally I have trouble remembering all the tones from memory but usually recognise the correct characters.