Ayup, someone sent me to that blog awhile ago. Informative and witty, and his posts about language are really... well, not fun (in that, it's the reality of a learning a new language) but definitely something that I think people sometimes need to hear. When you get right down to it, the only way to expand your vocabulary is by sheer memorization.
That was probably one of the worst parts about studying Mandarin, was the fact that the only way to get through was to simply memorize. But at the same time, it gave me even more of a distaste for the trend going through some schools of having kids "spell it out". That's how you end up with kids like -- well, I won't say who, but let's just say so much for public education -- who write things like "hopping" for "hoping", which isn't even accurate spelling-it-out. You just have to memorize.
This lack of memorization is also the reason that although I could understand a great deal when I was in France, thanks to sheer immersion, I couldn't actually say a great deal, comparatively. My vocabulary was just never that large, so I didn't have the words at my fingertips (tonguetip?). I could understand a word if I heard it, but the words that were second nature were actually only, I don't know, maybe a thousand at most... and most adult vocabularies in any language are easily ten times that. Pulling numbers off my head, but you get what I mean.
Unfortunately, the "watch and repeat" has been a miserable failure, because I can't put up with the Mainland/PRC insistence on dubbing EVERYTHING on television, even when the actors are native speakers. (I don't get it, I really don't.) And I prefer the storylines in Taiwanese dramas, anyway, but then I trip over the peculiar-to-my-Mainland-taught-ears Taiwanese accents. Either what little decent pronunciation I have is going to end up completely skewered, or I should just give up and try to get really, really good at reading characters on-screen, really fast. *sigh*
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Date: 19 Feb 2011 06:07 am (UTC)That was probably one of the worst parts about studying Mandarin, was the fact that the only way to get through was to simply memorize. But at the same time, it gave me even more of a distaste for the trend going through some schools of having kids "spell it out". That's how you end up with kids like -- well, I won't say who, but let's just say so much for public education -- who write things like "hopping" for "hoping", which isn't even accurate spelling-it-out. You just have to memorize.
This lack of memorization is also the reason that although I could understand a great deal when I was in France, thanks to sheer immersion, I couldn't actually say a great deal, comparatively. My vocabulary was just never that large, so I didn't have the words at my fingertips (tonguetip?). I could understand a word if I heard it, but the words that were second nature were actually only, I don't know, maybe a thousand at most... and most adult vocabularies in any language are easily ten times that. Pulling numbers off my head, but you get what I mean.
Unfortunately, the "watch and repeat" has been a miserable failure, because I can't put up with the Mainland/PRC insistence on dubbing EVERYTHING on television, even when the actors are native speakers. (I don't get it, I really don't.) And I prefer the storylines in Taiwanese dramas, anyway, but then I trip over the peculiar-to-my-Mainland-taught-ears Taiwanese accents. Either what little decent pronunciation I have is going to end up completely skewered, or I should just give up and try to get really, really good at reading characters on-screen, really fast. *sigh*