Welcome To All!
Welcome you all to my 2nd blog. Well, actually it's really my 3rd blog (but I trashed the very first one I did).
What is this blog going to be about?
Well, I'm currently "attempting" to learn Mandarin by immersing myself to it's entertainment scene through music, movies, and TV series. I also take whatever extra time and put it into learning to read the traditional Chinese language.
What I'll post will be things such as Mandarin music CD reviews, my thoughts about certain Chinese movies and what I thought about certain drama serials. But mostly, it'll contain my random thoughts or what I've been doing to learn the language.
I never realized the power blogging can have (and in my trader's blog, it has actually accelerated my learning). And so, what better motivation to learn something than to blog your progress.
I don't really care if anyone out there will read this - but just knowing there is a possibility that someone out there *might* be reading this is motivation enough.
5 comments:
yo jc
i'm chinese BUT (there's always a catch, huh) ...
... i don't speak mandarin well.
sigh. anyway, the story's this: i'm born into a mandarin-speaking family, but was sent to a non-chinese school (although the nearest school to my home is a chinese school, around a few hundred yards away). come to think of it, i've never really asked my parents why, probably because they wanted a better exposure for me, i guess.
so here i am, someone who speaks english much better than his own mother tongue. i still converse with my family in mandarin - but my vocabulary's so very limited; bordering on the pathetic, i would say.
i've tried learning other languages, but it all ended up nowhere because every time a plateau is reached in any of the languages i try to learn, i will somehow reflect on how i haven't even mastered my own mother tongue, and end up giving it all up altogether.
you can say that learning mandarin is some sort of a glass ceiling i've created for myself - some sort of baggage that i'll need to deal with first before mastering other languages.
i wish u all the best, and i hope i can join u soon (in learning mandarin well), although "soon" is a little too early to be used, since learning languages is nowhere near my priority right now.
Ryuu,
Thanks for your comments and thanks for visiting!
Yea - I'm in a similar situation. My parents can speak Cantonese and Mandarin (but mostly Cantonese), however I mostly respond in English.
Finding time to learn a new language is very difficult - especially when you have many other things going on in our lives. I've tried going to classes to learn Mandarin, but found this to feel like work. And so, the best way that I found to learn is by osmosis - surround myself in a Mandarin environment as much as I can and hopefully I can pick up a few words. This seems to be working, though lately I haven't put in enough time into learning (or should I say, watching or listening) Mandarin.
I am hoping with time I can at least understand and speak a little and when I have children, I can at least try to converse with them.
I wish you all the best in your trading AND in your goal of soon learning the language!
you might like this. got this off maoxian's delicious
http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
Ryuu,
Thanks for the link! I remember when I was sent to Chinese school when I was younger, I kept thinking the same thing - that Chinese is so difficult because there wasn't any rhyme or reason behind the different characters that represent each word and I also though that this kind of language structure is probably the most unfriendly when it come to learning the language.
I will keep trying and I'll try to pick up as much as I can (whenever I'm not trading of course!)
actually i beg to differ. i recall from somewhere that chinese characters have their origins, and there's some kind of history for each word, i.e. if you look at the character for "ren2" (people), it actually looks like a human!
or the character "tian2" (paddy field or something), it's a square with 4 squares inside, which actually looks like paddy fields.
http://yoshi.txt-nifty.com/photo/paddy-field-thumb.jpg
and reading the current book i'm reading - "how to study in college" (i already have a degree but am still interested in furthering my studies), and i've just realized that certain english words have their own history too - i.e. the word tantalize comes from the legend of tantalus (you can wikipedia it), etc. interesting...
anyway, back to the chinese characters, you may want to look into their origins! it may help in your learning :)
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