Hekx' Chinese

[Hekx]

I've been learning Chinese (Mandarin Chinese with simplified writing as is common in Mainland China).
I've started around October 2023 and have just finished the second "school year". Over this time, I've not even reached HSK1 yet (the first beginner level), so for me this is a very hard language. I would say I'm not particularly talented at learning languages - in school my language points were average - but I do love to do it and have learned multiple by now. Chinese is my first Asian language and it is very hard for someone who has, untill now, only learned germanic and francophonic languages. Not only is the vocabulary completely foreign, the writing is definitely quite hard as well. Only the grammar is very very easy.

So over this time I've been learning in multiple different ways. I'm gonna post some in this thread but for this first post, these two are definitely the most important:

1. Live group lessons
There are some evening classes for adults offered within reach of my home, but most of the more "classical" ones (one lesson every week for an entire school year, minus school holidays, with exams and tests) were not really reachable for me at the times they were offered, considering I am also working full time in a different town from where these classes were, and also I live in another different town. I used to be able to do this for Swedish, but at that time I was working in that big city where these lessons are, so I could go there after work.
Now there is also a much smaller class which is offered in the town I work at. This one only has 16 lessons a year, no tests, no exams. It's with a small group. While this is not as good as the full blown course I could subsribe to in the bigger city, this is definitely my nr. 1 learning resource.
Advantages
- regular learning with some "push" behind it to not postpone it - you go to the lesson or you miss it
- access to a real teacher you can ask questions to
- peers who are also learning with you and you can practice with, they're all cool people
- these lessons are really fun
Disadvantages:
- without the tests there is no incentive to still learn in between lessons if you have a busy shedule or don't feel like it
- it's really few lessons

2. Pleco
This is a chinese dictionary app.
The dictionary entries are fenomenal: there's different "dictionaries" with different ways of doing stuff, like one explains each chinese word with chinese words (like if you'd have a dictionary for your native language), one has example sentences, one just lists the translations very shortly, etc.
Each dictionary entry has: translations/explanations/example sentences + how to write this character (with stroke order, and you can lock it so you can write along on the screen without stuff moving around) + what other words do these characters appear in + what radicals is this character made of + audio with a male and female voice + etc. Also links to other entries.
There's also flashcards. For other learning I use anki, but for chinese I use pleco: the cards link directly to the dictionary, so you can view all that I just summed up, you can chose whether it shows you audio/character/pinyin/translation and which one you need to provide, whether you need to type it out or just say "correct/incorrect" like anki does, etc etc.
The app also has other functionalities like it can recognise writing from your camera and there's some actual books in there, but I don't use that as much.

It's just a really really awesome app, and it's totally free. You can also buy some upgrade packs, which includes books and premade flashcard sets and some more dictionaries - and these are one time buy, no subscription, so I obviously bought one of those (I really like the app, they may have my money).


There's other stuff I do to learn but the above are definitely my two main learning resources at the moment.

[Hekx]

Tones
Everyone has probably heard about Chinese tones and how important they are for pronouciation.
As someone who has never learned a tonal language before, and with my complete lack of any musical skills, this is a very hard part of the language for me. I'm not alone in this and there are tons of YouTube videos who try to teach tones. I was watching a lot of those and then one of them said something really smart: instead of practicing speaking the tones (which is hard if you don't have a native who wants to correct you nearby), try to practice listening. So I did the following:

Listening
I wrote a script to download all the syllabes in all the tones audio files from https://yoyochinese.com/chinese-learnin ... hart-table , save them to a folder and generate a spectrograph for each audio file. Then I took an anki plugin which makes cards from multimedia files in a folder and tweaked that code a bit to generate anki cards for me like I wanted them:
Front of the card is an audio file, back is the syllabe+ tone and the visual spectrograph.
Then I just started practicing the anki cards. I tried to identify which tone I heard and considered a card correct if the tone was right. I did not try to recognise the syllables, that was just not my focus at the time.
At the start this went horrible and if I had anything right it was just luck, but after a few weeks of daily practice I got them pretty much all correct. And I do feel that I'm now better able to pronounce them as well, just by being able to understand what each tone is and how it sounds.

Speaking
I also practiced speaking for a bit. Because I did not have a live teacher to correct me as often as I wanted to practice, I downloaded a singing app which shows you what tone you're singing at (or speaking at) via a spectrograph. This is also why I made spectrographs for all the anki cards: I now know how it is supposed to look like for each tone and can use the app to see if my pronunciation of the tones is correct.
The app is vocalpitch monitor but it was just the first one I found who did what I wanted. I could not say it's the best one, there might be better ones, but this one worked for me so no need to go look further.

I'm definitely not where I'd like to be with respect to tones, but at least with these two learning methods I feel like I have a bit of a grasp on it. Before this I was completely tonelost

[Talvieno]

That's actually very clever. The intonation is a difficult hurdle and it's hard to imagine trying to get past it without a native speaker. Your setup fixes that problem neatly.

I remember when my dad was learning German he had something vaguely similar, but this was back around 1999-2001. He would speak and it would show his spectrograph vs a native speaker's (but only, as far as I know, for single words). That image always deeply fascinated me. I have no idea what software he was using, but I've always wondered.

[Hekx]

I know one person who developed software like that as a master thesis or phd thesis in the 90s. The intention in that case was to help deaf or hard of hearing people to learn to speak - they would have visual feedback whether the sounds they made resembled what was intended. In that case it was not just spectrographs but I don't know the details of how it worked.

[Hekx]

Some other things I do to practice:

• listen to a prerecorded chinese audio file with one little earbud on repeat on my way to work. I go by bike, one earbud means I can still hear traffic perfectly fine and on repeat means I don't have to listen attentively when traffic requires more, because it will return anyway.
• practice saying sentences with a fellow learner from the chinese course, we call once per week
• do the AI character story which Tal described in the French post, it's lots of fun!
• write characters by hand -> currently following a book teaching 200 of the most common ones, which also has little example texts to practice reading