Okay, here we go! Onto my 4th posting. The title in Chinese basically states that "I need to practice my Chinese everyday" or "Every day I need to practice my Chinese".
If you are serious about learning Chinese, then you REALLY NEED to take this to heart!
I'm finding that if I don't practice my writing everyday, I forget it quite easily. Part of the reason is that my whole day is surrounded with English, except at night when I want the Chinese News or any of the Chinese dramas.
I bought the Rosetta Stone in Mandarin, but have only used it once since I need to physically sit down with in on my netbook. If it was available on the iPad, it would be a little more convenient. I hope to get back on track with that soon.
But I truly believe with Chinese or any language is that, "If you don't use it, you lose it!". You don't lose all of it, but certain components of it. Every time I stop and resume my Chinese studies, it's a little rusty at first, but it seems to improve as well. But I think if I were to continue studying a little bit each day, it would progressively get better and better without having to relapse. Chinese is one of those languages where sometimes you just have to memorize it for what it is. Just because. And that's all I can say.
I've recently started to learn more about parts of words and their meanings and how they create words and their meanings. Sometimes I feel like it's similar to learning Greek and Latin roots. Prefixes and Suffixes. Once you learn those, you can usually decipher a word. (But there are some words that don't follow that, it is what it is. Have you ever watched the National Spelling Bee Competition? Some if not most of those words are really hard! But usually you will see each contestant ask for the word origin. By doing so, they can figure out a spelling pattern).
Okay, back to practicing every day. Over time, I have noticed that some of my friends can understand their native language, but can no longer speak it. This was always puzzling to me. But I came to realize that if you didn't continue to speak a language, your body forgets. It's like, "How do I make that sound?" of "How do I say that word?". I was lucky enough that my grandma had no choice but to speak her native language since she didn't speak much English. Even though it's been less that a year since she's passed away, I wonder if I will lose some of my Taishanese because I am not speaking it everyday. I know when I went up to San Francisco Chinatown back in February, I could still understand and speak it.
So writing in Chinese everyday seems to help things stick better. Why? Well when you are writing, you are in a sense reading it silently/subconsciously to make sure it make sense or sounds right. By writing, you are remembering how the word looks, how to write it correctly, and how the word is used.
My ultimate goal would to be able to read a Chinese Newspaper one day. At the current moment, I can read the date and parts of headlines...
Since my last post was about PinYin, here are two links that are from a Children's Chinese Newspaper that has Traditional Chinese text and Pinyin right above it. So if you can read the Pinyin and have a general understanding of Chinese words and vocabulary, then you can figure out the meaning. It took a little adjustment, but I got the gist of it. Then I decided to re-read it for more practice. I think writing it out would be even more beneficial.
If you want, you can always print it up and take with you to practice your reading.
http://blog.huayuworld.org/gallery/8542/pdf1.pdf
*The title in Chinese translates to: Why do I want to learn Chinese now? Referring to a young adult like me who learned some when they were younger, but not enough to really get anywhere with it.
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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MLN002-520.pdf
*This is an 8 page pdf that was created by the Mandarin Learning Newspaper. Too bad they are no longer in print. Otherwise I would have subscribed! But this is a great resource to learn more vocabulary instead of just the basic repetition exercises of "How are you?" (你好嗎?) and what not. It's still good practice as kids learn through repetition and patterns as well. Just think how preschoolers and young children learn through songs and stories with a pattern. =)
(P.S. If you want to print this up, make sure you have it "fit to page", otherwise the borders will be cut off!).
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http://blog.huayuworld.org/MLNUSA
*This is the main website of the publications above. Feel free to search the site for other things to read in Chinese. I tried e-mailing them for more information, but it seems like it doesn't work. If anyone has any updated information about that site, please let me know!
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