#in a regular way. and I don’t practice output mucj so I know I’m not drilling correct form enough to be reliable

[rigelmejo]

Happy happy news!!

My chinese was understandable!

I still have no idea how many tones I butchered, or grammar things I totally said wrong, but my chinese just fucking being understood as I spoke sentences in real time is a fucking miracle!!

Sorry ahem ToT ok ok I’ll calm down a little!

Was talking to a language partner. Their English is great in my opinion. Speaking wise not any noticeable grammar errors that make it hard to follow, biggest issue just forgetting the word they wanna say - a problem ppl have in ones native language. So like really good! Their harder thing is listening, which I relate to as it’s my harder thing. Well eventually I got brave enough to talk in chinese and so that meant grammar on the fly and words on the fly. And I just tried not to even think about tones unless it’s a new word I’m being told, just to see if I’d say the right tones if I just spoke from my head on instinct. Cause I paused too fucking much to think long about grammar or which tones ToT

Anyway Wooh! My sentences were understood. They said my main issue was just not knowing the word to say in the moment, just like them. They said I seemed to have the issues they do - and I was understandable. They also confirmed to me that shadowing Might be a good plan for improving tones in sentences (you know like sentence tone sandhi changes etc). They said when they improved their standard mandarin to be like Peking accent for a speech competition, they picked an actor in a drama and tried to speak like them/repeat after them/imitate them. So it did work. And for English they did that too with characters from game of thrones and The Dark Knight, which is why they said they’ve still got a bit of British pronunciation - which worked tbh since I could hear what they must’ve used to do. And their English pronunciation I think is really good - so it definitely worked. So im hopeful if I do what they did and shadow more, it will help me too.

But dudes you truly have no idea how thrilled I am right now!! ToT this was basically a live test of me trying to do grammatically even remotely understandable shit in real time! Sentences in real time! Like usually I write which gives me time to think about grammar and look up unknown words. Or in rare cases usually id record myself saying something, so again I’d have time to think of the tones ahead of time and the grammar.

This was truly my first time just winging it trying not to think too much about speaking (I still tried to think of the words - cause my active vocabulary is reallyyyyy weak, but I didn’t try to think about tone or tone changes or grammar). So it was important to me to find out if me winging it could even be comprehensible. Cause obviously if I screw up tones too brutally I’d be incomprehensible, or if I screwed up grammar too brutally (since if my tones are wrong then decent grammar could help someone at least have a chance at guessing the word I meant), then another person just would not be able to follow wtf I’m talking about.

And I know, because about 5-8 months into learning I also tried speaking - my grammar was so bad my questions in chinese weren’t understood, my tones were so bad sometimes my words weren’t understood. (I’m talkin some basic ass screw ups though like back then I couldn’t do 1st tone correctly which I imagine made listening to me way more difficult). Now I’m almost 2 years into studying so just to speak basically without prep and be understood is a big milestone for me.

I learned 声调 means tone - I was trying to explain in chinese I mess up tones and said 声点 just fucking guessing what word might get my point across lol. And learned 粤语 (yue4yu3) means Cantonese. Anyway kudos to my (weak) active vocab cause it’s weak as all heck (like I couldn’t remember “tell” or use - 告诉 用 - until I talked around the point for a minute lol). Cause even weak at least it came to me eventually/I could kind of talk around it.

I was very lucky though as for the convo they mostly talked in English back so I knew if I was understood or not, and could tell what they were saying. They only said a bit in Chinese and it was helping me find the right word or letting me know part of what I said wasn’t clear so I could re-say it. And those kinds of sentences I can easily understand. I imagine in an actual 2 way chinese Convo I would do a lot more asking “这个词在英文是什么？” (and 95% guessing rn that sentence is grammatically incorrect but u know - asking x is what in English? Because I’d recognize less words ;-; )

Anyway. Like I said, I’m sure my tones were a hot mess. I didn’t listen to myself; but I’m fairly sure if nothing else my tones were less Clear than theirs when they spoke (which is an issue even if they’re sometimes correct). I’m sure my grammar had at least some issues (if not a lot). But it was just very cool to be simply understood. Because in the past I have not been able to maintain my own communication in chinese - I was too incomprehensible to make any points. So to just be understandable as I said things and asked about topics was really cool to me.