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meichenxi · 3 years

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Hey, could I ask you how you do shadowing? Like the different ways you do it? You mentioned in your tag that shadowing is good and I'd love to hear how you do it! I do not attempt shadowing much so I don't really know what helps, etc. ToT (my studyblr is rigelmejo)

Hellooo! Thank you for the interesting question!

Tbh I think I do it fairly basically - I don’t use any particularly fancy software, but software like Language Learning with Netflix has certainly made it easier. There’s a whole video on how to get the most of it here: [on mobile, link didn't work - How to study Chinese with Netflix! by Chinese Zero To Hero] (I’d recommend checking out all of their videos actually, they’ve done a bunch of livestreams recently and they place a lot of emphasis on shadowing + the course they are trying to sell you is…actually phenomenally good)

(Also, I have to preface this by saying that I have been very lucky in terms of pronunciation: I learnt about 80% of my current vocabulary by ear without characters or pinyin. I have been in China for eight months in total, and while I didn’t speak Chinese for all of that, I was constantly soaking in info on natural sentence intonation. I still often don’t know officially what the tone of a vocabulary item is, especially if it changes tone like 教, 为 or 相, but I don’t get yelled at so I have definitely internalised a lot of those changes. I definitely would have more trouble with this if I hadn’t had that experience - my other areas are waaaay weaker because of this though- my reading SUCKS lmao and I can literally handwrite about ten characters)

Anyway. How I shadow:

1) Quite simply by playing the line, and repeating it with all the emotion it has!! I usually use Netflix or Viki for this. I try to do it as fast as possible, and if I can’t do the whole thing, I ‘chunk’ it: if I were doing the sentence 我们还不知道他会不会来, I would start from the end with 他会不会来, then 不知道他会不会来, and then the whole sentence. Notice that this isn’t breaking it down into words or even grammatical phrases, but intonational phrases: it would be perfectly sensible to just do 会不会来 without the 他 but realistically, since this is a question, it’s likely that a strong stress will be placed on the first 会, and you wouldn’t be able to replicate that without also included the more weakly stressed syllable before.

2) I locate (intentionally or subconsciously) the main locus of stress within the sentence, and I focus on that accordingly. Tones may become less extreme if they are not stressed, and may become more exaggerated if stressed. This is always a good exercise. I accompany this with physical actions - I throw my hands down, I sigh, I groan!

3) I put away the text, and don’t look at the tones or even my computer screen - more on this below.

4) Finally, when I think I’ve got it reasonably accurate, I’ll record them speaking the line into my phone with an appropriate pause for copying and play it back to myself at various points throughout the day.

5) I then go and find other words with the same tone contour to slot in, and copy it again. After that, I find words that are slightly different tonally and pop them in too.

6) I finally do fun things like hold a conversation with myself. This can be really simple phrases imbued with some kind of emotion - 这个女子到底是谁呀？为什么不认识我？应该是新手吧。You can do this either really informally, or very formally, or both - trying to speak in the latter way is very fun! So then it’d be idk something more like: 那位姑娘是何人，来自何处？This is fun because you can really slow down your speech and sound as elegant as you like!! (this will sound stilted if you do it for modern speech, but it’s a very fun exercise)

Choosing your media!!

1) Don’t use donghuas. Seriously. The voice actors usually speak at a ridiculous pace and not with the same range of ‘normal’ intonation

2) Your Chinese is definitely good enough to recognise when anyone is quoting poetry or speaking in a paricularly sexy literary way so, uh…don’t do that. That rules dramas like Nirvana in Fire OUT.

3) Modern dramas and reality TV shows CAN be great, but they can also be quite intimidatingly quick and almost too mushy at times. I’d recommend informal speech in guzhuang dramas more, because they have professional voice actors and extensive sound editing, meaning that although it might be fast and the vocabulary harder, it’s actually much more accessible and easier to copy. You don’t want to be stuck with the awfulness of 50% failed foreigner and 50% 12 year old boy who can’t enunciate properly!!

4) CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON WISELY. I try to find characters that speak in a dramatic, whiny or childish way. This is so important! There’s literally no use copying Lan Wangji unless you want to be able to have that particular cadence and tone of voice you get reciting poetry. Childish/whiny/dramatic characters on the other hand stress some words very strongly, and rush others together - this is great for hearing what actual real speech sounds like. Whininess wins. In The Untamed, characters like Wei Wuxian (not yllz!wwx but just…regular wwx), 一问三不知 Nie Huaisang, Jin Ling, and Jingyi are all great. Also Jiggy, who is just very extra constantly and speaks much slower as well, which really helps. In SHL characters like Gu Xiang are good.

5) CHOOSE YOUR VOICE WISELY! If you are really aiming to copy them 100% (which you should try at least sometimes), you want somebody with your pitch range to sound normal. I have a sort of party trick in Chinese that because I’ve spent so much time listening to women in guzhuang dramas I can change my voice and sound like a) a scheming concubine with honeyed words, or b) the voice of the Beijing metro. My teacher found it hysterically funny. But it’s not my natural voice, and if I speak like that for too long it hurts. The women usually are too high for me, and the big burly manly men too low - so I’d recommend finding a man with a higher voice, or an older woman (like some of the female characters in Nirvana in Fire). Again, sorry that this is mostly the Untamed (I’m just most familiar with it) but the voice actors for Wei Wuxian and some of the juniors (+jiggy) has a higher voice. Likewise Chengling in Word of Honour.

On intonation in general:

- The thing is that whilst shadowing is useful it requires prior ability in a whole bunch of other skills that you can train - it relies on your ability to accurately mimic pitch, emotion and other contrasts. Training this in ANY language, including your native one, will help your ability to do this in Chinese - so I’d recommend spending a fair amount of time practicing shadowing (or speaking just after somebody whilst listening to a string of text, like monolingual simultaneous interpreting) in your native language too. Any training copying accents or mimicking other people is going to similarly help, regardless of the language.

So, with that in mind, further tips:

1) Hum / try to copy the intonation without any words. What this does is force you to pay attention to what the intonation actually is, versus what you may think it should be.

2) Don’t look at the text! Do! Not! Look! At! The! Text! If you look at the characters or pinyin you’re telling yourself ‘ok this is a third tone here’ etc, but you want to override the part of your brain that has gotten into bad habits and is supremely self-confident in how you’re pronouncing the third tone, and actually just go straight back to mimicking.

3) Don’t be afraid to do it with vocabulary that is way beyond your level. Actually, I find this can sometimes be helpful, because you don’t have a prior idea about how a particular tone pair should be useful - and you don’t know which tone you should be producing.

4) Learn vocabulary by ear - listen to a vocab podcast or even make one yourself (I often do this; I record my daily Anki and listen back to it through headphones copying throughout the day - if you’re not confident in your pronunciation you can get Google Translate to do it). Similarly, pick unknown vocabulary out of a longer segment and remember it, trying to internalise the tones instead of figuring out which tone it is.

5) Find emotional sentences, and copy them with emotion. This is SO CRUCIAL!!! We remember things when we relate to them, and when we imbue them with emotion - and it also helps in hearing exactly how an angry second tone sounds, for instance.

6) When you’re copying, look up, and imagine you are having an actual conversation. Carry yourself with conviction and poise!! Really try to whine like wwx or slime like jgy. After a couple of turns copying them, try to turn off the audio and keep delivering it in the same manner.

7) Swap individual words out. Once you have a line properly figured out, swap a word or two that has a different tone pair, and focus on delivering it with the same pattern of stress.

8) Finally, practice doing this in your native language too!! It’s a skill that we don’t use often, and it can be trained. Some people are terrible at it at first go even in their native language, but you can work on it!

About intonation in general:

1) I think a lot of pronunciation problems with people sounding unnatural or stiff ultimately come down to a fundamental misunderstanding of what intonation looks like across different languages. In English we mark it by pitch: and we are so used to the rhetoric that Chinese has ‘tone’ and not ‘intonation’ that we try and focus on blindly copying every single word textbook perfect without listening to how it actually sounds.

2) Chinese does have intonation!!! Except that, unlike English, when you stress a word, the pitch doesn’t change, but the tone contour is exaggerated - basically the only time you will ever hear a full third tone is in isolated or very exaggerated speech. If you have a Chinese friend, get them to record a sentence like the English ‘I didn’t ask her to steal his rucksack’, and put stress on the different elements of it - I didn’t ask, I didn’t ask, I didn’t ask, and so on. Notice and copy how the tones change. When shadowing, you should always be paying attention to where the stress is in the sentence: when you speak by yourself, practicing saying a sentence neutrally, and then with stress on one component, the next, and so on. If it feels unnatural, it’s because you might not have practicised like this before - it’ll get better!

Hope that’s somewhat helpful / interesting!

- 梅晨曦

#chinese #chinese langblr #langblr #chinese studyblr #studyblr #learn chinese #study chinese #chinese vocab #lingblr #askies

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mejomonster · 2 years

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Hi babes

I have an art blog over at @softcorevulcan and a langblr over at @rigelmejo if you ever hear me mentioning drawing or studying languages and ur wondering where I actually post that stuff

#rant #also my ao3 is softcorevulcan too. but i list that in my profile info #softcorevulcan is basically my username for all thw accounts where i primarily post my creative stuff #except the odd graphic which i put on mejomonster jsjsj #but yeah i dont mention rigelmejo much cause its NOT aesthetic or organized ok #its truly just a study processes and resource journal basically #but i like chatting with anyone else studying and sharing ideas!!

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mejomonster · 7 months

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#psst cheng yi if u follow me u should go to rigelmejo and then drop tips on how to language learn #just. u know. putting it out thete

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mejomonster · 1 year

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How did you learn Chinese, like did you use a specific program like Duolingo or did you take classes? How hard was it to read Priest's novels with where you were at in your language learning journey? I want to get back into learning (been wanting to since I watched The Untamed,) but I gave up about 8 months ago 😭

Hey ovo)/ so uh. That's a big question. I have a studyblr @rigelmejo so if you really want the full on journey lol its on there, steps i took and what I studied and progress and study tools I found and used and stuff I've linked for people.

For the shortest tip I can give you? Would be to check out the Heavenly Path site if you're interested in learning to read novels. You'll need to figure out your own way to study about 1000 common hanzi, basic grammar, and basic pronunciation (I link resources on rigelmejo), but after that point the Heavenly Path site has reading resources for graded reading, easier kids novels, easier manhua, webnovels by difficulty level, all the way up! So you can at that point just follow their recommendations and use reading tools they link (like Pleco and Readibu apps which I suggest you download asap - they include tools where you can click a chinese word when reading for translation and audio pronunciation and pinyin). So yeah at 1000 hanzi, just start reading from their suggestions! (Also consider downloading Bilibili Comics app as it has English and Chinese free manhua, so you can start reading manhua earlier, and youtube/viki.com learn mode and Any platforms with dual english/chinese subs and start trying to look up 1 word every 5 minutes or more as curious and practicing reading the chinese words in subs you've learned). I suggest you check out all pages on the Heavenly site, they link a ton of resources.

The short-ish version of what I did the first year I studied chinese? I fumbled a lot, read through an entire grammar guide summary in a few weeks here http://chinese-grammar.com/, watched some YouTube tone videos and went through a pronunciation guide here https://www.dong-chinese.com/learn/sounds/pinyin which took a week or two and I'd do it every few months, read through the book Learning Chinese Characters: (HSK Levels 1-3) A Revolutionary New Way to Learn the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters by Tuttle publishing in about 2 months (I really liked their mnemonics to help me remember hanzi), started Ben Whatley memrise decks 1000 Chinese common words and 2000 common words (took about 2 weeks to finish one then I took a few months break then studied the other 1000, mainly focusing on studying new words and not reviewing until the last week if I had time - in retrospect I think learners would do better with the Chinese Spoonfed Anki deck but the memrise courses I used worked fine for me). I was watching cdramas as usual most weeks, English subs with the Chinese hardsubs on the video file like most youtube cdramas, with Google Translate app on my phone to look up a word every several minutes as curious. Once I was 3ish months in and learning the memrise Ben Whatley 2000 common chinese words, I read some Mandarin Companion graded readers in Pleco app then some more 300-600 word graded readers in Pleco. That gets me to like month 6ish. Then I started reading manhua and looking up words in pleco or Google translate when I needed to in order to grasp main idea overall (or was curious about a particular word). Kept reading graded readers in pleco.

Around month 8 I tried 天涯客 and 镇魂, both brutally hard. I was reading in Pleco in the Clipboard Reader (from websites) or the Reader tool (i bought it for like $20 dollars along with handwriting recognition, OCR, and expanded dictionaries). Mandarinspot.com has a good reading tool too that can add pinyin if you need it, and Readibu in some ways i prefer to Pleco depending on your particular reading needs on a given day. Tried a few easier webnovels, tried a pingxie fanfic 寒舍 which was hard but easier than priest novels (love that fanfic). I kept bouncing between webnovels then around month 10 天涯客 novels took about 1.5 hours to read through a chapter. At that point I brute force tried to read it or 寒舍 daily with 1 chapter a day, got 28 chapters in before i burned out with 天涯客 and 60ish chapters into 寒舍. It was about a year in. I cram studied 500 hanzi in some common hanzi deck with mnemonics I found on anki over a month, hoping if I improved vocab I'd read easier. I also was gradually trying to watch more cdrama with only chinese subs, around month 6 I finally watched Granting You a Dreamlike life full episodes with no eng subs (about 5-10 word lookups an episode), watched 15ish eps, then after that shows got less daunting to try watching.

A little over a year in Word of Honor came out and I watched it in chinese first because I was too impatient for eng subs. After that went decently I got braver about reading, tried Listening Reading Method (see @rigelmejo for those experiments), more stuff etc like extensive reading with no word lookups.

In retrospect I WISH I'd started with easier novels Heavenly Path recommended. However on the other hand? I've seen people who read their first cnovel with Pleco as early as 3-6 months in which blows my mind. So me picking hard novels to start isn't the Hardest thing in comparison lol. This past year (so at start of year 3 studying lol) I actually read like 10 things on Heavenly Paths easier recommendations and it helped immensely in filling in gaps in vocab and reading fluidity I had. So if you do pick a priest novel as your first novel and manage to chug through it without giving up, be aware "easier" novels may still have stuff you can learn later so don't rule them out as reading materials later on.

I've also seen people do literally no study except maybe some curious Google searches on hanzi or grammar or pronunciation, then brute force read novels in Readibu until they improved. A brutal way to do it but possible. (I really recommend at minimum learning hanzi are made of radicals though as it makes recognizing and remembering them so much easier).

I think the best thing I did for learning to read was just being Brave and Trying to read regularly. And it gradually got less hard.

#replies #ask #chinese #do not use duolingo to learn chinese im sorry. i mean u can but im begging u do something else Too #duolingo is paced so Slowly. to make progress at a pace you may prefer #i really recommend almost Anything else at a decent pace. most popular textbooks go at decent pace #hell even brute force just opening novels in Readibu or Pleco and slowly reading word by word to learn #is faster

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mejomonster · 11 months

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Okay so 1 I went on about the free Smart Books app on my studyblr @rigelmejo which is what app I'm reading on. (And if you're a learner I recommend it because it's target language/English optional parallel translation, click translation, TTS, and also has word statistics on book length and unique word count and how many words I'm reading per minute and how frequently I'm looking up words... which for Guardian is about 150 wpm read and unknown words about every 112 words).

Anyway I love Guo Changcheng SO MUCH. I love his description as this lanky anxious emo college graduate who scraped by (who's going to become such a sweet heroic guy ;-; ) who reminds Zhao yunlan of a maiden sold into slavery or imprisoned by a general lmao

#guardian #lb #rant #also? it says a lot lmao how much my chinese vocabulary is specifically tailored to priests writing word choice #with guardjan i genuinely do have 98% reading comprehension or better.#and liu yao and other priest novels are easier to read #but im also reading 坏小孩 which has way LESS unique words but im looking up a word every 40 words because i do NOT know the authors vocabulary

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mejomonster · 2 years

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While I am a shipper of pingxie because let's face it idk how one could go into The Lost Tomb drama blind and not think it was a bl then be shocked to discover it wasn't meant to be (although on thorough mental debate I've decided there's at least a 20% chance the show mistakenly thought "Oh I'll just speed up iron triangle intimacy? How? Uh. How about romance action tropes for wu xie/Zhang qiling and buddy cop action tropes for wu xie/pangzi" and it Worked well enough for speeding up the dynamics for the sake of that drama compared to book, but it also you know... meant they used usually-romantic tropes to speed up pingxie (which reads bl as all hell) and while the buddy-cop tropes aren't strictly romantically coded a lot of shippers may optimistically read it romantically. Hence you get a very shippy feeling initial drama.

Then by the time ANY other drama rolls out, the ship dynamics got cranked up More and after The Lost Tomb I no longer think it was accidental. The Lost Tomb 2 having Xiaoge catch Wu Xie in his arms bridal style in a suit IS romantic trope to the max (I could name more scenes but that alone makes my point), Ultimate Note went absolute ham on shippy vibes (heihua pingxie are in the ost lyrics which would make my point enough, also it getting a scene cut particularly for being too overtly pingxie Wu Xie likes men in comparison to Pangzi liking Yun Cai). The Lost Tomb Reboot and other shows set later don't necessarily hammer it as hard (whereas TLT2 makers absolutely were hammering pingxie for some reason?) But by then npss has name dropped ships in interviews so he'd been more aware of shippy moments purposely in shows by then (or at least more aware of that potential interpretation).

Back to the point sorry. My POINT is while the shows made me ship it about as inevitably as Xena Warrior Princess makes shipping Xena/Gabrielle almost inevitable, I'm reading these books wondering how the actual source books Actually Feel.

Based on fan reactions I'm assuming I'm in for an eventual dynamic that feels quite like kirk/spock, but who knows. Readers know! I don't! Not yet lol! So I'm very excited to find out what the dynamics of all characters are more like in the books (like is heihua a big thing? Why is it a big thing? Are they just a team in the books a lot?? Is Wen Jin in the books more, I Hope?). And more excited to find out book characterizations, because I know they declawed/defanged Wu Xie significantly in some of the shows, so i am eager to see what they're more like (a ning is the woman of my dreams so far so good to see ToT she's what I thought she'd be so far lol).

But yeah. While I might put my gush over dynamics goggles on at times when I'm commenting, I am curious how the actual book dynamics feel. Versus the shows which I think definitely 1. Softened characterizations 2. Sped up iron triangle dynamics (and possibly other dynamics).

(For confused followers this is about my dmbj novels lb on @rigelmejo ToT)

#dmbj novels #lb

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the-old-book-town · 2 years

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@rigelmejo

Our reblog chain was getting a little long, and I wanted to talk about yamato kotoba anyways, so I jumped to this blog!

For the examples you mentioned, 海 (umi) and 村 (mura), these pronunciations are examples of yamato kotoba or native Japanese words that meant sea (umi) and village (mura) long before kanji was imported to Japan.

There was an old textbook on Japanese linguistics I read a bit of a long time ago that explained the history of adopting the Chinese writing system. Of course, the Japanese language existed before it adopted a written system. The scholars of the time all learned classical Chinese to read the Buddhist texts, and they decided to apply the Chinese writing system to Japanese. There were two ways they could go about this:

1) Take a native Japanese word (umi) and find the hanzi that corresponds to its meaning: 海. This is now reflected in the kun-readings. It’s not linked to pronunciation. And because verbs and adjectives work differently for the two languages, they later developed hiragana to represent the conjugation of the verb/adjective. That’s why 食べる (taberu) only has the kanji representing the first syllable (ta): because it’s the only part of this verb that is the stem. The rest of it (-beru) changes depending on tense, politeness, etc. (食べます, 食べない).

2) Take the hanzi and import it with its pronunciation to represent words or concepts that didn’t exist in the Japanese language; to this day, words are imported and adapted to Japanese: スタバる (sutabaru) is a loan-word verb meaning “to go to starbucks”.

Back in the day, they decided to take the hanzi and its original pronunciation (which, to note, was CLASSICAL Chinese lol) and incorporated it into their language. The clearest example of this, and how the pronunciation got altered by 1) making it fit the Japanese phonemes and 2) the passage of time, are the numbers: ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, etc. These aren’t native Japanese words for the numbers (they DID have their own way of counting of course; if you’ve ever heard ‘hitotsu’, ‘futatsu’, etc. those are the native counting words).

These pronunciations became the on-readings, and they don’t really resemble Chinese anymore (and in some cases resemble Cantonese a little more than Mandarin), but that’s also because Chinese has changed drastically over the centuries. (for example, Cantonese “two” sounds like “yi” which is close to “ni”...but not the Mandarin “er”)

And as for why they didn’t go Korea’s route and just use hiragana...They started off writing everything in kanji, which was a nightmare and difficult to read because some kanji were used for their meaning, others used for their pronunciation (in Chinese...which meant you needed to know Chinese to read Japanese...talk about a headache). They developed hiragana sometime later, and since then have just stuck to the kanji+hiragana system because...well, I at least find it a much more elegant way to read Japanese. It gives a clear delineation between words (since Japanese doesn’t use spaces like English), and I think it helps reading speed as well since you partially rely on image recognition to read it. And that’s a whole conversation for another day haha, but the fact is that Japan has stuck to it and is unlikely to change.

Now, I DO NOT remember where I read this history originally...I’ll try to find it, but no promises! It’s been years since I’ve read it, but it was archived by a university (might be Oxford University Press).

#japanese language history time

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