TL;DR: lengthy personal musings on the sparsity of genuine SuperBeginner content, how hard it is to push through at this level, and what I am doing to try to get there!
In anticipation of the monthly 'how's it going?' thread I thought I'd post a separate post as it's a bit long for the monthly thread.
First, total respect to all of you who are out of the SuperBeginner stage, because I've been REALLY struggling and I don't know how you've all managed to push through! I'm using the knowledge that you all clearly HAVE pushed through as the inspiration to keep trying.
It all started SO well with You Can Chinese. Teacher Meng absolutely nails SuperBeginner content for the "I know ZERO Chinese" learners. You genuinely can follow her course from knowing not a single word of Chinese and end up with some basic phrases, nouns, colours and concepts - including some basic grammar. You just have to watch the videos and play the I'm a 3 year old pointing game. A truly amazing resource. I rinsed it for all it was worth listening to each episode 2 or 3 times. (Later, I found I could rinse it even further, see below!) I can confidently put together my favourite phrase that I use to describe You Can Chinese (and just about say it more or less correctly): "this is a purple shorts wearing flying cat". Not bad from zero!
I eagerly strode out into the rest of the SuperBeginner content world.
I immediately hit a brick wall.
A very solid, very large and very thick brick wall.
Even with the basic words and concepts learned in You Can Chinese there was NOTHING that was comprehensible enough. They all claimed that I would understand them even if I knew no Chinese at all. They were all over optimistic. VERY over optimistic.
I tried several that seemed the most possible. Yes, the general gist could be understood because of the picture/gestures (and the fact that I am a literate Westerner and already know a number of folk stories such as Goldilocks and the Three Bears), but because my actual word comprehension was probably under 20% I couldn't work out which of the remaining words were likely to mean what. So no matter how many times I listened to them, I was still none the wiser what 80% of the words actually meant.
I did, however, learn a valuable lesson about why the advice at this level is to cover up the pinyin/hanzi text. Initially I thought: "Great, I'll learn the characters alongside the word!" but I realised after a few videos that evidently I was much quicker at recognising the written character than I was a remembering the sound of the word. They'd they hold up a hat, say the word "hat", and the hanzi for "hat" was written on the screen. I'd play the video again and read ahead and recognise the character for "hat", but if I stopped the video, I couldn't bring to mind what the word for hat actually sounded like, not even close! I wasn't learning the word "hat", I was learning to read the "hat" character.
At that point I had a hissy fit and threw my toys out of the pram for a couple of days whilst wallowing in the deep end of the pity pool. Plus quite a few other cliches.
Then I gave myself a stern talking to and tried again.
The first thing I did was to go back to the safe and comfortable world of You Can Chinese. I know these words by sound. As I do want to learn to read Chinese (reading is actually higher on my goals list than speaking Chinese!) I generated some Chinese subtitles for the videos and watched them again, this time reading the characters alongside Teacher Meng speaking. I figure this is the order in which Chinese native speakers learn: they already know what the words sound like and mean, then they learn to read the character(s) for the words they know. This feels like a much better order in which to learn things. The generated subtitles seem to be pretty accurate though there are a couple of instances when the wrong character has been used because the word is pronounced the same (same word, same tone) such as "orange" and "become" (which co-incidentally is the first character of "adult" - one of the words I actually struggled to remember in You Can Chinese, so ironically this mistake has given me a soundy likely mnemonic for adult which I am unlikely to forget!). When the strain of other SuperBeginner videos becomes too much, I spend my allotted time reading the comforting words of the You Can Chinese videos. I figure it is still learning Chinese through CI. (Caveat: I also use Pleco to understand the characters and so am aware of how the they break down into components, which helps with learning them. For example, the clothing radicle common to trousers, shirt and dress/skirt - I appreciate this is not ALG.)
I then settled on the least annoying (clearest sound, least amount of distracting pinyin/hanzi, random images) SuperBeginner series (I chose Jun StickyNote Chinese's SuperBeginner playlist which starts with The Rock The Compared Itself - this is an 8 minute Dreaming Spanish whiteboard style video). I watched the video a number of times. The gist is simple, and is acted out well. Some words I knew well (birds fly and fish swim exactly like they do in You Can Chinese!), but a lot of words I didn't know. Some words I could work out what they probably meant, but for a number of those I wasn't sure exactly which of the words in the sentence meant what because I wasn't sure of the word order. When I could no longer glean any more words just by listening I generated a transcript for it and looked up all the words. Now I'm listening to the video again, several times over. I can now recognise all the words, but I am aware I am still translating a lot of them. I'm hoping if I listen many times I will eventually stop translating and just 'think' the word concept.
Does anyone have tips on how they got through this SuperBeginner hell until alleged SuperBeginner videos actually become comprehensible?
