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Because of the uni work I did, my reading and writing skills of characters is way better than my ability to listen and talk.
I practise all the characters on the ‘new’ and ‘all’ sheets. Even the ones I have previously learnt, I needed to revise.
For the first few hundred lessons, I used to take dictation from each of the CLO dialogues. Back then, I felt I hadn’t finished a lesson until I could write it out from the audio. I loved doing that, it was a great way to make sure I hadn’t missed a thing in the lesson. However, it takes a lot of time, and I realised that I needed to listen to more, and leave the writing until my listening skills had improved. Of course I read all the time, and I read out aloud when I can. As I said, speaking along with the dialouge is really helping.
Another feature I use a lot is the line order animations, because I’m always clicking on a word that takes me to the dictionary, and from there I can see the character being written.Hello Adam.
Over the years that I’ve been learning from CLO I’ve changed my methods of working through each lesson. There are so many options!
I decide that I have finished with a lesson when I can listen to the dialogue and pretty much understand it all from just listening. It takes a lot of work to get that far though. I work with the printed characters in front of me, and the pinyin on the screen where I can quickly see the English with the mouse over. And from the pinyin page it’s only one click to look up a whole word.
I use Audacity to listen to the script, and I can scroll the browser page with the lesson that shows behind Audacity’s window, so it works quite well. I listen to small snippets at a time until I can say it along with the dialogue (shadowing). I try to learn the phrases off by heart, but I find them difficult to remember of course. I really should take the opportunity you offer to speak to teachers, but I don’t have a good enough internet connection 🙁
I used to do all the activities at the end of each lesson, and found them very helpful for checking I hadn’t missed any thing. Now I usually only do the sentence building activity, but only because I don’t have as much time, and I can’t wait to get onto the next lesson.Hi Adam. For me, learning Chinese is a hobby. I am a retired high school art teacher. I always wanted to learn a second language and in the past I have tried German, Indonesian and Japanese, but I never had time to really commit myself. So now I do have the time, well more than before, and I simply enjoy the satisfaction of making steady progress, and I look forward to being able to chat easily with my Chinese friends.
