Home FQA: frequently questioned answers Subscribe to feed All Mandarin, All The Time Journey to fluency in Mandarin (and Japanese) Adoption of Laddering Method (or: Khatzumoto is always right) July 13, 2008 in Uncategorized | Tags: Japanese, khatzumoto, laddering, Mandarin, method For a site that is titled All Mandarin, All The Time it must seem odd that the only posts of substance (so far) are on Japanese. Well, Ive been focusing solely on Japanese since I started this blog. In a way the title was a promise to myself to stop studying Japanese exclusively and start on Mandarin, but that hasnt happened yet. Partly because Im having trouble tracking down the resource Ive chosen for learning hanzi (step 1 of the AMATT method!): Cracking the Chinese Puzzles by T.K. Ann. Its the closest thing Ive found to Heisigs method and ordering for the hanzi, but unfortunately its been out of print for more than a decade and I cant seem to find any decently priced copies. It is also in part because I am not comfortable embarking on my studies until Ive acquired a decent pronunciation of Mandarin phonetics, but my native speaker is away visiting family at the moment. Those were the reasons, but now Ive discovered(/verified) a third: you cant start learn Mandarin and Japanese at the same time with the All Input, All The Time method. Khatzumoto writes about mixing up languages when learning more than one at the same time on his blog. I read this, but at the time I thought it was total hogwash. Ive tried to learn many languages before, and Ive experienced the symptoms: mixing up words and sentence patterns, such as using a Japanese word in a German sentence, or saying something- to mark the topic in Tagalog. But I found that this was a temporary condition; after trying hard enough I no longer made these mistakes very often, and was able to study a great many languages at once. At my height I was learning Japanese, German, Tagalog, Romani, Russian, and Thai together with daily practice and without any confusion. But that was before the AIATT method. A few days ago I sinoified my environment and spent a whole day listening to Mandarin podcasts and language tapes, just to get a feel for the spoken language. My plan was to alternate languages: Chinese, Japanese, Chinese, Japanese, etc. on either a daily or weekly basis. I made some progress with my Chinese, but when I opened up my SRS at the end of the day, I found that 24 hours of non-Japanese language practice was all it took to undo two or three days of effort. It was not a minor setbackit was a complete military retreat. So bad that I immediately canceled the experiment and Im worried about ever doing this again. I know that making a decision on one data point is usually a poor choice but I cannot even relate the extent to which my skills atrophied over such a short period of time, and BLOGROLL All Japanese, All The Time Sinosplice The Shanghai Expat Follow Adoption of Laddering Method (or: Khatzumoto is always right) All Mandarin, All The Time http://amatt.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/10/[7/10/2012 8:36:04 PM] what kind of effect that would have had if Id let it continue. What changed between this and my pre-AIATT experience? Im not sure. I think it has something to do with the fact that I was listening to audio I did not fully comprehend, and reliant on my subconscious brain to process and make sense of it. Whatever the cause, I now implicitly trust Khatzumotos claim that languages must be learnt in series for the AIATT method to work. Ive therefore reevaluated my strategy: I will continue to learn Japanese in isolation until I can make the switch to monolingual dictionaries (with the exception of hanzi, which I will start learning and report on as soon as I can find that damn book). Only then will I begin to collect my 10,000 Mandarin sentences and listen to Mandarin audio, using Japanese as the base language for my Chinese studies. But I will keep an even mix of Japanese and Mandarin audio at all times. Enough of that. Ill end this post hereI prefer to talk about what Ive done that works, not theorize about what might be useful in the future. Results are all that matters. Ill post more as these results come in. ADVERTISEMENT Be the first to like this. 7 comments Comments feed for this article July 13, 2008 at 10:17 am chris(mandarin_student) July 13, 2008 at 6:53 pm chris(mandarin_student) Regarding the multiple languages, I did briefly try to learn Japanese alongside Mandarin and found it too much effort, I think the problem was that my Mandarin hadnt reached a high enough level. I have recently started learning German though and because it iis easy for an English speaker it seems to be working if I learn in German only or via Mandarin. Although it seems strange finding German learning material in Chinese both reinforces my Mandarin and appears to be helping my German. It is only when I introduce my mother tongue that pollution occurrs, Reply Riiiight just read the laddering method you linked to and it agrees with what I seem Like l FOLLOW ALL MANDARIN, ALL THE TIME Get every new post delivered to your Inbox. Powered by WordPress.com Enter your email address Sign me up Adoption of Laddering Method (or: Khatzumoto is always right) All Mandarin, All The Time http://amatt.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/10/[7/10/2012 8:36:04 PM] July 14, 2008 at 1:53 am jinsei July 14, 2008 at 8:40 am Scott Schaffer July 14, 2008 at 10:21 am jinsei July 19, 2008 at 9:42 pm Easing back into Chinese All Mandarin, All The Time April 12, 2009 at 4:36 pm to have discovered. Reply chris, Definitely. I have to say that when I was learning more than one language simultaneously, most of my confusion came when the two languages were very different from each other, but had some feature in common. Japanese word order and German sentences which put the verb at the end, for example. But I never seemed to screw up German and Spanish, which I considered to be very similar (at least with respect to Japanese which I was also learning). Maybe because the brain was used to seeing parallels between the two? I dont know. In any case its a moot point now that Im adopting the laddering method. Reply For the record, if you cant find that book youre looking for, you dont strictly need any real source to use the Heisig method except a good imagination. For example, I was in your position about a year ago: no Heisig book for Hanzi available, and so no means of swiftly and easily following that particular path to memorization, but an urgent need to start knocking down the 3000+ Hanzi needed for basic reading. So I just did it myself: I went to zhongwen.com, started with the most utterly basic characters, then followed the ladder of etymology until I was building the tougher characters. I just assigned my own keywords and primitives and such. As I understand it, Khatzumoto did the same. I actually picked up Heisigs first book at some point awhile back and compared his key words to mine, and in a way I would almost say making up your own is better because you can find the key words that stick in your mind the most. ( in Heisig is LOCKET; doesnt work for me. For me, it will always be MAD MAX!) My attempts to use his keywords for remembering Hiragana were a catastrophe; his stories just wouldnt stick. Maypole for ? Old Nick for ? Bah. It was only when I thought up my own vivid images that it started working. But that could just be me. Reply Thanks Scott. I agree, the actual book is not necessary. If I havent found the book by the time I finish the jy kanji in about six weeks, Ill do just what you suggest. Ive been using the Heisig method for long enough that I dont need to be hand-held through his set of keywords and pre-made stories. But what I have found useful is the ordering of presentation of the characters (Kanji ABC is superior to Remembering the Kanji in this respect), and the time it saves not to recreate that yourself. From what Ive read of Cracking the Chinese Puzzles, it does the same for about ~6000 hanzi over 5 volumes. But well see how good it actually is. Ill be sure to give it a fair review once Ive gotten far enough into it to compare it with ABC and RtK. Reply [...] | Tags: Chinese, ChinesePod.com, Mandarin, Pimsleur, pronunciation, sinosplice, tones | My postponement of Mandarin until I go monolingual with Japanese may have been premature. I think some of the [...] Reply Hello, Adoption of Laddering Method (or: Khatzumoto is always right) All Mandarin, All The Time http://amatt.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/10/[7/10/2012 8:36:04 PM] Grapheme vs. keyword meaning Link: How To Accomplish Great Things: Small Victories, Winnable Games Theme: Tarski by Ben Eastaugh and Chris Sternal-Johnson. Blog at WordPress.com. Subscribe to feed. Nikou Great post for learning Japanese. Japanese is so hard for me. Ive lived in Japan for 2 years but failed to speak fluently. Now, Im in China, Im having an easier time with Mandarin. I wrote a blog post about the difficulties I had learning Japanese over Chinese. TheShanghaiExpat. Please feel free to visit and let me know if you are interested with link exchange. Nikou Reply LEAVE A REPLY Search