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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]


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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
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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.
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7 comments
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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
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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
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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
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