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17/1/15 14:34I tried to have a Skype Chinese lesson last night! I say "tried" because:
The connection was really bad. So my teacher said "download QQ and let's try it that way."
But while QQ is available for Linux, you have to unzip the tarball and all that, and I have done that before but I thought it would take too much time to reteach myself how to do it, so I thought, OK, just boot into Windows. Now, I have a dual-boot system, but I have not actually booted into Windows since I set it up. Because you can do Netflix streaming on Linux now.
It would not let me boot into Windows 8.
It would not let me boot into Windows 7.
I tried 8 a bunch more times.
Finally it let me in.
I downloaded Skype just so I could message my teacher that I was having a computer problem and I'd be there in a minute.
I tried to download QQ but Windows kept giving me grief.
My teacher called me up on Skype again and we managed to have a little bit of a lesson before the connection faded out again.
(IDK why it was so bad! I have a fast enough connection to stream video, and it's not like I was running an MMORPG on top of a BitTorrent client or something!)
My teacher said that my pronunciation was very good considering I'd mostly self-studied (*^▽^*) and that I wasn't "lower intermediate" but "higher intermediate" (*^▽^*)
(I am aware that flattery is a good business decision.)
I wonder to what extent my pronunciation is actually improved by having studied linguistics in undergrad? Although I only took that one phonetics class and I wasn't great at it. I never learned to recognize and produce most of the many IPA sounds that don't exist in English, but knowing "a retroflex sound is a thing that exists, you have to curl your tongue back" is perhaps a useful thing even if I'm not good at actually curling my tongue back. It definitely makes me aware of what to listen for, so I don't just stop at "x and sh sound like sh, ch and q sound like ch." (And I have French to thank for the u/ü distinction!)
I don't feel very confident with spoken Chinese outside of the kind of really scripted interactions that happen within a classroom setting, so sometimes it's hard to remember that my level in Chinese is maybe somewhat similar to my Japanese level when I graduated high school - I could read manga, I could read novels laboriously, but social anxiety multiplied any weaknesses in my spoken production to the point where my responses tended to be single slow words unless I had a chance to script things out a little beforehand. (I have finally made peace with the fact that it's okay to just say "Renew?" rather than trying to arrange everything in the correct order inside my head to say "Do you want to renew your books?") I feel like it started to come together for me when I lived in Japan -- I didn't consider myself "fluent" for a long time after I got back (and even now will say things like "moderately fluent" or "relatively fluent" because so many people think fluent means "native-like"), but that was the point where my brain started to be able to process whole sentences fast enough to actually have meaningful real-time conversation. That was the point where the "Din in the head" that Stephen Krashen talks about kicked in. (This is why I think that TPR and TPRS are so great - you can get meaningful real-time communication with a lot of participation from the learner, but it requires very little from the learner in terms of fast or accurate production.)
There are times when it's so easy to compare yourself with some (objectively quite high) standard and feel like you don't come close, that it obscures any progress you're actually making.
(Although, looking at it as objectively as I can, I guess I'm roughly around A2/B1 [that is, between elementary and intermediate] by the CEFR framework, and Intermediate-Low to Intermediate by ACTFL guidelines, despite any flattery.)
The connection was really bad. So my teacher said "download QQ and let's try it that way."
But while QQ is available for Linux, you have to unzip the tarball and all that, and I have done that before but I thought it would take too much time to reteach myself how to do it, so I thought, OK, just boot into Windows. Now, I have a dual-boot system, but I have not actually booted into Windows since I set it up. Because you can do Netflix streaming on Linux now.
It would not let me boot into Windows 8.
It would not let me boot into Windows 7.
I tried 8 a bunch more times.
Finally it let me in.
I downloaded Skype just so I could message my teacher that I was having a computer problem and I'd be there in a minute.
I tried to download QQ but Windows kept giving me grief.
My teacher called me up on Skype again and we managed to have a little bit of a lesson before the connection faded out again.
(IDK why it was so bad! I have a fast enough connection to stream video, and it's not like I was running an MMORPG on top of a BitTorrent client or something!)
My teacher said that my pronunciation was very good considering I'd mostly self-studied (*^▽^*) and that I wasn't "lower intermediate" but "higher intermediate" (*^▽^*)
(I am aware that flattery is a good business decision.)
I wonder to what extent my pronunciation is actually improved by having studied linguistics in undergrad? Although I only took that one phonetics class and I wasn't great at it. I never learned to recognize and produce most of the many IPA sounds that don't exist in English, but knowing "a retroflex sound is a thing that exists, you have to curl your tongue back" is perhaps a useful thing even if I'm not good at actually curling my tongue back. It definitely makes me aware of what to listen for, so I don't just stop at "x and sh sound like sh, ch and q sound like ch." (And I have French to thank for the u/ü distinction!)
I don't feel very confident with spoken Chinese outside of the kind of really scripted interactions that happen within a classroom setting, so sometimes it's hard to remember that my level in Chinese is maybe somewhat similar to my Japanese level when I graduated high school - I could read manga, I could read novels laboriously, but social anxiety multiplied any weaknesses in my spoken production to the point where my responses tended to be single slow words unless I had a chance to script things out a little beforehand. (I have finally made peace with the fact that it's okay to just say "Renew?" rather than trying to arrange everything in the correct order inside my head to say "Do you want to renew your books?") I feel like it started to come together for me when I lived in Japan -- I didn't consider myself "fluent" for a long time after I got back (and even now will say things like "moderately fluent" or "relatively fluent" because so many people think fluent means "native-like"), but that was the point where my brain started to be able to process whole sentences fast enough to actually have meaningful real-time conversation. That was the point where the "Din in the head" that Stephen Krashen talks about kicked in. (This is why I think that TPR and TPRS are so great - you can get meaningful real-time communication with a lot of participation from the learner, but it requires very little from the learner in terms of fast or accurate production.)
There are times when it's so easy to compare yourself with some (objectively quite high) standard and feel like you don't come close, that it obscures any progress you're actually making.
(Although, looking at it as objectively as I can, I guess I'm roughly around A2/B1 [that is, between elementary and intermediate] by the CEFR framework, and Intermediate-Low to Intermediate by ACTFL guidelines, despite any flattery.)