posted by caseybaumgartner on May 28, 2013 | 16 comments
I've used Popup Chinese for somewhere around six months now.At an intermediate level trying to push my Chinese along through self-study while working a full time job, I find myself dropping in and out of actual devoted study.One of my main problems, I think, is that I'm yet to develop a good, progressive, forward-looking structure that continually builds upon itself.Has anyone here developed a study structure for themselves that keeps them committed? Would love to hear any and all methods developed by other Popup users here.
I am living in Canada and have basically no chinese speaking friends that I have met personally. Here are some things that have helped me keep my candle burning:* QQ: I posted my QQ number publicly and after I got about 100 friends in 1 month, I removed it. Whenever I turn it on I instantly find many friends eager to chat. This brings everything up to the surface and my notebooks to the table.* HSK: I took my HSK1 after studying with Popup for 2 months. It only cost me $20 and I got a 95% on the test. This is your linear road to 5000 words. WARNING: Don't feel trapped like you have to learn only these words. I paused my goal for HSK2 (partly out of boredom) and found some cool apps and other interesting study material and had a huge relief and wave of enthusiasm that I was free to let go of the HSK2 words. I recently picked it back up again and found I actually learned a bunch of the HSK2 words indirectly. This was exciting. I think I will take it in June.* Movies: We had a cool thread going with a bunch of good movies getting thrown around. Pick one and watch it over and over (I avoid the Cantonese movies though...)* China connection: start listening to the Sinica podcast if you haven't already. It took me a while to realize how valuable and far reaching these guys are. I'm hooked now... Summary: keep the material fresh. Feel free to wander around and check out random material. I have 啪啪中文 as a foundation and the supplements as a 'diversification'. Be clear on why you want to learn to speak chinese and feed that desire. good luck and have fun...
malcs.lakey on May 28, 2013 | reply
This is the single biggest problem I have had for the past five years. Whether here on Popup Chinese or elsewhere, including face to face one on one learning, there seems to be no suggestion even of any structure to learning. Lots of great information and knowledge but zero progressive structure. If anyone (including Popup Chinese) can help I would also be VERY interested.
I'm a Chinese who continued to learn English after college and now I use English as my working language. My learning is that one shall match his personal interest/career need to his foreign language learning. You can choose the foreign language materials that interest you, what you've learned on these subjects in the foreign language will fuel your interest to study further and because what you've just learned are stored in the excited zones of your brain, there is more chance to repeat what you've learned and enforce it consciously or unconsciously.
murrayjames on May 28, 2013 | reply
My suggestion for someone at the intermediate level is don't look for a progressive structure that continually builds upon itself :-D
I hear a lot about the "intermediate blues"--people who get stuck in intermediate language hell and feel like they'll never get out of it. I'm at the intermediate level, but still feel like I'm improving. This is because I have a lot of contact with the language throughout the day. I don't study progressively or systematically. I just use the language a lot.
Some examples:
-Using QQ, 微博 and 微信 daily
-Reading books and internet articles in Chinese
-Listening to Popup Chinese podcasts
-All my computing devices (PC, cellphone) and websites I regularly use (Facebook, Google sites) are in Chinese
-I live in China and:
*My wife and her family are Chinese
*All my coworkers are Chinese
*Many of my friends here are Chinese
*Most casual conversations I have here (in restaurants, taxicabs, etc.) are in Chinese
-I also make flashcards out of stuff I see in real life. Not long HSK word lists, but, say, something my mother-in-law says, or a sign I read on the street.
My advice is to increase your contact with the language, and learn things as you go. At your level the heavy lifting--learning the basics of Chinese characters and tones--is all out of the way. What's left is the slow accumulation of vocabulary (chengyu, rare characters, slang), some finer points of grammar (which Popup in great for), and then one day, if you're ballsy, 文言文.
The other day I learned the word 羊水 (literally "lamb water"), which means amniotic fluid. I just love that two of the first characters I learned, put together, make up a word so rare I've never used it.
@caseybaumgartner,I'd suggest that you can do some useful practice while going through our lessons online. After listening to the podcast, you can try to make sentences and write a short story with the new vocab of that lesson. This will help you to use those new words so that you can remember them and will be able to use them in the future. Writing a short story is also interesting. You can write about anything you like. Then you can read the dialogue aloud. After that you can try to retell the dialogue in your own words. It's a very good exercise for intermediate students to make a long speech in Chinese.--Echoecho@popupchinese.com
crowley.brendan on June 6, 2013 | reply
I have been studying intensely for just over a year now and might be just getting to the "intermediate blues".My suggestions are to ensure that you are doing something every day to maintain contact with the language. 2 things I attempt to do every day: 1, review some vocabulary flashcards (I highly suggest the Anki application). Personally, I chose to make all my flashcards on my own so I can include usage notes and learn words in context. Whenever I come across a new word, I make a flash card (currently approaching 9000 after about a year, yikes). I review about 250 separate cards every day and "learn" 21 new words everyday. For me, it is important to ensure that the words you are learning are very fresh in your mind. Frequently, I will start my day off by listening to 3-4 podcasts on here, making flashcards for new words encountered, and then study those flashcards later that day. 2, I try to electronically write at least 200 characters everyday in a journal format. I believe in the cathartic process of writing about your day in general, but find attempting to put my thoughts in Chinese forces you to discover the gaps in your ability.
I'm a Chinese,I lecaning English language and culture.I wanna make a foreigner friend.we can learn each language each other!How do you think?
Hey, I live in California, USA, and I would like to work with you.
I think it's important to have a flexible study pattern. I used to try to keep to a weekly schedule in which each day had its assigned study tasks and I almost died from sheer boredom. Now I basically just do whichever activity I feel like, or whichever one I haven't done in a while.This is how I study Mandarin these days:1) Check Popup to see if anything new has come out.2) Read the Chinese news. Make flashcards of the new vocab I pick up from the articles.3) Translate English news into Mandarin (and get it checked by a Chinese friend).4) Watch Chinese TV shows and note down any interesting/useful sentences (not individual words） as well as anything I don't understand -then ask a friend later。 Make flashcards of those sentences.5) Review the flashcards. I only started reading/translating news quite recently as before that it was a bit beyond me. I've watched a lot of Chinese TV shows though and it's really helped my oral Mandarin. I like it because a) it's more relaxing than bashing your head against grammar books/lists of vocab and b) it's more useful (if you live in China anyway). If I had to recommend one study method for intermediates, TV would be it. I must admit though, with the exception of 爱情公寓 Series 1 and maybe 3, I haven't found a Chinese TV show that I watched out of sheer pleasure...Anyone got any suggestions?
the_saxophonist on September 16, 2014 | reply
What about the study schedule that is implied in the description for purchasing the premium study package? It says we get "detailed controle over your vocab lists and study schedule," which seems to imply some recommended study regimen."Get unrestricted access to everything on Popup Chinese: download our shows to your mp3 player, customize your transcripts and testing tools, and get detailed control over your vocab lists and study schedule. You will make incredible progress while having fun or your money back."
@the_saxophonist,
We used to have a calendar where people could bookmark lessons for "publication" into their account individually. And I can look at adding it back (the functionality is still there) but it was not very widely used and I would be surprised if even one in a hundred people even knew that it existed....
What happens now is that we add all of our lessons to people's accounts by default, scheduled by their original date of publication. Lessons get tagged as "studied" as people use them so there is some way of sorting the material people have looked at from the archive of stuff they haven't seen yet. If this is what you need, try clicking on the "banner" link at the top of the lesson archive page. It will show you a list of all lessons in your account, with simple tags (studied/unstudied/all) you can use to navigate through materials you have and have not seen.
Are there better ways of doing things? We're very open to suggestions. One of the big usability problems is actually making it obvious how things work. We've had more complicated setups, but they've always involved putting a lot more explanatory text on the site that no-one reads. When we added a more limited set of lessons to accounts on account creation and required people to manually add levels and shows, we would start getting emails with questions about where all the lessons were, for instance.
As far as the question of implicit structure goes, we are putting together a more structured set of lessons for people who know absolutely nothing -- i.e. "your first ten lessons" somewhat along the lines of the intro series we have for Cantonese. The pedagogical problem with making other lessons hierarchical is that the more anyone knows, the less a one-size-fits-all course makes sense. This is why we bias towards rough levels with 10-minute lessons that people can push through at their own pace and skip if they find them too easy. Suggestions on features and things we can do to improve the site are always useful though, and -- as promised -- we are always happy to refund anyone who isn't happy with the way things work for them.
saxophone.n.theology on September 22, 2014 | reply
Ok, so here comes annoying newbie with other "ideas..." Well, here we go:*Put an "account lesson page" link in the banner, in the links below the banner, or in a drop down menu.*Add the Chrome add-on to the Chrome store. Since your add-on isn't in the Chrome store, it automatically boots it off after using it just one time. They ask us to ask the author to add it so it won't kick it off every time. That said, if you need a body in the US to do it, I'd be happy to help in any way I can.Thanks, once more, for your kind consideration.
saxophone.n.theology on September 22, 2014 | reply
Thanks, David (I think it's David)...I appreciate your response. Your reasons make a ton of sense. I actually sent an email yesterday to your "service@" email address with some suggestions. Here's the cliff's notes version:*add tags for all the subject matter (adv., inter., ab beg., etc.).*Consider changing the banner Chinese Community to Language Learning Tools or something like that...All in all, I LOVE what you guys do. Your podcasts are like listening in on a conversation with friends, and, like you said, are in short chunks so one can do as many or as little as possible. I looked at several other websites before deciding on yours. The podcasts sold me. Adding the extra tags would help people siphon through the amount of lessons there are. I didn't even know until yesterday that there were HSK lessons, Film lessons, plus your music video links. Though the tags would help people find them easier, it was a good find! Many thanks. 谢谢! 再见!Jeff
Michael@Wuhan on September 17, 2014 | reply
Hello all!I like this website a lot and have been using the free part for around one week now. I had an account before, which I unfortunately lost. What keeps me coming back is the leader board and the 'public' competition to stay in the top 10 every week as well as the current Level. A structured progression for the lessons and the vocabulary would me awesome!Michael
saxophone.n.theology on September 27, 2014 | reply
From http://popupchinese.com/lessons/absolute-beginners/where-is-the-washroom, here's some great insight as to how to study the specifics on Popup Chinese:"For those of you who are new to Popup Chinese, we encourage you to approach our lessons as bite-sized units you can learn at the pace of one a day: listen to our podcast first and see if you can understand our simple dialogue. When you're done, fire up The Fix to test your memory and speaking skills. Pay special attention to the tones. And in a day or two, review the materials with our customizable PDFs and transcripts. And let us know if you have any questions - we're always here to answer them."