![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Overwhelmed with nothing to do, me and my roommates Nany and Hitomi hit up Yi Zhong Jie, a nearby night market. There I ended up stocking up on, uh, Mandarin learning materials. Weirdly, Wu Zun and Wang Dong Cheng spend a lot of time running around in gym shorts in this particular textbook. I have no idea how this happened.
Considering the fact that Ella Chen talks roughly at the speed of machine gun fire, Jiro slurs his Mandarin like a motherfucker, and Chun has an foreign accent not too different from mine—possibly not the best learning materials here, man. WHATEVER. I WILL KEEP WATCHING THEM ALL OVERACT. UNDERACT, IN WU ZUN'S CASE.
Also found a store where classic literature translated into Mandarin is mega-cheap. Like, three to six dollars a book. I WILL NEVER OWN ENOUGH. It looks like Pride & Prejudice is a bridge (or several) too far but Alice In Wonderland is about grade level. /reads forever
Thank god, too. This means I can stop carrying around Charlie & The Chocolate Factory with me everywhere. I completely hate this book and someday I will rant at length about it.
We're learning a new Thai dance. It is very hard and had me at practice until eleven tonight. And the kneeling and the standing and the kneeling and the standing all on concrete. I have the knees of someone slightly older than I am already man this is not an awesome feeling.
TOMORROW I GET TO SLEEP IN. UNTIL ... NINE. YES.
Considering the fact that Ella Chen talks roughly at the speed of machine gun fire, Jiro slurs his Mandarin like a motherfucker, and Chun has an foreign accent not too different from mine—possibly not the best learning materials here, man. WHATEVER. I WILL KEEP WATCHING THEM ALL OVERACT. UNDERACT, IN WU ZUN'S CASE.
Also found a store where classic literature translated into Mandarin is mega-cheap. Like, three to six dollars a book. I WILL NEVER OWN ENOUGH. It looks like Pride & Prejudice is a bridge (or several) too far but Alice In Wonderland is about grade level. /reads forever
Thank god, too. This means I can stop carrying around Charlie & The Chocolate Factory with me everywhere. I completely hate this book and someday I will rant at length about it.
We're learning a new Thai dance. It is very hard and had me at practice until eleven tonight. And the kneeling and the standing and the kneeling and the standing all on concrete. I have the knees of someone slightly older than I am already man this is not an awesome feeling.
TOMORROW I GET TO SLEEP IN. UNTIL ... NINE. YES.
no subject
Does reading classics/children's books in Mandarin work for you? I think that's a cool approach; I once bought one of the Harry Potter books in French because I felt my French could do with some brushing up, but I theh never really managed to read it. (I felt a bit too silly to try that with Japanese then.)
no subject
Hn, well, sort of. A lot of the problems I have are Mandarin-specific: I basically have very little way to guess unfamiliar characters, I'll never recognize a lot of words I know but can't write, and unless I'm reading a book meant for very young children (who get a phonetic guide) I don't know what the unfamiliar words sound like. However since the learning curve for reading Mandarin is so very steep I think it's pretty necessary to start reading ASAP, because you'll need the practice.
In French you'd have the advantage of knowing X-amount of words off the bat, since English borrowed them from French. Japanese would be a bit more tricky, though I once read a novelization of Finding Nemo that had a furigana guide.