learn Mandarin

I’ve been listening to my language CDs in the car while driving to and from work most days now. I listened to disc 1 for a long time and learned about tones and some vocabulary, and now I am listening to disc 2 and learning introductions, apologies, thank yous, and goodbyes. I listened to disc 3 about counting and telling time, etc, once during work just to see what it was like. this is a pretty good learning tool because I find myself making new connections all the time, for example, I’ll listen to disc 2 for the 15th time and realize that part of the phrase they’re teaching me is grammatically similar to another phrase in disc 1. Yeah, this is probably the most boring blog entry ever, so I’ll stop now.

This week has been good and bad for my Chinese study. On Mon, Tue, Wed, Thurs, Friday, and Saturday I listened to my 1st disc for maybe an hour total each day while driving, and then some more at work. In both cases, I couldn’t fully concentrate on them. But I would repeat the words and hear the instructions. Seems like by the end of the week too much was going on for me to concentrate on anything (I didn’t even finish that Taiwanese movie I was watching.) I looked up some info about radicals so I could start learning to read Chinese also. Now, I’m not sure if I should continue listening to the 1st disc since I haven’t memorized all the vocabulary, or should I keep moving and start listening to the 2nd disc, which teaches greetings and common phrases?

I got this set of 8 CDs for Mandarin. I’m going to try to listen to the first disc every day this week, and go from there. I have loaded the first 5 onto my mp3 player so I can listen to them at work too.

Today I’m also watching 飲食男女 (Eat Drink Man Woman) a Taiwanese movie from 1994.

I’ve resolved to do my best at learning this language. I’m not sure if I can do it, but we’ll see if I can commit anything to memory this week.