Mandarin - number of characters

Besides the other languages I'm doing I'm actually concentrating on Mandarin.

I think a lot of Chinese learners wonder how many characters they know.  There are webpages that will give you a test and make an estimate based on that.

I've found another method.  For iOS devices there's an app called Flashcard Fu.  Once you have the app it's a free download to download the 4,000 most common characters.  Besides being a pretty good way of memorising a few extra characters it also tells you how many characters you've mastered.  As it takes a while before the app believes you have mastered a character it will be a while before my actual knowledge will be reflected by the app.  At the moment it's showing me as having mastered 320 characters but no doubt it's several times that.

I think it will be quite interesting to see how many characters I actually know and how that correlates with how much difficulty I have reading.

I don't really suggest that this app is all you need to learn characters but it does give audio for each character, and it's pretty quick to go from one character to the next so you get some nice audio feed-back which I think helps link tone marks with what you hear.

 

Mandarin (update)

I've got sick of New Practical Chinese reader.  They even seem to have a sixth volume so they no doubt take the reader up to a very high level.

But in the meantime I've become too discouraged at having so much trouble with spoken Mandarin that I've decided to concentrate on real texts with real audio.

For this reason I'm now using mainly 慢速中文, a free blog that comes with transcription and audio.

I'm also using popupchinese.com.  They have superb dialogues with great voice actors.  This also comes with transcriptions and on top of it all the dialogues are invariably funny.

With both of these I've decided to extract all new vocab and learn it.  It's quite possible that the trouble I'm having with spoken Mandarin is because my vocabulary simply isn't big enough.

Mandarin

At the moment my learning revolves around New Practical Chinese Reader (新实用汉语课本).

When I was in Peking a couple of years ago I had a look through all the grammar books on offer... and I decided on this one so I bought all 5 volumes. Cd's as well. When I got back to Australia I discovered that it had just been made the new text for my Chinese class at uni.

The audio is very good, but there is heaps wrong with it. I feel that the vocab they introduce is not very topical, the reading passages and dialogues should have translations somewhere and the general content of the dialogues is a bit lame.

There is a Taiwanese series that comes in about 5 volumes with vcd's of the dialogues acted out that is far better... but the text is all traditional Chinese characters. Still, I'd probably start with that one if I were starting all over again.

Having gone through about 3 volumes (New Practical Chinese Reader) I now find that I'm having too much trouble with understanding spoken Chinese so I'm going through the series again but this time I'm entering everything again into my spaced repetition program and making all the questions as just the audio. Being able to recognise spoken Chinese in sentences and also individual words should be a good test and good practice.

Does the problem with Chinese arise because there are so few sounds available? Well, I'm keeping track of what I've entered; it'll be interesting to see how many words are actually homophones and how many of the actual homophones are immediately recognisable as being such and whether the different meanings actually come to mind.