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Day 14 – 14 days of learning Chinese

Day 14, the colors. Lots of new words to learn. The structure of all sentences was similar though, so not a lot of difficulty there.

This was the last dayI really enjoyed the challenge, and I feel like I did actually learn Chinese, although obviously at a very basic level. Not the vocabulary, but also the tones and their importance, a bit about the structure of sentences and even some writing.

From a motivation and discipline perspective the challenge worked great. Having made this public commitment really helped to sit down for the video every day, even if I didn’t feel like doing it so much, or other things in life asked for attention. I definitely recommend this method for guaranteed focus on a subject or project for a longer stretch of time.

For now I’ll leave it with these fourteen days. Maybe I’ll do another challenge like this in the future, and surely I’ll be listening to some more lessons and repeating these ones to really make them permanent. Thanks for watching and keeping me on track!

Day 13 – activities

Day 13, only one day left! Today is about activities and work. I didn’t master the lesson perfectly, but some of the sentences came out kind of right. I watched some videos about the different tones of pronunciation, and I’m trying to apply that. Still a long way to go towards fluency in Chinese, but that’s not my goal (yet ;).

Day 12 – beverages

This was a difficult lesson. Lots of new vocabulary, which took quite a while to remember. Managed to say “the grandma likes apple juice”, yay!

Day 11 – 14 days of learning Chinese

The months. Easy lesson because similar to the days of the week, the names of the months are the word “month” combined with the month number. It seems to me that Chinese is a really systematic language.

Day 10 – yesterday, today, tomorrow

Today I learned about the days: yesterday, today, tomorrow. I’m starting to get the feeling I can actually say some things! Though still a very limited set of things, of course.

Learning this lesson went relatively smooth because I listened to it a lot of times before today. Today I only needed a short practise session to master it.

Day 8 – 14 days of learning Chinese

Day 8 – learning how to ask for and say the time.

Day 6 – keeping Yoda Jewish

Almost one week has passed by, and I’ve learned a lot already! Today more “countries and languages”.

Notes:

The words for all continents are similar. “o-tjoh” (Europe), “ya-tjoh” (Asia), “fay-tjoh” (Africa), “may-tjoh” (America).
When remembering longer sentences with many unknown words, it helps if you can find a sentence in a language that you know that sounds similar. For example, “Capital cities are big and noisy” (listen to the recording here). I already knew the first words “capital” and “are” (or what seems like “are all”), but the rest of the sentence? Then I realized it sounds like “Yoda Joods houden” – “to keep Yoda Jewish”. That is totally weird, which is great for remembering stuff. I imagine something like this and will never forget the sentence:

Today’s video:

Thanks to Joyful Jewish for already having created the artwork for my weird association!

Day 5 – 14 days of learning Chinese

Day 5. An entire lesson again. The image of this post shows the characters for “in school”, the subject of the lesson.

Notes:

It helped to paste the Chinese characters into Google Translate to understand which sound means what. I found that I actually did know some of the words already.
The Chinese names for other languages sound funny to me. I like to say them 🙂
The word for “to learn” is in a lot of the sentences. Also “school” and “school children” are based on it.

Here’s todays video. It includes some of the original recordings of the audio course so you can hear whether what I say is any good.

Day 4 – 14 days of learning Chinese

Another day, 6 other sentences. Boy, these were hard to remember. I couldn’t recognize many of the words, which made it hard to reproduce a whole sentence. But finally I managed.

Notes:

“Are you here on vacation?” was the easiest because it starts with “are you here” and what came after it sounded a bit like Portuguese.
“Please do visit me sometime” was hard, but it helped that “you” and “me” were in the middle of the sentence. Then it became “[weird sound] you [little sound] me [peculiar, easy to remember sound]” which made it digestible.

Day 3 – 14 days of learning Chinese

Day 3! Time flies on a busy day, so it’s good to have the challenge as a motivation to learn just a bit of Chinese.

Notes:

“I’m sorry, but I already have plans” sounds almost like it’s German.
There’s a lot of “tiÃ¨n” which I have heard in the following lessons means “day”.

Day 2 – 14 days of learning chinese

Day 2 of the challenge, 12 left.

Notes:

Various family members have multiple words for them. Grandfather/-mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt. I wonder why. Could be older brother vs younger brother, grandfather from mothers side vs fathers side, etc?
“2” is “arrrr” like a pirate.
With the males there’s a lot of “fu”, with the females a lot of “mu” and “ma”.
“mother” sounds almost like “Mutti” in German.
Five different words for uncle? Really??
“The family is not small” was the hardest to remember.

Day 1 – 14 days of learning Chinese

1 day of the challenge down, 13 to go. Chinese is fun!

Quick notes:

“he” and “she” sound exactly the same (are they?).
the last part of “is here” sounds like “juli”, the Dutch month July.
“is here” is exactly the same for I, he, we. Easy does it!
“all” sounds like “tÃ£o” in Portuguese only not nasal. Also close to “todo”, all.
“we” is pronounced like “woman”

See me speak gibberish:

14 days of learning Chinese

Let’s start a new challenge: learning to speak Chinese! I love learning languages. My mother tongue is Dutch and besides that I speak English, Portuguese, French and German (in descending order of proficiency). Time to add another one to the end of the list, albeit with a very small font.

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