Post 5- Week 1

In week 1, I started my language learning challenge. I was rather surprised about the amount of Chinese I am familiar with. My Chinese writing skills has really gone down hill. I am able to read them, but when it comes to writing, I guess my mind just blanks out, which also really shocked me.

This week, I have followed my plan, which was to.

Week 1- Give myself a pre-test. Write down what I am able to write currently for a simplified self-introduction. After writing it, brainstorm what I would like to have in my ideal self-introduction. In particular, the vocabulary that needs to be looked up, for example noun and verb vocabularies. These many include name, age, doing words for hobbies, etc.

The time taken to write my pre-test self introduction was 15 mins for 7 sentences. I personally believed I took too long for simply short 7 sentences. It may have been because I did this at 10:30 at night and my brain wasn't functioning properly, but it did rather shock and annoy me, because of my Chinese level dropping that much. 

Another thing that I picked up on that I found interesting was the fact that my Japanese writing interfering in with my Chinese. An example can already be seen in the 1st sentence, where I wrote:

「我的名前是黒田祐理。」  (My name is Yuri Kuroda.)

After looking over at what I wrote carefully, I realiｓed that it actually was a mixture of Chinese and Japanese. The correct version should have been:

「我的名字是黑田祐理。」  (My ｎame is Yuri Kuroda.)

As I was composing it, I was speaking Chinese to myself, however from the pre-test it can be seen that I bring in my Japanese skills unconsciously. I said 名字 (ming zi meaning, "name" in Chinese) to myself when I was writing it, but it turned out to be I automatically translate it into Japanese and wrote 名前 (namae meaning "name" in Japanese). I believe something similar happened once again, when I wrote my own name, since I am more familiar with the Japanese way of writing my own name, I wrote the Japanese version 黒田祐理 instead of 黑田祐理. 

As this week's work, I have also noted down what types of sentences I would like to have in my self introduction. Possible vocabularies that I may need to use have been listed out too, and I am planning to use the technologies as planned, the MDBG Web Translator and iphone app to search for the vocabularies and phrases in Chinese. 

I have only done a short list of what vocabularies I may need, however, this list will get longer and longer every week, as there will be more and more vocabularies I realise I need to use.