Adoption of Laddering Method (Or_ Khatzumoto is Always Right) « All Mandarin, Al

Adoption of Laddering Method (or: Khatzumoto is always right) All Mandarin, All The Time

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Adoption of Laddering Method (or: Khatzumoto isalways right)July 13, 2008 in Uncategorized | Tags: Japanese, khatzumoto, laddering, Mandarin, method

For a site that is titled All Mandarin, All The Time it must seem odd that theonly posts of substance (so far) are on Japanese. Well, Ive been focusing solelyon Japanese since I started this blog. In a way the title was a promise to myselfto stop studying Japanese exclusively and start on Mandarin, but that hasnthappened yet. Partly because Im having trouble tracking down the resource Ivechosen for learning hanzi (step 1 of the AMATT method!): Cracking the ChinesePuzzles by T.K. Ann. Its the closest thing Ive found to Heisigs method andordering for the hanzi, but unfortunately its been out of print for more than adecade and I cant seem to find any decently priced copies. It is also in partbecause I am not comfortable embarking on my studies until Ive acquired adecent pronunciation of Mandarin phonetics, but my native speaker is awayvisiting family at the moment. Those were the reasons, but now Ivediscovered(/verified) a third: you cant start learn Mandarin and Japanese at thesame time with the All Input, All The Time method.

Khatzumoto writes about mixing up languages when learning more than one atthe same time on his blog. I read this, but at the time I thought it was totalhogwash. Ive tried to learn many languages before, and Ive experienced thesymptoms: mixing up words and sentence patterns, such as using a Japaneseword in a German sentence, or saying something- to mark the topic inTagalog. But I found that this was a temporary condition; after trying hardenough I no longer made these mistakes very often, and was able to study agreat many languages at once. At my height I was learning Japanese, German,Tagalog, Romani, Russian, and Thai together with daily practice and without anyconfusion.

But that was before the AIATT method. A few days ago I sinoified myenvironment and spent a whole day listening to Mandarin podcasts and languagetapes, just to get a feel for the spoken language. My plan was to alternatelanguages: Chinese, Japanese, Chinese, Japanese, etc. on either a daily orweekly basis. I made some progress with my Chinese, but when I opened up mySRS at the end of the day, I found that 24 hours of non-Japanese languagepractice was all it took to undo two or three days of effort. It was not a minorsetbackit was a complete military retreat. So bad that I immediately canceledthe experiment and Im worried about ever doing this again. I know that makinga decision on one data point is usually a poor choice but I cannot even relatethe extent to which my skills atrophied over such a short period of time, and

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what kind of effect that would have had if Id let it continue.

What changed between this and my pre-AIATT experience? Im not sure. I thinkit has something to do with the fact that I was listening to audio I did not fullycomprehend, and reliant on my subconscious brain to process and make sense ofit. Whatever the cause, I now implicitly trust Khatzumotos claim that languagesmust be learnt in series for the AIATT method to work. Ive therefore reevaluatedmy strategy: I will continue to learn Japanese in isolation until I can make theswitch to monolingual dictionaries (with the exception of hanzi, which I will startlearning and report on as soon as I can find that damn book). Only then will Ibegin to collect my 10,000 Mandarin sentences and listen to Mandarin audio,using Japanese as the base language for my Chinese studies. But I will keep aneven mix of Japanese and Mandarin audio at all times.

Enough of that. Ill end this post hereI prefer to talk about what Ive done thatworks, not theorize about what might be useful in the future. Results are all thatmatters. Ill post more as these results come in.

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7 commentsComments feed for this article

July 13, 2008 at 10:17 amchris(mandarin_student)

July 13, 2008 at 6:53 pmchris(mandarin_student)

Regarding the multiple languages, I didbriefly try to learn Japanese alongsideMandarin and found it too much effort, I

think the problem was that my Mandarin hadnt reached a high enough level.

I have recently started learning German though and because it iis easy for anEnglish speaker it seems to be working if I learn in German only or via Mandarin.

Although it seems strange finding German learning material in Chinese bothreinforces my Mandarin and appears to be helping my German. It is only when Iintroduce my mother tongue that pollution occurrs,

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Riiiight just read the laddering method youlinked to and it agrees with what I seem

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July 14, 2008 at 1:53 amjinsei

July 14, 2008 at 8:40 amScott Schaffer

July 14, 2008 at 10:21 amjinsei

July 19, 2008 at 9:42 pmEasing back into Chinese AllMandarin, All The Time

April 12, 2009 at 4:36 pm

to have discovered.

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chris,

Definitely. I have to say that when I waslearning more than one language simultaneously, most of my confusion camewhen the two languages were very different from each other, but had somefeature in common. Japanese word order and German sentences which put theverb at the end, for example. But I never seemed to screw up German andSpanish, which I considered to be very similar (at least with respect to Japanesewhich I was also learning). Maybe because the brain was used to seeing parallelsbetween the two? I dont know. In any case its a moot point now that Imadopting the laddering method.

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For the record, if you cant find that bookyoure looking for, you dont strictly needany real source to use the Heisig method

except a good imagination. For example, I was in your position about a yearago: no Heisig book for Hanzi available, and so no means of swiftly and easilyfollowing that particular path to memorization, but an urgent need to startknocking down the 3000+ Hanzi needed for basic reading.

So I just did it myself: I went to zhongwen.com, started with the most utterlybasic characters, then followed the ladder of etymology until I was building thetougher characters. I just assigned my own keywords and primitives and such.As I understand it, Khatzumoto did the same.

I actually picked up Heisigs first book at some point awhile back and comparedhis key words to mine, and in a way I would almost say making up your own isbetter because you can find the key words that stick in your mind the most. (in Heisig is LOCKET; doesnt work for me. For me, it will always be MAD MAX!)

My attempts to use his keywords for remembering Hiragana were a catastrophe;his stories just wouldnt stick. Maypole for ? Old Nick for ? Bah. It was onlywhen I thought up my own vivid images that it started working. But that couldjust be me.

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Thanks Scott.

I agree, the actual book is not necessary.If I havent found the book by the time I finish the jy kanji in about six weeks,Ill do just what you suggest. Ive been using the Heisig method for long enoughthat I dont need to be hand-held through his set of keywords and pre-madestories. But what I have found useful is the ordering of presentation of thecharacters (Kanji ABC is superior to Remembering the Kanji in this respect), andthe time it saves not to recreate that yourself. From what Ive read of Crackingthe Chinese Puzzles, it does the same for about ~6000 hanzi over 5 volumes.But well see how good it actually is. Ill be sure to give it a fair review once Ivegotten far enough into it to compare it with ABC and RtK.

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[...] | Tags: Chinese, ChinesePod.com, Mandarin,Pimsleur, pronunciation, sinosplice, tones | Mypostponement of Mandarin until I go monolingual with

Japanese may have been premature. I think some of the [...]Reply

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NikouGreat post for learning Japanese.

Japanese is so hard for me. Ive lived in Japan for 2 years but failed to speakfluently. Now, Im in China, Im having an easier time with Mandarin. I wrote ablog post about the difficulties I had learning Japanese over Chinese.TheShanghaiExpat. Please feel free to visit and let me know if you are interestedwith link exchange.

Nikou

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