September 9, 2009
· Written by: Judith
Since today, I know 2000 Chinese characters!
I’m really grateful to the creator of the cross-platform vocabulary trainer Anki and the creator of the Hanzi statistics plugin, which allowed me to learn this many characters and to keep track of the number – a great motivator for me.
The characters I know split as follows:
By HSK Level
Basic: 99.75%
Elementary: 86.97%
Intermediate: 44.31%
Advanced: 20.6%
By frequency:
1 – 500: 100.0%
501 – 1000: 94.8%
1001 – 1500: 78.6%
1501 – 2000: 51.8%
2001 – 2500: 35.8%
2501 – 3000: 19.4%
3001 – 3500: 8.2%
Neato!
I love being able to recognize most of the characters in the subtitles of the Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms TV series. I’m already on episode 41, so that’s 30 hours spent watching Chinese with Chinese and English subtitles. Actually a lot more because I tend to re-watch, and I’ve also watched some future episodes that were recommended to me. Studying Chinese has become a really fun activity, I’d love to spend entire days on it. Alas, I have to work and also prepare a trip to the states, starting next Wednesday.
September 2, 2009
· Written by: Judith
Today I reached a first milestone in Spanish!
My study of Spanish consists exclusively of classes with Edufire teacher Enrique, who has mastered the art of giving conversational Spanish lessons in a way that has students talk most of the time and right from the very first lesson. Obviously I had heard the odd Spanish expression before, for example “sabes” or “no hablo espan~ol”, and I can draw on my knowledge of Italian, Latin, Esperanto and French (in order of usefulness). However, I haven’t looked at any grammar book, vocabulary list or lesson, just taken these classes with Enrique, maybe eight or ten of them.
One thing is that I’m getting a feel for the nature of Spanish, as reflected in my guesses becoming more and more accurate. Today I still guessed “sesanta” instead of “sesenta” for 60 and was totally wrong with “estade” instead of “verano” for summer, but when I said “a causa de los esclavos… or something”, totally expecting to be corrected, I was correct!
However, the real reason I’m calling this a milestone is because during today’s one hour lesson, we had quite a natural conversation, touching upon various things from tonight’s language party to my upcoming trip to the states, previous trips we both did, what we think of various cities, and so on. Normally there is at least one point during the lesson in which Enrique has to bring up a new topic in a rather abrupt way, or ask several less-than-related questions to make me practise a certain point of grammar that I got wrong, but today the conversation was coherent for a full hour and I never felt as good about expressing myself in Spanish!