u/woshikaisa

I'll be spending roughly a month in Chengdu from mid-September to mid-October. Do folks here have recommendations for tutors they enjoyed working with in-person in that city?

In HSK "2.0" terms, my current level is somewhere around HSK 5. My listening comprehension is miles ahead of everything else because that's where I put most of my effort. I can participate in informal conversations with friends and even had a parent-teacher conference once, as long as the other side is OK with me speaking English. My goal is to actually work on my Mandarin speaking skills.

I started struggling at HSK 4. It became incomprehensible at HSK 5. Surprisingly comprehensible again at HSK 6. Once it reached HSK 7 I couldn't understand anything 😂

Amazing format, I wish there were more of those out there.

Warning! There are English ads for her courses interspersed throughout the video, so not 100% Mandarin CI.

Just curious.

I'm approaching 1000h and I feel like I can follow the gist of what they're saying, but I miss too much stuff and it bothers me. Maybe because I came from a non-ALG background, the itch to sentence mine, look things up, etc. gets really strong.

I have a strong interest in being able consume their content because 1) it's conversational 2) it's not super slowed down and controlled like the Lazy Chinese podcasts and 3) I'm looking for more male patterns of speech to model after, since the overwhelming majority of Mandarin CI content is produced by women (the other day I spontaneously said something to my wife and she was like, only women talk like that in China, lol). On that last front I've been consuming a lot of Dapeng's podcast, but that still doesn't check the box for actual unscripted conversation between 2+ people.

My wife (Chinese naturalized as American) and I (Brazilian-American) will be spending a month in Chengdu with my in-laws. We have a two-year-old boy who currently goes to a Montessori daycare here in the US.

Since our kid has started daycare only 3-4 months ago and we're really happy with his adaptation and progress there, we would like to not break his daily routine by pulling him out of group care entirely for the two months we'll be out.

I've found this sub and decided to post here to see if folks can recommend any daycares in Chengdu that they would vouch for. Language-wise, Chinese-only is totally fine. We'd ideally keep him in a Montessori environment, but that's not a dealbreaker.

Our current plan is to stay in the 麓湖 area. We found a Montessori daycare called 阿咯咯 there, but we have no idea how good it is and so far have only found their own posts on 小红书.

We're open to changing where to stay altogether in order to be closer to a good daycare, as long as the area also offers easy access (walking or public transit) to parks, restaurants and cafes.

Thank you!

My wife (Chinese naturalized as American) and I (Brazilian-American) will be spending a month in Chengdu with my in-laws. We have a two-year-old boy who currently goes to a Montessori daycare here in the US.

Since our kid has started daycare only 3-4 months ago and we're really happy with his adaptation and progress there, we would like to not break his daily routine by pulling him out of group care entirely for the two months we'll be out.

I've found this sub and decided to post here to see if folks can recommend any daycares in Chengdu that they would vouch for. Language-wise, Chinese-only is totally fine. We'd ideally keep him in a Montessori environment, but that's not a dealbreaker.

Our current plan is to stay in the 麓湖 area. We found a Montessori daycare called 阿咯咯 there, but we have no idea how good it is and so far have only found their own posts on 小红书.

We're open to changing where to stay altogether in order to be closer to a good daycare, as long as the area also offers easy access (walking or public transit) to parks, restaurants and cafes.

Thank you!

I'm at 600 + 257 hours of input in Mandarin (600h estimated prior to switching to mostly-ALG and tracking hours).

This morning we had a parent-teacher conference at my son's English-Mandarin bilingual preschool. The lead teacher for his class is Chinese, so when my wife (also Chinese) got there I said they could speak Mandarin, but I'd speak English if I wanted to say anything.

I was elated. I followed almost the entire meeting without issue, not having to strain at all to figure out the meaning of anything. I participated quite a bit and it was really cool that the teacher got along with the crosstalk-style conversation with no weirdness at all and not falling back to English. I said "almost" there because there were two points I had to clarify with my wife after the conference, but turns out I had understood those correctly too 😄

Feels suuuuper awesome to have my effort so far validated in this way 🎉

I'm at 600 + 257 hours of input in Mandarin (600h estimated prior to switching to mostly-ALG and tracking hours).

This morning we had a parent-teacher conference at my son's English-Mandarin bilingual preschool. The lead teacher for his class is Chinese, so when my wife (also Chinese) and I got there I said they could speak Mandarin, but I'd speak English if I wanted to say anything.

I was elated. I followed almost the entire meeting without issue, not having to strain at all to figure out the meaning of anything. I participated quite a bit and it was really cool that the teacher got along with the crosstalk-style conversation with no weirdness at all and not falling back to English. I said "almost" there because there were two points I had to clarify with my wife after the conference, but turns out I had understood those correctly too 😄

Feels suuuuper awesome to have my effort so far validated in this way 🎉

I am reading Polyglot - How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb, a Hungarian polyglot born in the first half the 20th century who learned 16 languages. Her approach was heavily based on reading, but she addresses learning pronunciation in her book. I found this quite interesting:

>There was an elementary school in Buda where French was taught from the first grade on. My little son attended it, and I took part in one of the classes. Each child pronounced quatre so perfectly (like “cut”) that I heaved a deep sigh of envy. A sympathetic fellow mother said to me from behind, “The reason why they don’t say it ‘cut-r’ is because they have no idea the letter ‘r’ is in the word.”

>Can we draw a conclusion from this that you should first hear a word and then see it only afterwards? I am afraid not. Not for theoretical reasons but for practical ones. You couldn’t set your learning process to such a long-term method of obtaining vocabulary even if you supposed it was enough to hear the pronunciation of a word only once or twice and you wouldn’t ever make a mistake again.

>The precondition of repetition is that the phrases to be memorized should be commonly used by speakers of the language. However, this cannot always be ensured even in the very center of a foreign-language environment, let alone thousands of miles away from it!

>I have written it several times but I must emphasize it once again (and I dare not promise it will be the last time): it is only books that provide an unlimited amount of repetition. It is only reading that can be returned to again and again without being an ordeal. And a book is expected to bear witness: it lets itself be interrogated again and again, with an invariable readiness. Besides its million assets, it is only culpable in one thing: it cannot speak. Or rather, it does speak to you, but in accordance with your mother tongue pronunciation habits.

I figure this made a lot of sense in her time, but I can't help but wonder if she would change her stance if she was still alive today, with abundant and easily accessible videos, audiobooks and podcasts in many, many languages.

Anyways, the whole book is a fascinating read. Her approach was basically immersion but in books, given they were the easiest media format to access back then. Where she differs from ALG is that she would pick an adult novel right off the bat in a new language and work through it, instead of starting with easy material and gradually increasing the difficulty.

Edit: reading further turns out she addresses videos:

>Videos can enrich our vocabulary and improve our sentence construction skills, but only if we watch them repeatedly. According to my own informal surveys, this is not typical of fans of videos.

Not quite what our community would say, but again I wonder if that's due to the availability of material at the time it was written.

Just wondering if as native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese I can safely go ahead and consider the hours necessary to attain each level in French half of what's actually in the DS roadmap, since both are Romance languages. I also grew up listening to a ton of Spanish and can consume native media in it with very high comprehension, so that's another Romance language I have high familiarity with.

For what it's worth, at 30 hours in I'm already finding most Super Beginner and Beginner content totally comprehensible and even a bit boring sometimes. I gave a shot at listening to the Inner French podcast and I could understand the first two episodes just fine, way beyond "just the gist", despite a few words and sentences going over my ahead me here and there.

French is my personal ALG experiment since learning about the method. I'm trying to be cautious of being too hasty, while at the same time hoping not to take "forever" to make progress in it while balancing it with my main TL that I've already been working on for years (Mandarin). Ideally, I'd like to speedrun French to the point where I can start reading, but without sacrificing the listening skills and near-native ability to speak that ALG promises.

Just wondering if as native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese I can safely go ahead and consider the hours necessary to attain each level half of what's actually in the roadmap, since both are Romance languages. I also grew up listening to a ton of Spanish and can consume native media in it with very high comprehension, so that's another Romance language I have high familiarity with.

For what it's worth, at 30 hours in I'm already finding most Super Beginner and Beginner content totally comprehensible and even a bit boring sometimes. I gave a shot at listening to the Inner French podcast and I could understand the first two episodes just fine, way beyond "just the gist" despite a few words and sentences going over my ahead me here and there.

French is my personal ALG experiment since learning about the method, so I'm trying to be cautious of being too hasty, while at the same time hoping not taking "forever" to make progress in it while balancing it with my main TL that I've already been working on for years (Mandarin). Ideally, I'd like to speedrun it to the point where I can start reading, but without sacrificing the listening skills and near-native ability to speak that ALG promises.