Can Adults Learn Languages Like Children?
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- Опубликовано: 7 сен 2024
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Long time no see 好久不见！Our interview series with the most successful Mandarin learners is back! Learning Chinese as an adult might seem IMPOSSIBLE, but today my friend Mairead Harris is gonna tell us how it's actually quite different from learning as a child. And you don't need to listen to all those videos telling you to "learn like a kid." You’ll definitely wanna hear and implement what she has to share.
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Mairead has reached a level of mandarin all students can only dream of. She went to one of the best schools in the world to learn it, Middlebury College, and has been persisting for years as a passionate student of the language. No doubt is still learning eveyrday. This is most often what it takes to learn it to the level of being able to articulate and intellectualize the language. Incredible achievment and hope she continues to grow and teach students for many years to come.
This American lady's Mandarin is off the scale brilliant, and at every level. Very well done. Thank you.
天啊，太爱这位何老师了，太懂我们高中老师的苦了！对我的高中生来说，声调加动作真的超级有效！
我没教过高中生，只要有效的方法都值得用起来！👏
Great video....thanks.
Glad you like it!
Xiaoma is married with a Beijing girl, we couldnt expect another stuff... For whom of us that dont have the fortune to be married with a 中国女孩, just left try to talk with the 广东人 from some restaurant... 哈哈
Huh??
Yeah, Part 2!
Yay Part 2 and 3 both are live now🙌
Any recommendations for older adults 65 plus to learn Mandarin
跟上令人惊叹的工作 congrats 🎉 I love your channel, gao xing wo ái ni stay blessed and fantastic!
teacher give a guider, then let students do by themself, "wisbok" style exercises are helpful to Chinese language learner.
I'm curious how the gesture technique can work with abstract words, like "taste". I think Mandarin Blueprint has some kind of system for memorizing tones based upon a "scene", I think. I haven't taken their course, but they have some promotional materials that suggest that this is what they do. One student said that it's effective, and that you only use it until the word has become ingrained, and at that point you can dump the whole scene from your memory.
The gesture technique might help a bit at the beginning or for some words with specific content, but I really doubt that it can make the main learning/teaching method for long-term serious adult language learning. Since the learners already have a whole new sound system AND a written system to learn, why bother to make an extra system to memorize?
@@RitaChinese Yeah, the only thing is that the tones are almost completely arbitrarily "assigned"; there's no logic to it, so having a memory aid of some kind in the beginning seems to make some sense. Something that locks the tones into a picture or a body movement of some kind, using other body senses to tie it into your brain's network. Even if it's only for a few weeks until the tones are locked to the word.
It would be nice to see some study that compares these methods to rote memorization (and other techniques, such as listening to and speaking the word 20 times a day for several days) to see how effective they are after, say, the 6th month.
I guess there's also a motivational factor. Perhaps making up the movement or scene is more entertaining than repetition. It might make practice more enjoyable, and therefore more addictive, or at least not a study method that students tend to find boring.
@@yeroca The video mentioned that our brains appear to be trained to forget the tone marks that are written above the pinyin. It appears to be that when our western minds remember a word, we tend to imagine just the letters on the way (because we're used to doing that quickly), but not the diacritics. An attempt from 100 years ago was the Gwoyeu Romatzyh, where the diacritics actually become part of the spelling of the word. However, the rules were quite complicated, so it was abolished. Research also didn't back up that it produced better learning outcomes. With today's unicode tables, I was experimenting with using different characters for different tones in pinyin, for example using an upper-case letter for first tone, a greek letter for the second tone, an inverted letter for the tird tone, etc. Something that makes the tone more intrinsically memorable when working with the pinyin than the accents that the brain appears to have a hard time to remember. I'll see how that works out, not too much practice with it yet. I liked the gesture approach, but it is probably quite high cost when thinking of a large vocabulary. The Hmong approach would add a -b for a first tone, a -v for a second tone, a -m for a third, and a -j for a fourth tone, but I think that doesn't do the trick within pinyin but would rather clutter it up. Somehow there doesn't appear to be a really good compromise. Another method out there is having the capitalisation follow the sound of the word, like DA, dA, da, or Da. The colour approach also doesn't seem to help memorizing that much. In either case, one probably simply has to put in the reps and there is no quick fix. Another approach would be to partiularly rehearse syllables with the same sound but different tone in contrast to each other, as the brain can remember differences between things better than ingesting an isolated fact from scratch. So sorting a big vocabulary list for pinyin and revisiting that might be of help too.
Maybe the gesture approach has some merit in showing us that the tone is easier remembered with tone production rather than syllable memorization, as it appears to be more intrinsically linked to a motion. That would mean when one studies Chinese a lot via reading, listening, and working with texts not so much via speaking, remembering the tones appears to be much harder, and the tones really are more of a speaking skill that the "inner voice" then internalises when thinking of the word. So speaking the syllables out loud while learning, or having small example sentences for each word that one speaks out aloud along with the words (and memorizes with the "melody") might even be the best help.
@@GwennDana A very thoughtful response with some ideas that hadn't occurred to me before. For example, I hadn't considered that the color approach is used to aid memorization, and as you said, the colors are not memorable for me. The other approaches sound interesting as well.
In the end,, pinyin and other non-hanzi written systems are only crutches until we can ingrain the word. So I guess the question is which system is the most effective in both the short and long term. My sense is that listening to the word in isolation and in sentences and shadowing it is probably the most effective, but I have no stats or studies to back up that guess.
The MB method teaches a variation of the memory palace. I'm doing their course now, you learn word, meaning, tone, and character at the same time. It works surprisingly well, often I'll recognize a character but not recall the pronunciation or meaning until I think back to my scene.
Good video, but the music ruins it.
The thing that always works for adults is: sign up for Rita's course!
:D
Can’t argue with that😆
The newest Duolingo format seems to teach language like children, there's almost no grammar explaination.
yeah, its the best way to learn if you have time to spend, very slow but makes sure you get it right, the thing i dont like is that they dont put grammar explanations in some courses, sometimes you just need it
Duolingo is next to useless for actual language learning
The chinese course is not very good. I could do the quiz and skip right to the end.
Wow there’s an interesting thread about Duolingo Mandarin haha. I’ve heard its Chinese course is not the best in the world, but always curious about what exactly they may need to improve.
@@RitaChinese not so good for remembering characters 😆
yes, they can
Makes me very sad. This college is for American elites. I could never afford such an expensive education.
Instead of complaining and feeling sad, figure out how you can raise the funds. For me it was starting a small business.
My secret is skritter