Shadowing

More morning shadowing. Definitely not as smooth as yesterday.

Lots of shadowing.

Shadowing this morning and more speaking with myself.

Talking with myself in the car. I can this challenge has improved my fluency. The beginning of my car exercises were pretty rough, but now I feel like I can keep a constant flow of thoughts for the most part, unless there’s something I don’t know how to express in Chinese.

Shadowing on Du again.

More Du shadowing

Shadowing with Du Chinese. Long stretches are pretty mentally exhausting. The last story I tried I noticed my pronunciation and ability to follow degrading so I’m going to take a break and try again. The sentences that trip me I will play again and again and mimic them until I can do them perfectly. The last two stories I did I have pretty much mastered by now.

Talking in the car again and shadowing on Du Chinese. I am now sold on Du Chinese. I could spend hours on it. I used to think Chairman’s Bao was better but the stories are just way more interesting and diverse on Du since it’s not just news. The highlighted text feature as you listen is a huge help as well as being to play the recording at any word you click on. Definitely makes shadowing much more easier.

Talking to myself in the car and more shadowing! I’m more tired today so definitely a lot harder...

Shadowing in the morning and talking to myself in the car again.

Talking to a friend. Started in English but we later switched to Chinese. We ended up talking for over an hour, but I probably only got 15 minutes of speaking time since he loves to talk, so I did manage to get quite a lot of listening practice in.

Talking to myself in the car and ended today with shadowing more Du Chinese. Shadowing materials in the morning gives me good material to talk to myself about. I recently listened to Scott Young’s book on Ultra Learning which he talked about active recall vs. passive recall. How closing the textbook and summarizing it is vastly superior than taking notes or passively reviewing. It made realize this can be applied to language learning. We can so get caught up in the slickness of SRS, that we might spend more time reviewing flash cards then actually engaging with the language. I’m trying to get away from Anki more and engage in more “organic learning”, such as shadowing and speaking to myself to impress the input I get from reading and listening. This approach of summarizing a text or audio seems to have great potential, so I plan on continuing to use it.

Shadowing Du Chinese stories.

Talking to myself again in the car. I think I found a correlation between the days I do shadowing in the morning to the days I speak better. But it’s bizarre, today I shadowed this morning and speaking was so much effortless. It’s almost like shadowing warmups up the brain and gets it in Chinese mode. Maybe I I’m over analyzing it, but I’m going to keep experimenting.

I found one of the few male recordings for a story on Du Chinese. There are male voices in the dialogues but it’s hard to hard find longer recordings in my voice range.

Talking with myself. Pretended to do a podcast on the way back from work. It’s surprisingly easier maybe because how much podcasts I listen to.

Shadowing Du Chinese.

Talking to myself on the drive to and back from work. It’s funny how much my speaking ability fluctuates. Yesterday felt way more smooth and I had a continual flow going, but today was much more difficult due to being tired.

Du Chinese shadowing before I went to bed and then recorded a video.

Shadowed this morning, then talked to myself in the car on the way to work. Lunchtime I finished reading 谁生活得更美好 out loud. I tripped over a few words and had to occasionally look up the words I haven’t bothered learning yet because they only appeared once. Then I mimicked some spoon fed audio on the way back. I actually took a break from this deck because I feel the words were getting less frequent and I weren’t really learning them, so I started mining sentences on my own which seems to be a lot more effective. But the audio files are still useful.

Read out load 谁生活得更美好 and the filmed a video of me speaking Chinese with myself. I plan on a doing a video diary everyday during the challenge to track my progress.

Shadowing. It’s so satisfying when you not only get the tones right when shadowing, but also hit the right intonation and accent.