The threshold hypothesis states that there may be a level of proficiency that once attained, enables the attriting language to remain stable. After perusing the Wikipedia a bit and reading about language acquisition and loss, I came upon the previous term. I realized that this is my goal for my Chinese studies.

I find it interesting that each of you are quite advanced in your second (hmmm…actually it’s second for none of you, how do I say in 30 words or less, the language that is not primary) langauages and so the concept of all of you having reached some sort of stable threshold may apply.

How do each of you feel about being at a ‘threshold’ where there is some stability to your Chinese (or English for Jenny) where loss would not be quick once out of the language environment. How could one measure this for oneself? Are there indicators of this level? Are there specific ways of learning to get to this? Is fluency and pronunciation more stable once at their thresholds, in comparison to vocabulary or listening skills or reading/writing?

Anyway I was thinking about Aunty Sue’s last post… Aunty Sue don’t be discouraged! Your dilemma reminds me of my Russian lessons, where my tutor would play videos or songs and ask, “Can you pick up some of the words?” and instead of admitting the truth and shaking my head no, I just assumed a neutral blank look on my face. It was about 1.5 years into the formal lessons that I began the arduous task of being able to understand spoken Russian… which I *wish* had been emphasized more at the beginning. (Russians are SO into grammar, and conversation is just incidental.) So that’s why I’m just listening, listening, listening to Chinese now. The aural comprehension will definitely be there as you keep at it. (Unfortunately no shortcut, just a lot of exposure over time…) And there are lots of people in your boat, but they probably don’t have the desire or courage to post about it.

One thing that works for me is listening to Chinese as I’m falling asleep… something happens in your brain and you can understand it better. (Maybe the worry or the “trying hard to understand” inhibition is lost.) In fact an Australian person described a memorable incident of this– that explorer named Robin (I forget her name)– the one who rode a camel across the Outback– another time she was traveling with camel herders in India and trying to pick up their language (and feeling very frustrated), and one night as she was falling asleep she felt that suddenly all the barriers to understanding were gone, it was like all the asphalt covering her brain was removed and all the words, instead of bouncing off the asphalt, were sinking into the fertile soil, and she could understand the whole conversation that was going on around the campfire. Unfortunately the next day the effect was lost. But it was like a harbinger of what was to come… when she eventually was able to communicate with the Indian herders.

Maybe drinking 2 glasses of wine would help reach this state also?

Also I’ve found it helpful (in remembering what I think I’ve learned but actually haven’t)– to make a recording of myself on tape, saying the English expression and then pausing to let the listener (myself) fill in the Chinese, and then reading on tape the correct answer. Whew! Recording the “correct answer” in Chinese really makes me pay attention to tones, and when you play back your own bloopers on tape it is more obvious than when you say them into the air. Ken mentioned something about having problems with two 2nd tones in succession and I hear myself saying them as 2nd and 1st tone. Anyway. It’s just a low-tech way to make my own crude home-produced audio course. It helps capture little interesting asides that I see or hear and want to remember– such as “zhe shi4 wo3 zuo2 tian1 mai3 de shu1″ This is the book I bought yesterday. What a weird way of saying it. I saw it in a dictionary sample sentence and thought– I don’t want to forget this! Put it on tape!! I’m sure Chinese is just trying its best to find its way into my brain, if I can only find out where the entrance door is so I can open it…

That’s just my way though. When I started first grade, I hated school and my great consolation was to take home our first-grade reader and read the stories in it. It helped me forget my dread of class the next day. It also helped me skip first grade. (Then I was even more upset.) In third grade I went to school in a faraway town (20 miles away, like a thousand miles to my mind) and when I would first arrive in class and miss my mom and start to cry, I’d open a book and start to read (I especially remember “The Bully of Barkham Street” ), and it had an immediate teddy bear effect and tears would stop! So now that I can make my way through an easy story in Chinese it helps me, ironically, to forget about the Chinese language and feel more consoled. Yes one does need lots of encouragement and hopefully de-emphasis of conscious learning process in the beginning. (But this being Chinesepod, learning process will ever be emphasized )

Thanks in advance

[quote] How many times do you listen to each lesson? I’m not one for revision myself, but I think I would tend to listen to each one several times. Perhaps we could step up the number of suitable popdcasts… Let me see about that one. [quote]

I would say if the show’s are interesting (Ones that aren’t have a format that being with ‘mono’.) I listen at least 3-4 times. Usually I will listen the first time casually, then later in the day once again hitting the pause/rewind button a lot, another time after I have looked at the transcript, review exercises. I like trying to figure out as much as I can w/o seeing the transcript. Then a few days later I’ll reload it onto the mp3 player for another listen. Then it goes into the 3-4 random previous podcasts which I put onto the mp3 player daily.

I think dialogues and the realitively simple chatting holds my interest the longest over time and I seem to ‘hear’ new words over time. I notice that in the intermediate lessons a new word is often said in some form or another over 15 -20 times, whereas in Advanced shows words get said on the order of 5-8 times, and often just with a kind of definition-kind of explanation, or an explanation using other words that I don’t know. I don’t find any particular words in the advanced show harder to remember, I think it’s more the format. You know–vocab overload.

Your Epod casts this past week have not included Jenny/Chinese—not sure if that’s just a May day holiday production lag, but this along with Jpod gone takes down overall new daily input for me (and yes I’m going out A LOT these days), looking forward, if you could free up the sample clips in the review exercises, or allow some sort of play area where listeners could help mix/match, generate new content, then we’d be talking W2.0 wouldn’t we.

My Mp3 player is loaded with it’s ONE new show, going out for lunch and about town now. BTW, I tried some input from some other learn-Chinese podcasts, tried’em, dropped them. Cpod still the BEST. Cheers.

BTW AuntySue, You’re the BEST AuntySue I know. In language learning don’t compare, I’d shoot myself trying to be like John, and the 1.5 year old toddlers know grammar better than me, what Chinese have you taught your parrots lately?

Pets — great topic for a lesson!

Lesson length — Call me slow, but for the first couple of lessons (only!) there’s too many words for someone who is completely naive. It took me a week before I could pronounce and remember hello, one week to remember and six weeks to get my tongue around goodbye. By the time I’d finished claiming to be or not be American/German/Whatever I was consuming whole lessons before breakfast.

My problem with Chinese is that I never understand anything of the dialogue at the beginning. “Don’t worry, just try to get the gist of it.” Well I never could. Not the merest trace of a gist, which I suppose makes me really stupid. Occasionally I could muster a guess, always quite wrong, because there are no words that I know. It’s better if I fast forward to the translation chat in order to avoid feeling inadequate already before I reach that part. Maybe that part has more meaning when one’s vocabulary becomes larger.

My other problem with Chinese, as a beginner, is that I find no confidence boosters. Everyone else can pick up an easier podcast, or talk to and help more naive students. I tiptoe around here selectively avoiding any confidence snuffers, because there’s no antidote (ten confidence boosters) at my level. I have some minutes, a few times a week, not the hours per day that some invest, therefore my time is stretched longer and I’ll be advancing only very slowly so I need to make adjustments. I’m looking for other ways to get confidence boosters and protect myself from confidence snuffers, and I think those ways will have to be external to Chinesepod. One is to work on my own from a traditional book tracking progress however small, and another is to form the habit of stepping away immediately when my linguistic self esteem takes a blow, go do something easy like turn a cabriole leg or play a concerto or build a mail server. At the stage when the subject area is a bit less foreign to one’s experience, there begins the potential to be independently motivated and self-rewarding. Reaching that stage successfully depends on the comfort level found leading up to it. I wouldn’t mind being way down below the rest of the class on the odd occasion, but it becomes wearisome. At the moment the only class of equals I can find is the class of one student.

How many times do you listen to each lesson? I’m not one for revision myself, but I think I would tend to listen to each one several times. Perhaps we could step up the number of suitable popdcasts… Let me see about that one.

Haruka is working on her master’s degree (in economics) at Fudan university. Meanwhile, Steven Shen has just opened a pet shop - no, seriously. The ‘whole pet thing’ is taking off around here and Steven plans to tame it, as it were.

Mike, I think it is possible to make the elementaries longer. Good suggestion. As to the level adjustments, I think John P is the man.