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71. How to Use The Most Common Character in Chinese 的

2020-01-21

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欢迎光临! Welcome!

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The Mandarin Blueprint Podcast focuses primarily on The Mandarin Blueprint Method online curriculum. Creators Luke Neale & Phil Crimmins answer questions and comments, discuss topics related to China and Mandarin learning, and have special guests.

0:14 Affiliate Link & Google Reviews

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2:33 Grammar Point

#GW-Helper-Possession-助词-的

我的儿子吓呆了。

wǒde érzi xià dāi le

My son was scared senseless.

我早上骂了我的儿子。

wǒ zǎoshang mà le wǒde érzi

I scolded my son this morning.

我明白你说的话。

wǒ míngbai nǐ shuō de huà

I understand what you said.

桌子上的勺子是你的吗？

zhuōzi shàng de sháozi shì nǐde ma?

Is the spoon on the table yours?

11:44 Miscellaneous

XIAO TIAN BY COMMUNITY

Is it ok to have a gap between Anki review and the course lessons? For example, I just finished lesson 29 in the foundation course but I am only in lesson 19 or 20 in my Anki. The gap is getting wider because creating props and making movies is happening fairly quickly now. I read all of the sample sentences, conversations, etc. but I’m still going through the lessons much faster than I can review the flashcards. I really don’t want to slow my momentum, but should I give the lessons a break until I catch up with flashcards?

Thank you for the awesome support, as always.

15:18

MAKAI ALLBERT BY COMMUNITY

Just a quick suggestion! I think it would be great, and interesting if you guys had maybe like an anki deck, or even just a podcast where you teach a few chengyu? They have a lot of cultural and historical significance, and also… you can impress your Chinese friends. Just a thought..

16:45

DAN BY COMMUNITY

Hi. I saw you have the standard pinyin chart. Is there a modified chart of how the actors and sets map to standard pinyin?

ACTORS – Facial Mnemonics to Learn Pinyin Initials

HMM Pinyin Chart – Why Is it Different?

17:24

TYSON HOFFMANN BY EMAIL

Every once in a while some of my author friends float me texts to correct before publication. I have an eye and an ear for what sounds right. What’s strange is that I can’t stand grammar and my head gets muddled when Chinese teacher’s fill up the boards with more and more grammar patterns and rules. I totally ignored English grammar as a student because I was just a rebellious kid who had planned on being a professional skateboarder. Trying to get to Chinese fluency through relearning English grammar and principles and applying them to ideas like Stative Verbs, Auxiliary Verbs, Directional Compounds, etc., is just too much. This is why I appreciate the idea of Comprehensible input and spaced repetition. Only if I hear something repeated enough times in a certain context does it “stick” and can then I get a unconscious feel for it.

If I ever get out to your part of China (I’ve never been so far to the west) I’ll pay y’all a visit.

21:24

BRETT YOUNG BY EMAIL

Thank you for the response. After listening to your podcast for the last several months, you have helped me to not be as concerned with reaching a certain HSK level. I think for most of us the HSK is just a way to check our progress, but with Mandarin Blueprint progress is easy to discern without any type of test or certificate.

I also sent over some questions about remembering words that you did address on the podcast. Since then, I have noticed others have had similar questions. I think the thing that helped me was to finally get some perspective. In the early stages of the course, we are just being introduced to the words and we really won’t “learn” them until we are seeing them in context later. Along those lines, I did have one suggestion for the course. Especially in the early stages of the course, on the level reviews instead of showing all of the words that we “know”, maybe you could say they are words we have been “introduced to” or “are now familiar with”. I know you are excited to show how much progress we have made, but when I hear someone say that I should “know” a word, if I really don’t “know” the word fully and how it is used in context, then I think I have missed something and need to go back again and try to learn everything about the word until I understand it fully. This can make me feel very frustrated and lost when that happens for a lot of words.

I have fallen off the wagon or is it on the wagon (Seinfeld reference) with regards to Chinese for the last two months and have not really studied at all. I do still listen to the podcast and the last few podcasts have inspired me to take the pressure off trying to learn at a certain rate and just find the joy of learning Chinese again with your course. I can’t remember who said it, but the comment was that you can learn anything if you get rid of the time goals and just try to enjoy what you are doing.

29:20

TYSON HOFFMANN BY EMAIL

Yeah. His conflict is that he’s in a class introducing new characters each week and he wants to benefit from your method, but he’s still got to keep up with his course work. He wanted to find a complete prop list to see you recommend for each prop so that he could start applying them in his class studies. The idea of sitting through a video for each lesson just to run through them so that he can see your props and then start applying them on his own was a bit discouraging. He didn’t realize that you “take the training wheels off” at one point and that there are less videos as you progress.

I too found this very slow in the beginning because I already know hundreds of traditional characters but I’ve decided to pause my regular classes and focus on laying TMBM foundation and seeing where it leads me.

I’ve come to see that the guys who simplified the characters sometimes switched out a more complicated sound components for an easier-to-write sound components and so the props don’t have the same consistency as you give us in TMBM. It’ll take a bit of thinking to restructure your method in a way which introduces components in an earlier order.

Though I prefer the traditional characters, knowing the simplified will probably be more useful for me in the long run and so now I’m just making notes of the differences and not worrying too much about memorizing the traditional ones.

32:16

KENT BROECKELMAN BY EMAIL

Greetings Phil & Luke,

First, my apologies, as I did not remember getting the first email asking for an interview. I will definitely do a podcast with you guys! I just want to get a little further to be able to say more about how great your course is. Trust me, you have no bigger fan!

Just as a background, I work for a Chinese company in Hong Kong. I came here in December of 2016. I was only going to stay for 2 years, so didn’t really worry about learning Chinese, just thought I would pick-up what I could. I didn’t worry about Cantonese (and still don’t, as you don’t need it in Hong Kong). After 2 years, my boss asked me to stay. I asked him for Chinese classes, and they were absolutely horrible. He paid for 2 semesters and I hated them and was so happy when I would have a work trip so I could miss class. I truly got nothing out of it. In fact it made me want to learn less than wanting to learn more. When I stumbled on your method, and you guys talked about how you also had been through classes and how they were a “false friend”, I decided to give you a try. Hopefully in a few months, I will be able to say “and the rest is history” except I’ll say it in Mandarin!

Send me another reminder in a month, and we will set up a time to do a podcast.

Best Regards,

Kent

35:20

KIKA BISOGNO BY EMAIL

Hi guys!

Although I have been learning Chinese on my own for the last 5 years (or more), I decided to start from scratch with you because I still have trouble remembering either characters or meanings or pronunciations or tones, which is very annoying, especially when I try to do some reading. So, I had been searching for a method to help me better retain all the information about each character. I’ve tried a whole bunch of repetition apps but then I realized endless repetitions without context is really of no use.

So, I can truly say that I’m having LOTS OF FUN going through the motions of your technique. I am so invested creating my crazy scenes/stories, with the actors, the sets, props, etc. that the characters/words get virtually engraved in my mind. I hope to continue until I learn to speak as nicely as Luke & Phil