Hi gang, I just wanted to say hi and introduce myself. I don't think I will post much but I will definitely check out what is going on here now and then. A major reason I decided to stop by is to read leosmith's posts which I find interesting and original. I don't really follow anyone's advice though since I don't have much time to study and my language learning tends to be ad hoc and in small spurts. As such if I try to do anything formal or intensive it tends to stress me out. Anyhow, I have been working on Mandarin for several years now mostly using courses like Teach Yourself, Colloquial, etc. I can say simple things and have a decent vocabulary but I am definitely not conversational. I have started working on characters again using Learning Chinese Characters so that I can move on to readers. I need to learn more complicated sentence patterns and doing that through pinyin and audio only is not working for me. I have studied Italian pretty intensively in the past and am pretty comfortable with it but of course I don't get much practice with it where I live (Singapore). I used to have dreams of studying other languages like Japanese and Cantonese but now don't entertain those thoughts so much. Eric
Welcome the the forum Eric. Just curious - why don't you have time to study your languages? Singapore would be a pretty good place to learn some, I would think. In case you haven't seen it yet, I keep most of my "learning philosophy" posts in the polydog home sub-forum.
Work mostly. I have relatively little time left at the end of the day. But recently I added anki to my phone to learn characters and it's made a huge difference in my productivity. Yes and no. I do pick up stuff organically but truthfully I feel like I can learn more in one week in Taiwan than I do in several months in Singapore. It's partly my own fault. I would find it weird trying to speak Chinese to a Singaporean when we have English in common even though they would probably be agreeable to it.
