#Tips for improvement

6 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

placid granite
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Hi so I dont know if anyone can relate to this: I'm a person who was born in a foreign country (brazil) with chinese parents and during most of my childhood i attended a school that taught me my mother tongue (chinese), however, i dropped out before finishing the course to its completion which placed me in a really awkward position.

Im decent at pronunciation since we established to always talk in chinese at home, but when it comes to characters and their meanings im close to being illiterate. The only ones that are fully ingrained in my brain are the fundamental ones (小，我，etc). I am unable to read a book if it doesn't have pinyin 😭 and even when it does i can't absorb its meaning completely

I've tried to do something about this countless times (me and my mom actually lol), each of them without success. Moreover, theres also the fact that I dont have any chinese friends, which would probably have helped me improve this skill

Something that is frustrating to me is how people say"practice and you will get better",i have talked in chinese with my family for my whole life, yet it never seemed to change anything?? I even went to China a considerable amount of times to visit my cousins, the visits, though, almost never paid off in terms of language improvement

So, how do I navigate this? Does anyone have a similar experience and can offer me some tips? Is there a way for me to improve or my fate was set the moment I decided to drop off that course? Sorry for the long aa text and if my grammar sucks btw

severe snow
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That’s because your family probably has ways of communicating that precede having to rely solely on connecting unfamiliar language (vocab and grammar) together.

For example I grew up in a French household. I was always told to “set the table” in French. I do not speak French and can barely read/write any basic French.

But from all the years of knowing when guests or family friends were invited over for dinner, you could tell me “set the table” in French and I’d understand you, passively, given the environment, without necessarily knowing the language.

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I’ve also been overseas to work on my language skills; it’s a journey, not a destination. What methods are you using? What is the purpose of interaction?

devout fjord
placid granite
# severe snow I’ve also been overseas to work on my language skills; it’s a journey, not a des...

What you said makes sense, but it still is weird that youre able to understand something without fully understanding it yk? Since the sentences make so much sense to me, even though reproducing them feels foreign at times. Also regarding what methods im using, Ive tried to read children's book, play games with chinese audio, watch movies in the idiom, summing up, trace back the steps I used to learn english. Maybe thats where my mistake comes from? Because chinese relies heavily on the characters and it is substantialy different from other languages...

placid granite