Thoughts on Fluyo?

Always enjoy hearing the updates!

Hey mate! Been watching your videos recently and you seem like your on a role! I have a question though as I am a beginner. I’m just getting started with the mandarin blueprint, and pronunciation. How do you approach tones and how do you practice them? Cause pinyin is pretty straightforward but listening to tones and being able to tell the difference and identify them is really hard for me?

Finally a new video!!

Ive barely studied any grammar so far, only vocab, so this gengo grammar deck looks extremely useful. I didn't know game gengo even had anki decks and I watch him somewhat often.

Is there an option to let her speak slowly.

When I saw those action figures on your shelf and your long beard i felt like "this guy knows the stuff i want to find about Japanese", then I saw how this dude was talking about my best teacher Andy who showed me how to learn Japanese with Genki the right way (because Genki is kinda strange from chapter to chapter, it lacks good grammar explanations but it's the truly Japanese book written by Japanese for us, poor souls trying to fugure out this inside-out language (beautiful and different, and that's nice)). And after all these I saw those awesome sites and started stuffing this very comprehensible input into myself ;) I have no choice but subscribe..

Keep it up!

i find that lingq is super clunky

Mandarin Blueprint seems like an amazing way to learn chinese. Wish it'd be a little cheaper. My average Polish wallet can't afford it no matter how I look at it. Also, have you tried Migaku? They support chinese and it's a complete learning/immersion tool for learning languages. Cheers.

暴露, also seldomly written as 曝露, means exposure because it implies the ancient use of 暴as 曝 (see the 日on top of the character) which means sudden or violent exposure of/to light, later with the second 日on the left added to distinguish between the meanings of 暴and曝.

It's all about having fun while doing it! Great to see the victories compounding, very inspiring. :)

我同时在学日语，咱们一起加油！

Im on level 20 just within 3 months.

加油加油！自學語言很難。

Great Channel. I do a lot of similar things.

Being able to learn that many words is very impressive and very inspiring. Keep going at your own pace and I wish you the best of luck! - From a Chinese from Malaysia

I just bought Dushu and am reading the mandarin companion books, very cool app (not available in the google store for those looking)

I am on MB level 23. Like you, I also like to read the stories on Du Chinese. I also subscribe to Lingq, but I don’t find it to be particularly useful for people like me who are learning Mandarin at an elementary level.

LingQ has a sentence mode on iOS. I’ve used it to read entire books 😂. (I needed the full sentence translation because Korean is just hard)

With your handwriting practice, are you just writing out individual characters, or are you doing whole sentences? Inspired by your example, I've started to practicing writing again, which I had stopped for a long time. I'm going through a grammar book and copying out the example sentences - two birds with one stone so to speak.

I love LingQ, but I think if you're learning any asian language lingQ is not the way to go.

¡Gracias por esta crítica!

Love that! I'm studying chinese now too, It's the most I've enjoyed studying a language. I've been consistently doing my anki (25 words a day) for about 2 months now and I'm so happy with my progress! It feels like a long time thing (aka my whole life) for me too. I speak Japanese already (N2+ after 7-8ish years), so I have the advantage of a bit more than 2000 characters, not all overlap but they help BIG time!!

I hope you continue to do Mandarin bro. You’re not one of those language learning liars on KZbin, claiming to learn a language in 1 year, etc. I respect you and I’m a true fan and I hope you achieve your goals. I’d suggest Chinese Zero to Hero. It’s geared towards the Hsk, but it’s good because it gives you some structure. Other than the late great Laoshu505000, most people who get GREAT in mandarin are those who have lived and China for years. That’s something I’ve come to realize about the Chinese language studies

I found your video from a year ago which I actually watched and commented on lol. It was a good review. Because of the price I think I'm going to pass. It sounds really good but since I studied Japanese the characters don't seem like a big issue for me anymore. They just stick when I look at them without any need for mnemonics or anything, even though they're a bit different than the Japanese ones. If you decide to go back to Japanese later on I think you'll find kanji are just not a problem for you at all too.

I've done really well with vague goals too. You see so many people talk about how terrible this is - you need to set specific goals. I get that they're trying to be helpful but many people setting specific goals fail at language learning too. It's just a weird hard hobby. If you rephrase vague goals into building habits that sounds better and people tend to be less critical. It's just vague goals though really. That said I think specific goals once in a while can be good and fun like doing a challenge. But only if you want to. I have this 5000 vocab/sentence korean deck based on a frequency dictionary which I paid for professional voice actors to record the sentences just for me and although I have had studied this deck over the many years that I've had it, I haven't finished it by any means. I keep giving up and starting over or something. Well, I decided to do a black Friday goal of basically restarting (almost) and also finishing this deck in roughly 3 months. That's a little over 50 cards per day per my math. That's a hell of a lot. But I would feel SO much better about myself if I got through this stupid deck. I shelled out a lot of cash for those voice actors! I feel you on the "hey, I'm going to be doing this for the rest of my life" type thing. I think getting good at a language means accepting it as part of your personality and essentially this means making it part of you for the rest of your life. I feel recently like my subconscious finally decided that Paul is going to be studying or using Korean in some way for the rest of his life. Recently it just feels like things click better for me and stuff and I really think that's it. I think I'm about 5 years into this language lol. I wonder if my subconscious self had known that I would be using Korean for the rest of my life from the get go if I wouldn't be fluent by now. I think I probably would be. But that's just the way it is sometimes. I think part of me for a long time was thinking lets finish Korean so we can move onto to something else! But that ain't happening folks. But I am dabbling in Chinese. It's the discount season - do you recommend Chinese blue print? I just subscribed to Du Chinese. Does it offer something different?

Don’t let the Japanese weebs get you down. If they try to put you down, they’re just losers who are projecting. Keep up the good work

i usually go with process goals over result goals when it comes to learning. i have my goal, maybe it's 10 minutes with anki, 30 minutes of reading and making an entry into my learning log each day. second to that i have a requirement rather than a goal of reviewing at least 1 anki card and reading at least 1 sentence. even if i'm dog tired and laying in bed i can do that right before i sleep in maybe 2-5 minutes. i have that requirement of myself to maintain momentum. if i skip a day it somehow ends up being skipping a month half the time. one thing that really helped me was to always do the review first then add in new words based on how i was feeling. some days get no new words but at least the review got done and i'm not forgetting things i've put effort into remembering. i usually go review cards then read/watch something and if there are new words that are interesting to me or seem useful they are the ones i'll study as new words. i've quit learning strict lists. now my learning looks more like a fractal as i follow one interesting words into another. this makes it much easier for me to maintain motivation and when i review those words i get memories of where i saw them instead of words that are disconnected. it sounds like what you're doing is getting words and then finding them in the wild which is sorta an inversion of what i'm doing. interesting stuff. cheers.

You stuck with Japanese for 2 years. That's long time motivation. So what happened? and why is Mandarin different?

If you really test these "polyglots" you will find they are not even good at any language, terrible accent and easy conversations only. Basically an useless endeavor, better to stick to 1 or 2 languages besides the native language. Myself I'm Portuguese, fluent in English and learning now French. These will be my main languages and will be enough.

you've got a great attitude there; the motivation you have, just enjoyig the language- that's gonna take you far. I saw an idiom today if you like to break words apart and see their clever logic: it's a 成語：入木三分. literally to dig the centimeters into the wood (with your brush). originally to describe powerful calligraphy, now just for any powerful writing.

Yes. The main reason for studying a language should not be that the language is easy. The main reason should be that the language is interesting to you personally. I am also doing the MB method which for me is the greatest thing since sliced bread. In case you didn‘t know, many language departments in this country are having serious enrollment issues, so it is great to know that there are people out there who care about learning another language. You deserve a medal!

Great work, man. I've recently hit 300 and flashcards are starting to get less efficient for me too, so the section of this video on flashcards hit home. This is really inspiring, and I hope you keep going!

Great vid bud, very inspiring and good shout on the 50% off on mandarin blueprint!!!

Reading/writing is something I have put off taking seriously for many years. I live in China, and I can speak Chinese, but other than here and there learning some and just picking them up by seeing them so many times (which does mean I can at least read to a degree), I've never actually taken any sort of *class* in it. I've more recently been trying to consistently focus on characters every day, with the goal of reading two books I have which are Xi you ji (Journey to the west) and A dream of Red Mansions - both entirely in hanzi with pinyin, no english except for a bit in the beginning and a few other spots to explain some things. The books are HSK5 level, and if I'm honest my HSK reading level is not there *yet* - but I bought these as a way to challenge myself while remaining interested in what I was reading - and what better than two of the four big Chinese classic novels? SO far, from looking through it, I can probably understand 70% or so - it uses 2,500 characters from HSK 5 (so it is an abridged version that changes the way things are expressed and worded - my wife is a native speaker and even SHE doesn't know all the characters in the actual, original Journey to the West novel) - so it is beyond my current capability to fully read all the 2,500 characters, but...that's kind of the point! ANYway, I don't know how easy these are to get where you live, but they're an awesome idea and I wanted to share that. It's from SinoLingua - and has a QR code you can scan on each that takes you to a page where it will read the chapters out loud to you, if you want. Another cool feature is they come with a card that you place over the page that blocks out the pinyin, so if you want to take your ability to rely on or accidentally see the pinyin underneath the characters away, you can. If you're at 750 characters, I DO think they have some versions of books that use 1,000 and 1,500 HSK characters (so you'd understand 75% of the 1,000 one, and can learn the other 25% as you go). I'd suggest going at least to 1,500 character books, since you'll run out of characters you DON'T know pretty fast if you buy the 1,000 one. The thing that annoys me about those ones under 2,000 characters or so is that they put childish illustrations everywhere, like it's meant for a kid. The 2,500 character books have no illustrations inside, so not only feel more "serious" but the lack of images takes away context clues that might let your brain "cheat" by guessing a character. You're doing great! Interesting to see what other people say about this reading/writing journey. I do love how these abridged books are handled - if you can find them, they're nice to have. Amazon, maybe?

Congrats!! 750 characters is no small feat The more you learn the more rewarding it is! Keep it up :D

There are radicals in Chinese, too! A character might have several components, but it has one radical. Keep on keeping on! Fun to keep up with your progress

Are you in Florida too? Mentioned hurricanes. The west coast of Florida got hit over and over this year.

Did you get the lifetime or monthly?

Nice work! The progress is visible!

Awesome! It seems like you are starting to acquire the language. Can't wait for the day you just speak purely Chinese on KZbin or travel around China and Taiwan speaking Mandarin Chinese.

Yall slave people and its forced on people.

No english is a language of deception. Based on european languages root words are based on evil invading people homosexuals mentality. Look at greek and rome. Evil people. Langues based on cold scarce people. They invade. The word bank hello love spell backwards is evol

Good for you! I have to say your understanding of the context is pretty accurate. And your pronunciation is actually very good, especially you are not living in China and didn't have many people to speak Chinese with. Keep up the good work! Here are a little tip I hope might be useful for you: Read the whole sentence before you play the audio, even though you don't know some of the words in the sentence. You can guess the sound & meaning of the words that you don't know. Guess the sound by the sound radical, guess the meaning by the meaning radical. It would take much longer time than repeating after the audio, and much painful, but it would help you to memorize it a lot easier. Because you always remember your guess, good guess or bad guess, all work. I used the same methods to learn English, and it really helped me a lot. Ohhh, and I hope you kind of get used to the Chinglish mindset, haha. Like, 你看看我，我看看你. You look at me, me look you=we look at each other, it indicates that the kids didn't know what to do. In Chinese, we describe a lot about what people do/environment, to indicate some sort of feeling/emotion, especially in advanced Chinese (like, ancient literature). Mulan is a very iconic female in the Chinese history, we all learned about the story in high school in China, but we learned it in the hardcore way, through ancient Chinese, which is very different from the modern Chinese. And it just reminds me that I've wrote a video script about reading Mulan in ancient Chinese but I didn't make the video.... or maybe I should.... Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story and enjoy your learning :)

Great Job! I just hit 700 yesterday. Think I'm going to slow down on new characters for a bit, while I shift my focus to immersion and speaking.

Congratulations on the Character milestone 🎉

Good job! Your pronunciation seems to be quite good, from what I could hear. Especially, as Americans tend to have a very thick accent at the beginning and struggle with a lot of initials. As a native speaker, I always recommend people learning Chinese to shadow or rather echo first exactly what they hear without looking at the pinyin or even the characters (since for many characters, you already know the tone and try to say it the way you think the tone should be pronounced). I’ve noticed that many people get stuck by focusing too much on the tone marks. You can still check afterwards. I learned Thai, which is also a tonal language, and I realized that just repeating what I heard, before obsessing over which tone it should be, made speaking much faster and easier for me. It kind of comes naturally this way. I also believe that this did wonders for my listening comprehension.

I used Mandarin Blueprint for a week. I think it's been fun and such a unique way to learn. I just wanted to try it out and see what it was all about. I don't think Ill will be continuing it though because I am enjoying learning Vietnamese more. Maybe I'll come back to it later on down the road.

How much time it's been since you started learning Chinese? Also, how would you rate you current level in terms of HSK?