Now that I’ve reached a high level with Spanish, it’s time for a new, personal, project for me. For the last two years everything has been Spanish, Spanish, Spanish, with no time for other things. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t have other goals and dreams.
At the same time I started with Spanish, a good friend of mine started with Mandarin Chinese. I always had a weak spot for Mandarin, but him majoring it in college made me think about my own goals about language learning. Sure, it wasn’t going to happen that I’d only learn one or two languages -if this Spanish thing worked out, I’d start learning another language- but I had other things to worry about (like learning Spanish from scratch!).
Over the past few months I’ve been thinking about what language to learn. I flirted with other Romance languages (especially Portuguese and Italian) and even did some research aboutTurkish. But no, they didn’t give me the feeling I felt when thinking about Mandarin.
Within two weeks the academic year starts in the Netherlands, and I know I’ll be busy doing lots of things for college and getting my daily portion of Spanish. But I’m also at the stage I feel comfortable with my skills and I can actually say I’m fluent at Spanish (maybe not totally near-native fluent, but with the proper input and fine tuning grammar-wise I’ll be truly fluent within the next two to three months).
So now that I can put my Spanish on cruise control, it’s time to fulfill my other dream: learning Mandarin. But this time I’m not the expert as I’ll have to do everything from scratch. That’s why I launched my new blog Mandarin-Only.com.
Spanish Only will be kept alive (OF COURSE!), but the Mandarin blog will be my newly adopted kid. So from now on it’ll be loads of Mandarin, and bits and pieces of Spanish (which isn’t bad, as I’ll have college to kick me back to Spanish on a daily basis).
Read the first post about my approach over at Mandarin-Only.com.
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@Ramses: I am happy for you and sad at the same time. Happy because you are following what you want to do. Sad because I really look forward to your no-nonsense blogs on Spanish learning. The other blog sites, well, they are not near as informative as this site. Your site got me out of my grammar book mentality and into some real Spanish, which I now enjoy. I know the Mandarin site will be as successful, but I am selfish and would prefer you only stay here. Bottom line – I am happy you are going after your dreams!
Who says I’m not staying here? This blog will stay alive and kicking, just like before
. The only difference for me is that I’ll be doing more Mandarin than Spanish, but in the end even the people here are go to benefit from this as I’ll be going through this entire learning process again.
Also, the two blogs are really different. Here I give tips on learning Spanish and actually any language, over at Mandarin Only I document the things I learn in Mandarin and the difficulties I have.
Awesome !! I’m really looking forward to reading about your new adventure from the beginning. It’s great that you feel comfortable enough in Spanish to start a new language! Mandarin’s fantastic– it’s so fun to listen to. I have some Taiwanese friends who taught me a few words– and the tones are so fun! Best of luck!
P.S. One question: Will you use Spanish as your base language to learn Mandarin? Or will you stick to Dutch/English?
I’m thinking about Mandarin -> Spanish for the first few hundred sentences, but my goal is to switch over to Mandarin -> Mandarin asap. But for every sentence I’ll need to do the translating from English myself, because most sources are Mandarin -> English.
Thank you for this site I refer to it daily as I learn Spanish. You have very good advice and I really appreciate your new sentence database. I can’t wait till I can go through it more. Is it possible for you to incorporate themes in your sentences so one could filter through different subject matters? I am inspired to learn all sorts of languages because you are showing that it is possible. I myself have hopes of learning Mandarin as well as Arabic and maybe Italian. Who knows I just like the way languages work. Keep up the good work.
This isn’t really a post to discuss the sentence database, but oh well. The first system I was using did have categories. The main problem is that no one wanted or could help me adding sentences, so I had to do everything myself. So adding sentences by hand, while defining a subject is just impossible for 5000 sentences (more to come).
I simple collected loads of sentences in a .txt file and made a script to export it all to the database. This way you have many sentences, but without subjects.
So no, I won’t be adding subjects because I don’t have the time to do that. However, I WILL add an option to export selected sentences to an Anki importable file.