learning Chinese

I have been seriously slacking on learning Mandarin. I am committing myself to studying at least 30 minutes every day from now on. This seems like a manageable amount of time each day (not like I'm that busy anyway), but not so much that I will cover a ton of material and then never remember. I'm not great at remembering what I learn, kind of funny like the opposite of the Chinese, who like to memorize things but not really learn/comprehend.

The only downfall of my plan is that in August I move to Quanzhou, where they speak Taiwanese Hokkien. In China, each area has its own dialect and they are completely unintelligible to each other, not at all like accents in the US; they are basically different languages. So everything I learn here, will essentially be of no use to me for 12 months starting in August. Somewhat frustrating.

I am also stuck between two different learning approaches, slow with great accuracy versus faster with less accuracy. My TA has been teaching me to speak very slowly and get all the pronunciation and the tones completely accurate. She's not interested in teaching at all though, so I don't think that was really a strategic move. When I speak, Chinese usually have a hard time understanding me. After I repeat a time or two, they often understand and say I have good pronunciation, but I really speak too slowly to function.

Someone shared a link with me to the blog of a guy that learns languages in three months, and I was very interested to see the video of his progress after studying Mandarin for one and a half months. He choose the same slow approach to speech. There were TONS of comments on his video and approach to speaking, and they seemed to be split 50/50 about which is better, slow with great accuracy versus faster with less accuracy. I am inclined to say that faster with less accuracy is better at this point.

My mom is learning Mandarin as well back in that States (she's frickin' adorable, she asked if it was ok with me if she learned). She studies a lot more, has tried a bunch of different learning approaches (books, online courses, etc.) and is probably much better than me, which is somewhat embarrassing. But she told me about this program that libraries in the States have to teach languages, and you just need a library card to use it. I recently started using it and it takes the fast with less accuracy approach. It doesn't tell you the tones of each word outright, but there are hash marks above words that give the indication, the audio is good, and if needed you can record your voice and compare your voice pattern with that of the Chinese speaker. My biggest problem with this is that it is so far from what my TA has been teaching me that I have a hard time reconciling things she has taught me with the way the program teaches me. Also, thank goodness I've been here a while and I know what's useful and what isn't. The program was not written for someone looking to learn practical speech for daily life; there is a lot of extraneous speech that I don't need and don't bother to learn. I typically take one or two lines from each lesson. My favorite thing yet is this:

Super useful, lol.

With everything that I am learning, I am not studying pinyin at all. Pinyin basically takes Chinese and puts it into Latin characters so Westerns can read it. To read it you essentially learn a new written language. But not Chinese. It's definitely easier to learn and read than Chinese, and if you can read it you can pronounce things correctly, but I find that in daily life the only thing it would be useful for is reading street names. Most things have Chinese writing and English writing, not pinyin. I'm definitely open to being convinced otherwise, but at the moment I don't see it being an important focus for me.