Benny’s first video attempt in Mandarin: 2 weeks after starting
Full disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. ?
From the blog’s origin era (2009–2014), kept as lived proof of the method. See all the missions.
[Captions in English, Traditional Chinese (written by a native speaker) and Simplified Chinese (automatic conversion). If you live in China and YouTube is blocked, check out this video on Youku.]
As I've explained in great detail before, uploading a video of yourself speaking just after you've started to learn a language can be very beneficial.
So, with that in mind, a couple of days ago I asked my Chinese teacher (I'm getting private lessons for now) to translate a script containing everything I would say if I were giving a tour of my home in a language I speak fluently. I wanted to explain complex things, such as replacing my laptop with a desktop and not really using my fridge. She wrote it up for me in Chinese (which I used for the captions) and in pinyin. Since then, I've been studying the pinyin to learn all the new vocabulary and memorising the lines themselves. This video is the result of that!
Before anyone jumps in and nitpicks, I'll clarify that no, I don't force locals to listen to me speak like this for 10 minutes. I actually speak better and faster than this when ordering food and the like, since I only have to remember one phrase, not an entire script, and I don't have a camera (and ultimately thousands of eyes) on me 🙂
I have a LOT of room for improvement (after recording it, I noticed several obvious mistakes myself), but since people have requested more video updates from different stages of my progress, it's only fair that I share this! It's also a full 10 minutes long, as far as apartment tours go… even though it's the smallest place I've lived in for 14 years! So I will certainly forgive you if you don't make it all the way through 🙂
Obviously this video is scripted. I managed to memorise the whole thing apart from 2 or 3 words, for which you saw me glance at my notes. It's been an excellent mini-project for burning this particular vocab into my memory, and it forced me to start speaking complex sentences beyond ordering food etc. quicker than I would by letting it “happen naturally”. As well as learning the vocab, I've gotten a sense of typical sentence structure and a better understanding of tones (even if I can't reproduce them so well yet), since I wanted to understand every aspect of what I was going to say.
Since I am only two weeks into learning the language, I'd be very happy to hear whether native speakers can understand me most of the time without reading the captions. I'll work on improving my pronunciation and getting more comfortable with speaking. As you can see, I'm thinking too much, especially about the tones, but this is just a stepping stone. Fast progress or bust! 😉
Any thoughts? Let me know in the comments!
Social