Benny's first video attempt to speak Mandarin: 2 weeks after starting to learn

http://fluentin3months.com
Captions in English, Traditional Chinese (written by native) and Simplified Chinese (converted automatically from traditional).
There are many stepping stones to fluency, and this stage is one of them.
Hardly my most interesting video, but you can see my first ever attempt at speaking Mandarin on camera. Obviously lots of issues to work on, like tones/pronunciation, comfort with the words, and a need to let them flow together and not need to think so much. But it's a start :)

Rather than being spontaneous, I had a native prepare this script for me in advance, and learned what I needed to. You can see me refer to my notes for two words I had forgotten, but otherwise I'm genuinely thinking of the words themselves, and hope having made this video and the pressure to produce it will give me a boost in this early stage!

[Edit: I'm getting a lot of trolls for this mission, so let me make it clear that I will DELETE your comment if you go off topic, mention people or websites that have NOTHING to do with my mission, post too many comments or are unnecessarily mean. I'm putting myself out there, by making this video so early in my language learning progress, and am not interested in dealing with Internet cowards and time wasters.]

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Taiwan
• Chinese
• Mandarin
• foreigner
• white
• Irish
• beginner
• first attempt
• slow

[Konfurious]

I know you are still at an early phase, but you should work on the tones, they are really important.

And if you have words, pronounce them as one word and don't overstress the tones and look at the tone sandhi, suoyi for example is spoken as 2, 3 and yinwei is one word, there shouldn't be a pause in there.

And do yourself a favor and learn Hanzi, Chinese without them is useless and hard to learn.

Differentiating between 的 地 and 得 for instance is not possible without them, but still important.

[irishpolyglot]

@Konfurious "I know you are still at an early phase" Based on the comment, I don't think you do :P

The whole problem with the video is that I was thinking too much about tones. I'm speaking faster when I let some imperfect ones slide through and I'm learning to improve speaking much more efficiently since I've stopped studying Hanzi to come back to later & focus on speaking.

"Differentiating between 的 地 and 得 for instance is not possible without them" Wrong. Forget about context?

[PolyglotPal]

非常好的中文！ What you're doing is not easy. Keep up the great work dude :) How many characters do you think you know at this point?

[irishpolyglot]

@PolyglotPal Thanks for the encouragement! I'm not actually counting the characters I learn - I'll be writing about this on my blog. Checked out your videos and you're doing amazing :D Keep up the great work!

[ninjakid165]

haha i can't wait to see the before and after ! Is there a translation anywhere?

[irishpolyglot]

@ninjakid165 Click the captions! They are in original Chinese and English ;)

[dispacct1]

Watching this video made me face a truth that is unpleasant for me to recognize: Ever since I started "learning" Japanese, which I refer to as my favourite foreign language, I have not once attempted to ACTUALLY TRY TO SPEAK IT. Watching this video has inspired me to stop my bullshit excuses and just bloody speak it. I'm gonna start talking in Japanese all day, looking up every word I need. I'm excited to begin.

[irishpolyglot]

@lwtproject So sick of people overusing the word "impossible".

Thanks for your discouraging and totally unhelpful comment. I'll add it to the stack of "ignore asap".

[celmaitaredinoras]

On your blog you once said that you're an American guy and this stuff with achieving fluency in 3 months it's all fake and all you do it's to study phonetics and stuff and then make a video in which you claim you can hold a conversation in X-language....Why prolong this lie? You already told the world the truth yourself! Vlad

[Guitarstratdude]

Please respond! How id you learn so much vocabulay in just two weeks? I am learning Modern Greek, and lack of vocabulary is really holding me back.

[zakyzeek]

@dispacct1 That's exactly what I do! It's really helpful! But always be prepared for dissapointment. There's no avoiding the bastard, so just learn to not let it bother you.

[aksumfan]

I'm impressed my how much vocabulary you managed to accrue within your first two weeks.

[oldschoolwaverider]

@aethelwulf19 Yeah that was my intention, a neutral tone. Looking back at my post I've made a few tonal mistakes I think "to write characters" is xie3 zi5 rather than xie2 zi5. I should really double check these things before I post. whooops ~

[aethelwulf19]

@oldschoolwaverider

ne5

I wasnt aware of a fith tone. Is that neutral?

[aethelwulf19]

@irishpolyglot

Damn, you are good. I just commented on your other video to try out chinese.

Im impressed. I studied Chinese in university and we only practiced syllables and tones for two weeks.

I think you speak more than I did after my first year!

[rewtaah]

Fantastic effort, keep it going man...