Walking in the Chinese fog

The walk goes on; this is about as much as I can say about my experience of learning Chinese. It's a long walk. And it doesn't feel like a light stroll.
I'm walking very clumsily in the fog, hitting my toes on words and phrases that stand in the way of comprehension, stumbling over prepositions and conjunctions, or are they verbs? The characters are no longer a barrier/It's not that the characters are a barrier anymore, as long as I can find their sound or two and a basic meaning. Sometimes they come with a surprising diversity of meanings. That's when the trouble starts..
I seem to be grasping only the very basic patterns of subject, verb and object, with occasional adjectives and adverbs fitted in, but the rest is part of a dense fog, or is it a mist that might disappear as soon as the sun comes out? I have no idea how much longer this fog will last.
After about half a year of study, Chinese seems a little less intractable. Yet I feel like a baby that isn't yet ready to babble its first sentences. Yes, I can pronounce and understand recurring words and phrases, even write almost 400 characters. As soon as I try to form simple statements, however, I am lost for words, phrases, word order, collocations, particles and what not.
Is it useless to try to write at this point? I hope not, because I feel the urge to express myself in my new language even though I make terrible mistakes. Could I avoid them using grammar books? Corrections have always taught me a lot. So even if my short texts must seem like an insult to native speakers, I still have to write from time to time.
How would I proceed to speaking the language otherwise? At the moment I am happy if I succeed in catching a whole sentence when listening. At first I hear a familiar phrase or two I have practised using flashcards, maybe I've also mastered writing the characters, and together with a few particles they form a pattern that I can now finally understand when I hear it. From there to using the sentence in speaking it will be a long way.
I know that I will stammer and struggle, grasp for words, mispronounce, barely making myself understood. Native speakers will have to be very patient when speaking with me. I will thank them in advance, but I will need to try out what has finally stuck from all the listening and reading and writing corrections.
As I continue my walk in the fog, I hope to find some signposts. What I like about this way of learning Chinese is that it is unlike anything I have tried out before. Without any previous knowledge of a related language I am virtually thrown back to the state of an infant learning their first language from their surroundings. Of course, I have the benefit of being able to use other/additional resources, to write and learn through the channel of other languages; thus I hope to speed up my progress to basic proficiency.
I understand that I have to write badly before I can write reasonably well, just as I will have to speak badly before I can claim to "speak Mandarin". Any other way wouldn't be as much fun.
(Thanks to Steve Kaufmann begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting for the simile of the "fog"!)

(corrected by http://www.lingq.com/profile/Jezsh/)

English at LingQ

 

Comments

[Kommentiert von: DebbieScott39]

The problem is you, the issue is not you