It's been one of those down phases. I am just really lazy without the environment giving me a kick up the proverbial backside.

Changing things around a bit, I changed to practicing speaking skills. 

Materials - old glossika mp3 Chinese Beijing

Process - a) copy the sentences from PDFs into excel list (takes time)

b) create  srt from the mp3 GMS C (very easy and quick)

c) process the srt and mp3 in subs2srs to create individual sentences from the mp3 and the tsv file (UTF 8 )

d) to get the English sentences into the tsv file, I select all the data in the tsv file and paste into excel. Add another column on the right with the corresponding English sentence. Select all the data in excel, copy and paste back into the tsv file replacing the original data. 

e) import into Anki

f) setup the recall card showing English. Answer card is set to show the Chinese and plays audio ten times.

This way, I am practicing simple sentence construction. My spoken mandarin is a bit weird because I frequently translate in my head from both English and Cantonese to Mandarin. All of these sentenxe

I also do shadowing. After some multiple reps of sets of ten, I have been reviewing the sentences with a Mandarin speaker after practicing. I get feedback such as tone is a bit off, a word might be articulated too loudly, rhythm is off.

If comparing to starting straight away trying to be perfect with a teacher with an unfamiliar sentence, it feels more comfortable practicing with anki and then fine tuning.