Back after a long hiatus.

Didn’t do anything most of 2024. I lost the rhythm of learning and totally dropped it concentrating on other projects.

 I did travel to Chengdu again in August and needed to socialise a bit. Predictably, my mandarin really had gone down. There were quite a few Cantonese speakers at the event so I was able to fall back on that. However, more mandarin ability would have been great to mingle with the solely Mandarin speakers.

Roll on to last November and I thought of starting learning again but doing something different. After all, when repeating the same methodology and getting the same results (I.e. lack of progress, frustration and stopping starting ad nauseum), one needs to somehow break out of that cycle.
 

After reading some of the reviews in this forum, I looked at LTL’s program and pricing structure. Past experience taught me that I probably hadn’t had enough exposure to a critical level of mandarin during a week. Reading some of the posts on this forum, I decided to give it a go with LTL. The package equates to doing about four lessons a week. As I have a job that gives very irregular hours, the pricing point makes it attractive that if I suddenly have to cancel at short notice, I don’t feel bad about it. Frequency would give me a better chance of getting a feel and the rhythm of the language.

 I just went ahead with a leap of faith and booked the 100hour package. I started on HSK 3 for review and listening and speaking practice. So far I have done about 45 sessions over ten weeks and so far, it’s been very good for me for a number of reasons:
 

a. I have never taken classes with other people prior to this and it helps just having another student around to feed off their motivation. 
 

b. A friend of mine also signed up just after me. We chat together about the classes and telling each other about the plans for booking lessons. Sometimes we end up having lessons together but we don’t deliberately set out to do so. It helps to see someone also proactively booking lessons. 

c. Sometimes I am the only one in the lesson. That gives me a chance to free talk but not for too long as there’s a structure to the lesson to complete. I have enough vocabulary past HSK 3 to make a free conversation but need a better idea of correctly formed sentences.

d. I am a borderline disorganised mid HSK 3 level. Doing HSK 3 course gives me some reassurance that I do know some mandarin and can work on consolidating that knowledge. Learning 5000 words but not being able to use them more than half of them properly is not my style.

e. Because of the frequency of lessons, I started to notice some sentences and vocabulary are repeated across different lessons giving me positive reinforcement. Previously, I didn’t have enough frequency and I don’t get daily mandarin exposure in real life. I am not a great consumer of media in any language.

f. I am running out of HSK 3 lessons so potentially there are fewer lessons that I can take. Therefore , I book into HSK3+ lessons and occasionally HSK 4. HSK 3+ keeps adding a layer of consolidation. 
 

g. After doing some of LTL HSK 4 lessons, we I realised in the past I was trying to learn too much in a short space of time, especially without the external language environment. My brain rejects the sensory overload. A few teachers have said I am at HSK4. However, it’s a false impression. 
 

h. The different teachers follow a roughly similar teaching format. I don’t mind having different teachers as they follow the slides and it’s actually exposure to different accents and personalities - all the better if you get exposed to the same sentence in a different lesson but hearing it in a different accent. 
 

On to the next 50+ lessons and see where I end up.