It's Easter holidays and like a good boy, I have been trying to do some homework in between some nostalgic moments of watching Queen on Live Aid. 

I upgraded my OS to windows 10. Windows 7 o' faithful servant I will miss you.

I had to reinstall Anki and it's been upgraded to 2.1 which is a little different and needed a bit of time to work out. The Chinese pack has a different name. I tweaked the chinese note format import from . tsv to make things a bit more efficient.

I created one extra anki card type - a listening card. It shows nothing visually and only plays the  audio sentence five times. After the 'answer' button is pressed, it shows all the information and plays the audio another ten times. The initial five times is for repeated listening so you don't have to keep pressing buttons and wasting time to hear the audio again. Whilst listening, I also pay attention to the rhythm and tones. After the answer is shown, the audio repeats ten times, again do that you don't have to keep pressing 'repeat audio' when reading the characters and trying to figure out the proper tones in a sort of native speaker style. If I want to shadow practice, then it's very easy to get multiples of ten reps by simply pressing the 'repeat audio'.

I mentioned in another thread I dug out some old anki cards on Growing up With Chinese and found my listening comprehension had improved a lot. I had only created notes up to episode 46. In my previous run of note creation, I had omitted out Mike's and Charlotte narrative voice. I think that might have made things less helpful. Because hearing different voices use the same vocabulary is also beneficial. Thus my new direction is to try and finish the series and redo the earlier ones to include Mike's and Charlotte's voice. 

I have made three extra episodes. I notice some of the scripts are slightly inaccurate and some o

words are incomprehensible. In order to check, I record that sentence on to wechat and send it to my very nice italki tutor in Beijing (where the series is set) for verification.

Returning back home away from the immersive Mandarin environment has its disadvantages. With the two italki sessions last week, fluency has definitely gone down and language interference from Cantonese has gone up. It's good to know these things are malleable so during the next visit in China, some more improvement will come.

I do think that effort in shadowing , revising tones and pronunciation has helped. I watched some italki videos of language teachers who speak non-native Mandarin in their introduction. Compared to those who have only learnt online, I think I compare quite favourably. I'm not as good as those who have lived in and studied degrees in China.

Been a bit naughty and not done my glossika training for a few days. I don't quite Iike that there are only two reps before a new sentence comes up. Although it does repeat later, I prefer a couple more reps continuously. Hence why I designed my anki cards to repeat the audio more times for each card. I paid for glossika so I better use it. Just how other users can get up to 70k+ reps is amazing. Saw it mentioned one person went through the whole Taiwan course and now doing the Mandarin Beijing course. Phenomenal.