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For several years, my primary goal with Chinese was to be able to read a Chinese novel as I would an English novel (not necessarily understand every word, but understand 99% of it without the help of a dictionary). Over the past few years, I mostly achieved this goal and was starting to feel a bit lost as to what I should do next. Looking back at the 2024 thread, I stated that "what I really want to do now is USE output for something fun so I can get better (publish a Chinese language blog/vlogs, contribute to Chinese message boards or social media, etc...)." Although I did publish one Chinese language vlog in 2024, I really just continued to do more of the same type of input-based studying I was doing before: learn vocab, read novels, and watch Chinese TV. However, in an odd twist of fate I was offered a job in Taipei this year (completely unrelated to the fact that I can speak some Chinese), which I accepted. After the first month living there I realized: (1) to my great surprise, people seem to have zero issue understanding what I'm saying. After almost ten years of studying in the US, I was afraid my tones and pronunciation were terrible. Maybe they are, but I can at least make myself understood, which is all that matters to me. (2) I can understand some people 95% of the time, some people 50% of the time and some people 0% of the time. I have no idea if it's the accent, speed of speech or what, but some Chinese is still completely incomprehensible to me. I'm hoping this improves with exposure. So now my goals for 2025: (1) Learn the traditional characters (I am already 80% of the way there with this, but I still need some practice). (2) Get better at parsing a Taiwanese accent (I can much better understand mainland TV shows vs Taiwanese TV shows). (3) Third, and most importantly, I want to be able to work in Chinese. The company provides translators, which I rely on for Chinese-language meetings, but I want to be able to do what some of my coworkers can do and get by in both languages (English and Chinese) without a translator. To do this I think I need to learn more business-specific vocab and get more comfortable with fast speech. So, if by the end of the year I can get by in my job without a translator, I will consider myself successful. I probably have a 50/50 chance at achieving this, so I'll call it a stretch goal.

Hi, all. It's the end of the year, so to put a coda on this, I'm reporting back on my 2024 goals for learning Chinese. I met all of my goals (they were all process goals, like 30 minutes a day of studying and learning 500 new words). I wanted to take the HSK again to get an objective assessment of my Chinese (and to see if I improved at all), but wasn't able to find an online assessment or a test center near me. (Granted, I could take a full practice test again, but I haven't done that.) So, it's hard to say if I've improved or not. I'll say that I don't think I got dramatically better or worse, which is probably to be expected given the amount of time I put in this year (about 45 minutes a day, all told). I may have some more time to devote to studying Chinese next year, so if I do, I'll be excited to do more listening and reading. Happy new year, everyone!

The daily process is: sit down and review flashcards in the morning (average 26 mins/day according to my anki), then add the new page for the day (~30 mins) I make the anki flashcards entirely from scratch - I record the 'keyphrase' for every card myself using an external mic (F5 records directly into an anki field on a computer), and I use this website to generate speech samples for each chengyu, which I record using Audacity and add to the card manually. I do this so that I don't need to look at a screen while reviewing (though I still often take a look when the English>Chinese recall is ambiguous/nuanced) and it has helped massively for listening comprehension when chengyu turn up in real life conversations. In the evening I watch Chinese TV for an hour, taking screenshots when I bump into chengyu I have already studied. I do not take screenshots of ones I have not studied in the deck, as when I did this at the beginning things got out of hand very quickly. Once every few weeks I go through the screenshots and copy them into the 'tv' field for their respective card. Each page of the dictionary has around 4-5 chengyu, the name of the dictionary is 汉英成语手册 and is from the 1980s, its a great dictionary, but I still need to refer to the 'Duogongneng Chengyu Cidian' in Pleco for the all important usage, 近义, pronunciation disambiguation and analysis notes. I go through each chengyu carefully, making a note of anything I think will be important to remember in the 'details' field of my anki card. The details field often gets more notes added later when I use a chengyu in real life and it doesn't quite land like I thought it would (if I can, I ask what went wrong - working with Chinese colleagues means I'm very fortunate to be able to ask a lot). Hope that gives you a good idea of what the process looks like. I would recommend anyone reading this who is thinking about jumping into learning chengyu to use the '500 Common Chinese Idioms: An Annotated Frequency Dictionary' initially, don't take my approach straight off the bat, you'll definitely burn out if you haven't done some groundwork first.

Could you elaborate on your process for this? The flashcard looks like it was generated? I feel like your approach to drilling Chengyu or more broadly idiomatic expressions could be a great thing for me to try as well.

Its definitely not more effective, your strategy of immersion and native content is still the right way to go. I have just found that over the years that although I have been able to absorb many chengyu, actively using them correctly has consistently seemed to elude me. Learning the specific situations and usage cases through the dictionary + sentence mining tv shows is helping me to get over this hurdle. Nothing revolutionary, but you guessed correctly, it certainly has been fun and helped me sustain daily study.

I am learning Chinese mainly for reading novels, and of course one of my long-term goals was to read the 4 classic novels. I am definitely not ready yet, but I am considering reading one in the near future, because I only have 2-3 years left before life gets very busy, and it might be good to tackle one while my pain tolerance is still high. It won't happen in 2025 because I want to finish jin yong's condor trilogy first, but maybe 2026... Otherwise I don't have any particular goals for 2025, actually I am finally going to take the foot off the gas. After ~2.5 years of pretty intense studying I think I can mantain my current level without much effort now, so I will just engage with Chinese more 'naturally' and hopefully keep improving at a much slower rate.

@Denemelik I took the HSK3 exam in early 2022. There were 5 characters that we were required to write down, and I remember one of them was 定. Can't remember the other 4 but overall it was pretty easy to write (all of the words required just a few strokes).

Last month I took the TOCFL Speaking Band B exam, and got the results a couple days ago. Here is a write up of my experience this time: https://elliottjones.net/en/blog/passed_tocfl4_speaking.html

I'm curious because this is almost the diametric opposite of my approach to improving my Chinese, which has been just about 100% focused on immersion and native content ever since I learned enough hanzi for that to be possible. (Well, I guess a chengyu dictionary in Chinese is native content too, but you get what I mean, I think...) Do you feel like this is a more effective way of learning to pick out the kind of nuance you mention? Or is it just a matter of this being a sustainable/enjoyable way for you to study?

One thing I've always said I would do, but never got down to doing before, was studying an entire dictionary. At the end of January I pulled a chengyu dictionary off my shelf and decided I was going to learn a page a day until I finished it. I haven't missed a day yet since, I'm on page 329/557 and have now studied 1932 chengyu. In total the dictionary has ~3000 to learn, so I've still got a while to go. My one takeaway from the experience so far: understanding TV has become increasingly easy, I am able to pick out nuance in meaning, puns, deeper cultural themes.

A year has passed since I wrote my plans for 2024. I spent a total of 9 weeks in China related to work and I got to travel independently in Yunnan, Qinghai and Gansu. I loved travelling in China even though I felt it was way more cumbersome than travelling in Japan even though I know zero Japanese. In terms of learning activities I mainly focussed on shadowing native content and my pronunciation, tones and fluency have greatly improved. I spent about 1 hour per day doing this. Sadly it did not really improve my active oral outputting skills (forming sentences, having dialogues). I tried 2 sessions with italki teachers but sadly I did not really feel motivated to stick with them. So, my plans for 2025: More shadowing More listening Using Chatgpt to help me outputting (sentence forming exercises) Hopefully get myself to finally start outputting (speaking) with an Italki teacher. How about you? Really looking forward to reading your plans

Every year we have a thread on this and 2025 should be no different. This is to invite you to reflect on your progress and activities in 2024 and your aims for 2025.

Interesting! It seems like a bad translation from Chinese to English.

Hello, I will be taking the HSK3 exam on January 12th. Has anyone taken the last HSK3 exams? If anyone remembers which words they wanted us to write in the last part of the writing section, I would be very happy if they could help me

Have you tried Pleco's built-in flashcard system? You can set it to test you with audio.

Hi @hungrybrain, I would say my speaking is getting close to native for casual communication, mainly due to close to a decade of chatting in Chinese exclusively at home, and at work for the last 5 years. I frequently have phone calls in Chinese where after talking for a while, I give them my ID number to do something, and they can’t figure out why the system won’t accept it, cos they are not using the foreigner form (in Taiwan foreigner ID numbers use a different format) and then I have to tell them that I am in fact, a foreigner. Having the accent down is a big part of it, my Chinese was almost entirely learnt from immersion, having come to Taiwan at 17, so speaking “台灣國語” has never been an issue for me. My TOCFL speaking, which I got the results for today was B2. I think in reality I am probably around C1 for speaking, but for TOCFL you also need to have great reading to do the Band C speaking exam because the questions are not read out to you, and they are very long and complex. Since my reading is only around B2 on a good day, for now I am stuck at B2 for the speaking test. I am also somewhat held back by my reading on the listening exam too (currently have B2) since you have to read the multiple choice answers, but its not as big of an issue as it is with Band C speaking. Here is an example Band C speaking question from the TOCFL site, which you would be expected to read yourself. As you can see, having great speaking skills alone is not enough to pass Band C speaking cos you might not know what to actually talk about in your answer. From what I saw on the real exam, this question is on the easier side too. Right now improving my reading is my number 1 goal so I can move on to Band C. If you are based in Taiwan, which it looks like you are, would be happy to have you over for dinner and we can discuss it more in person. DM me.

You can have a look here, it's basically packs of audio for different languages, including a decently large one for Chinese. I use a combination of these, Forvo, and making do without audio.

https://forvo.com

Hi, folks. Apologies if this is discussed elsewhere, but if so, I couldn't find it. Is anyone aware of an online dictionary that has audio recordings that are easily downloadable for its words? I want to try using audio prompts on my flash cards, but would prefer one from a native speaker rather than recording them myself. A downloadable mp3 with the pronunciation of whatever word I'm studying would make that easier. I imagine I could record the audio clips myself directly from my laptop's audio output, but that's a bit more trouble than if they're directly downloadable. Thanks, Mark

Hi guys this website helps me with learning Chinese even if I have a busy schedule and have couple of hours a week to learn. you can check them at rememble.org I hope this will help. Thanks

Regarding 綠林好漢, to add another interesting twist, Mandarin speakers in Taiwan do pronounce it as lǜ, see e.g.: https://youtu.be/kbz2l3T-nxs?si=mcyTVOMKugh2mKie

Is there anyone who’s going to Chongqing University? let me know! 🫶🏼🤞🏽

Hi there! I'm 25F from Italy and I am going to spend six months in chongqing from February 2025 at Chongqing University studying Chinese. I don't know anyone there yet and I'm trying to find someone who's going there as well. I'm looking forward to make friends annd enjoy the city, the Chinese experience and hang out! Let me know in DM or in the comment section! Maybe we can get in touch

I don't understand. Your LinkedIn blog banner says, "Near-native level Mandarin Chinese fluency" but your TOCFL was B1, and then later mixed B1/B2. I scored B2/C1 on the TOCFL but don't feel even close to near-native. Did you have problems with test anxiety?

oh dear you're right! clearly the scene from 鹿鼎记 affected me deeply as I recalled it then too...