Studying at work - and keeping the boss happy.

[xianhua]

My office-based job has absolutely nothing to do with China - well I guess all our computers and desks are made there - but you get the point. Therefore, I’d been wondering how to utilise those 7:30 hours of work each day to help with my character learning. The problem was twofold: 1. I’m paid to work so can hardly spend time studying a foreign language. 2 If I phoned our IT team and asked them to download the Windows East Asian files, they may have a thing or two to say. However, I think I’ve found a way of learning characters with minimum abuse of work time.

Basically, I copy and paste the character (or word, or even sentence containing the word) of the day from NCIKU into Word, and then minimize the document. Now, I usually have several software programmes open at any one time and regularly switch between them. Therefore, every time I switch programmes I also take a quick glance at the character on the Word document. I would spend no more than 2 seconds looking at the character/s. By the end of the working day, I would have probably looked at it 30 times and thus only used a minute of work time. It seems to be working quite well. I’m also noting them as I go along for future reviews.

My goal is to get up to 3000 characters by 2011 when we are planning to live in China. I currently know around 1500, so after another two years’ study, that’s a further 500 (based on two years worth of work days and one character a day). The rest will hopefully come through my after-work study which consists of Anki flashcards, Boya Hanyu (which doesn’t seem that popular with learners here?) and my journal entries on Lang-8. I also have a white board hanging up next to our front door which I use for character writing. Again, I’ll probably walk past the front door several times a day glancing on each occasion.

[Guest realmayo]

of course, if you use anki, you can study it online on any web browser...

[xianhua]

Nice thought but our web usage is tracked so I wouldn't want to keep opening Anki, or have it open all day long for that matter (I only need to use NCIKU once to copy and paste the character/s). I can hear it now: "So...yesterday you spent 7 hours 29 minutes on some site called An-kee".

[Scoobyqueen]

How about sending yourself an email the night before with some things you want to go over again. This will then also work like revision since you will have gone through it the night before. And also your employer cant control who sends you emails.

There is a bilingual news web site that posts news in English and Chinese. Can you get away with that?

But you can also do it the old-fashioned way printing out flashcards on paper and keep them handy. Doodle characters whilst you are on the phone as well.

[imron]

Nice thought but our web usage is tracked so I wouldn't want to keep opening Anki, or have it open all day long for that matter

Does your phone have Pleco yet?

[abcdefg]

of course, if you use anki, you can study it online on any web browser...

Or on a thumb drive USB key.