The 2010 Aims and Objectives Progress Thread

[heifeng]

2010 Goals

-Listening

-Watch Chinese news daily for at least 1/2hr , 1 hr on weekends.

-Understand more of dialects that I hear daily.

-Vocab & More

-Improve Legal Terminology vocab & break up into monthly goals. (January goal Immigration vocabulary)

-Read at least one law related article per day & sight translate/record, work on speed & accuracy.

-Improve Medical Terminology vocab, including layman vocab.

-Break Up into systems/fields to study each month (January Goal gyno & dental vocab, yes,I realized this does seem like quite a random combo when I look at it here too)

-Read at least one medical-related article daily, sight translate/record, work on speed & accuracy....etc

-Organize my vocab notes/journals...somehow. Maybe just post everything on up here hehe

-Random Exam prep

-Pass Court interpreting written exam, worry about the rest later:)

-Work on more English..yes English vocab too.

-Work on Chinese Grammer

-Actively study more commonly used chengyu.

-Speaking & Pronunciation

-Work to get 二乙...(aiya..must break 80%.....grrr) and try to retake PSC if time, scheduling, etc. allows.

-Take practice exam weekly to improve random character recognition and record self randomly speaking. Organize results to record characters I screw up to avoid repeating same mistakes! (start journal for elements, birds, stems, trees, farm implements~ this year these random characters are gonna be thorns in my side no more!)

-Find good programs/resources to practice shadowing and do so for at least 15 minutes per day. Probably need to do this in English & Chinese I guess.

-Writing;

-actively practice handwriting at least 2 hrs per week.

-Keep an ACTIVE Blog. Goal: 1 article per week

-Reading

-Read at least 1 novel every 2 months. (ie. keep up 2009 average)

-Improve reading & scanning spead (Yes, stole this one from Imron, but I have no clue how fast I read now)

-Less time reading English-language fashion & gossip websites. Start thread/Get recommendations from forum members on good, juicy, gossipy Chinese websites.

-Stay updated on Chinese current (non entertainment/gossip that is) events. Scan newspaper at least every other day.

-Other

-Spend more time studying for class & going through text book exercises.

-Turn in all homework on time, get most out of class in general~

-2009 was a great year to practice record myself reading at least 1x per day. So I just need to keep this up & work on 1) natural pauses and 2) getting it right the first time round (tones, pauses, everything)!

-Time Management

-Sure, I'll join the 'don't break the chain' gang. I anticipate 2010 will be a busy year, must not waste a minute, right!?

Hmm, per my calculation, w/ some rounding up, this is easily totally 30+ hrs per week, not including actual class time. I'll have to streamline it a bit and make sure I can fit a little of everthing in daily, and in some cases weekly. Studying Chinese really is a lifelong part time (sometimes full time) job isn't it...

{I reserve the right to spell check this later heh}

Edited December 24, 2009 at 10:58 PM by heifeng

[character]

Participated in the Pleco for iPhone beta (and hopefully will get picked for the flashcard beta whenever it gets announced).

I was making good progress with the Chinese Breeze readers, then got distracted by the excellent (but ~500 page) Art of Game Design. Need to get back to the readers.

Using Skype for Chinese-English language exchange. Not a great way to do it, but better than nothing.

Signed up for another year of Chinese class.

[Sarevok]

Overall:

Being more disciplined and focused in my studies, that is when I start reading some book (either a novel or some 工具书), listening to an audiobook, watching a series etc., then I should finish it before starting something else...

Listening:

Listening to Deutsche Welle on a daily basis again - after scoring 满分 in 初中等HSK听力 I got kind of comfortable with my listening skills, which is not good, as I should be constantly practicing. Chinesepod by itself is not gonna cut it - it is fun and all and I really enjoy listening to their Advanced and Upper Intermediate lessons, but I should be also listening to some "real advanced" stuff, by native speakers for native speakers...

Vocab:

Focusing on the specialized vocab from various fields. I have acquired quite a lot of 工具书, 分类词典 and other specialized dictionaries, but they are just sitting on my bookshelf gathering dust. I should be working through them slowly and not waiting for the next translating/interpreting job, preparing at the last moment. The first candidates (let's say from January to March) are geometry- and electro-vocab...

SRS:

1) Getting rid of that flashcards backlog (should be manageable before 2010 as I already started working on it) and not letting it happen again.

2) Sorting out and starting reviewing new cards - I have gathered some 2500 items during 2009 (from reading, watching TV etc.), entered them to my SRS but never actually got around to review them, so they are marked as Uncategorized and are not part of my repetition cycle.

3) Gradually reintroducing suspended items, 3500+ in total (2200 of which being chengyu and other idioms)

4) The total number of to-be-sorted cards is thus 6000+, when taking the addition of completely new words (which I am bound to encounter) into consideration, it roughly equals to adding of 20-25 "new cards" per day, which should be manageable (some of them are not completely new, since I have already studied them at some point)

Reading:

1) Increasing my reading speed. I am familiar with Imron's method and find it very useful, though I never got around to fully implementing it into my studies. I take it my current speed might be under 200 cpm - terrible, I know, that's why I should be working on it...

2) Doing a 朗读 and recording myself from time to time...

3) Reading 十万个为什么 regularly - excellent resource for gathering vocab from various fields and learning a thing or two at the same time...

Writing:

1) Doing more 听写 with a colleague of mine, using random articles from the net or the above mentioned 科普百科

2) Working on my cursive script

HSK:

Taking the HSK高等, provided it will be offered in my country next year (I heard it might be... for the first time ever). Apart from doing some mock tests before the actual exam, I don't plan to prepare for it extensively, the overall study should be enough...

Grammar:

Brushing up on my grammar skills, I have some excellent resources for that, I just have to get around to actually using them

Classical Chinese:

Working my way through 古文语法 by T. N. Nikitina and 今用古代汉语. Maybe memorizing some poems, since this is allegedly a good strategy for tackling Classical Chinese... it gets the lowest priority though

[imron]

but I have no clue how fast I read now)

A paragraph of Chinese, a stopwatch (or mobile phone with a stopwatch) and the word count feature of MS Word are all you need

[Erbse]

I'll limit my post to Chinese goals

Where is my Chinese now?

I've self learned Chinese, with the occasional evening school, for more than 3 years now. For someone who learned 3 years my overal level is piss poor. I have read all Chinese Breeze 300 character level books twice and just started with the 500 character level. Learned a few other characters from my textbooks, so I should be able to recognize 500 characters now.

Looking at the HSK vocab list, I know about 90% of the words of the level 1, and maybe 30% of level 2. Never learned the HSK list specificially.

My listening and speaking is very simple and even daily gossip is hard to grasp for me.

Overall things are not looking good, yet I have a strong desire to go on. One of my previous teachers once said to me, that I'm the most lazy persons he ever met in his whole life. I need to change that!

I want to reach all the followoing Chinese goals by studying at the evening and weekends. The rest of my time should be used to find a regular job and then do that job to get my financial situation in order.

Goals for 2010

Reading

I want to push my characters as my main objective in 2010. Before end of April I want to get through all the Chinese Breeze 500 character level books, after that I want to continue with other reading material. I want to be able to recognize a minimum of 1500 charcters at the end of the year, however the aim should be 2000 characters.

Furthermore I want to introduce Anki to my character and word learning routine.

Listening

I want to listen to Chinese at least 4 hours a week. TV, podcast, radio, anything. Possibly split up into several sessions a week.

Speaking

Once I have a job (also one of my 2010 goals) I want to invest the money into lessons on italki or some other similar place.

I also want to speak more Chinese with my Chinese friends instead of English and German.

Grammar

I want to get on with my Chinese textbooks, of wich I have plenty. Many of them in virgin state.

Writing

No handwriting goals for now.

Other

I haven't visited China for more than 1 year. Previous visits were really helpful for my Chinese. I want to find the money and time to spend at least a few weeks in China 2010, but I realize, the outlook for doing this is rather bad. Therefore this goal is optional.

[Groat]

I'll try to motivate myself with this thread too. It better work!

1) Finish Heisig's book. 350 to go, so should be done by the end of February. Do a full review to check for retention rate (last one I did at 1000 and it was 93%).

2) Collect vocabulary from and read the Chinese Breeze books I ordered. Two books from the 300 series and two from the 500 series. Also get started on the Graded Chinese Reader book I purchased.

3) Get serious about grammar. All my other skills are way past it and my grammar drags my overall skill down too much.

4) Do something about my listening comprehension. Probably going to start with something relatively easy. CSLpod and Slow Chinese look good. Currently listening comprehension is more of an issue of vocabulary to me, so this is lower on priority.

5) Try to be more consistent with Anki practice. Hopefully I'll get my phone (N97) to display Chinese characters. It would help a lot.

6) Go to China to get some motivation. Prepare to be amazed yet again how people understand me extremely well, but I have no clue what they are talking about.

7) Finish two bachelor's thesises (almost done!).

By the end of the year I should be able to handle 2000 characters and at least 3000 words. Vocabulary is this year's main goal, sided with grammar.

[wushijiao]

I'll probably end up adjusting this, but I'll give it a stab right now. My main goals this year will be with respect to my Polyglottery project, and my Putonghua and Cantonese will probably remain in a state of active maintenance (in other words, I don't envision myself actively getting into new levels of mastery, like Heifeng ).

2009 has been a pretty good year overall for my language studies (probably because it is a post-election year! It's interesting that 2004 and 2008 were both mediocre years, studying-wise, but 2005 and 2009- both post American elections years- proved quite fruitful. That's probably because following every detail takes up way to much time in election years)!

In any case, sometime in mid-2009, I made Apple Daily my news staple of my daily news reading (rather than the NYT). And, I've tried to read at least a few hours per day in Mandarin/Cantonese.

As far as Mandarin:

Reading

-Continue to read 蘋果日報 on daily basis. Additionally read some 南方周末，RFA, 新華, forums,and Twitter per day. Continue to read 爭鳴 and 前哨 every month.

-Concentrate on boosting reading speed.

-Read more academic books/articles.

-Learn Buddhist terminology in Chinese.

Listening

-Continue listening to podcasts.

Writing

-If I make a run at HSK, practice writing by hand for three months ahead of time. (This goal is always hard to stick to!)

Speaking

-Speak whenever I have opportunities.

Cantonese

Reading

-When reading 蘋果 on computer, use Cantofish, and watch accompanying videos.

-Search out for interesting comics

-Go through Dictionary of Cantonese Slang.

Listening

-Watch news daily (if time permits)

-Listen to podcasts daily (時事一周, VOA, others...)

Speaking

-Speak whenever possible.

Anyway, to sum up, as for now, I hopefully can continue to do a decent amount of reading and listening per day in Mandarin, and to a lesser extent, in Cantonese. I've somewhat struggled to find a mental equilibrium or "groove" in learning Cantonese. When I have bursts of ambition, it seems to end in frustration (ie. so much effort for so little payback). And doing nothing is also not good, and not rewarding. So far, a subtle mid-point might be best. But, in short, I'll be on the look-out for new strategies to improve Cantonese in a viable manner. As far as the other aspects to my plan, I think I'll post in the other thread, so as not to distract to much from this one.

[abcdefg]

-Improve Medical Terminology vocab, including layman vocab.

@heifeng -- I would be real interested in how you plan to go about that. It's something I hope to begin in 2010.

[Meng Lelan]

Improve Medical Terminology vocab, including layman vocab.

@heifeng -- I would be real interested in how you plan to go about that. It's something I hope to begin in 2010.

Blah, I don't want to hear about any of the medical terms and how you two plan to go about doing this, else I go into reverse peristalsis.

[abcdefg]

...else I go into reverse peristalsis.

Well I already know that fancy term.

呕吐 = barf

[animal world]

Post deleted

Edited December 31, 2009 at 01:42 AM by animal world

[Meng Lelan]

Dang it, I'm getting out of this thread.

[Gleaves]

Here are my Chinese goals for 2010:

1. Read six books. I plan to set aside an hour a day for reading.

2. Watch four TV episodes and two movies a week.

Pretty straightforward. I basically want to keep up consistent content intake, and especially increase my listening. At some point this Winter or Spring, I’d like to get a tutor to work or my speaking. I’d also like to start posting on lang-8 to work on my writing, but I don’t have any definitive goals for my speaking/writing just yet.

Good luck, everyone, on your 2010 objectives.

[roddy]

Right, lets see if I can muster any goals for the coming year . . .

As far as Chinese goes, I'm currently making a push at learning to write - or at least learning to write with a stylus+tablet, courtesy of Skritter. This has actually been remarkably successful by my standards - have got up to 1500 characters 'learned' (95%+ retention overall, but bear in mind that I 'knew' these characters already, I just would not have been able to write them on demand in most cases) in about a month. Using Skritter has become pretty much habitual and I'll clear my review queue a couple of times a day at least, so hopefully this'll stick.

That's about it for Chinese at the moment though - anything else is purely recreational (bit of TV watching, although even that's fallen off, podcasts, the odd movie) or work-related.

But there's more to life than Chinese. Have been getting back into playing the guitar after a decade-long hiatus - played quite a bit from the age of roughly 12 or 13 up until graduating, but stopped after that. Was never great, but used to enjoy it and I'm now trying to start up from scratch, learning the scales and positions and all that stuff that I skipped over the first time round in favour of 100 Rockin' Heavy Metal Riffs for Really Cool Guitarists or whatever it was. Bought a book+VCD course (吉他自学三月通 - interesting thing about using a Chinese guitar course is the number of 'former Soviet Union folk songs you get to learn） and am using this as a bit of a syllabus. Should probably invest in a better guitar as my current one is not bad for a 250Y (2nd hand) guitar, but that's not saying much.

Started French classes about six weeks ago, not because I particularly wanted to learn French, I just wanted to learn something. The classes have been ok, the pace is pretty slow but it's been fun to be back in a classroom setting. I'll aim to either keep this up, or ditch it for something else constructive. But I'm not allowed to just stop going so I can do extra napping.

Going to make this sticky, and will un-stick the 2009 topic. Have a good 2010, folks.

[renzhe]

1) Finish the HSK vocabulary. I have 800 items left.

2) Go from being able to write 1000 characters to 2000.

3) Improve tones. My tones are generally good, but I've been getting sloppy. I'll keep a close eye on them and make an effort to pronounce everything clearly and correctly.

4) Improve spoken language to go beyond everyday conversations and make it easier to talk about more complex issues. The trick here will be to integrate all the HSK vocab into conversations, something I should be doing more aggressively.

5) Improve the understanding (listening + reading) of news/newspapers. I'm really good with fiction/drama, but disappointing with current affairs and newspapers.

6) Do some langdu exercises like heifeng and imron. I tried some, and I'm not terrible, but there's still a lot of work needed here.

7) Reading will be restricted to short stories. Certainly the Eileen Chang and Lu Xun stories I have lying around. No 1400 page books this year.

Do the HSK. Intermediate at first, and then see if I want to make a stab at the advanced one.

Generally, the tenor for this year is solidifying and pushing far into the advanced territory. I feel like I have a decent foundation, and I'd like to iron out the quirks.

[querido]

So far, we're ahead of last year in number of participants!

[Jose]

2010 will be a good year for me to work on my Chinese. I recently left my job, so I have a lot of spare time right now. My main Chinese-related aims for the new year are:

1. Improve my spoken Chinese and tingli. For this, I am thinking of going to China and spending a few months there. I have some savings, so I am not in a rush to find a new job, and I think I can do this now.

2. Read through some reference books that I have used thoroughly, but never read from cover to cover. In particular, I want to work through Yip Po-ching's Routledge Comprehensive Grammar.

3. Improve my classical Chinese. I would like to work on the books by Fuller (the first two parts at least) and Pulleyblank, which I bought and used briefly for a university course a couple of years ago. I have already started to tackle this goal, and I'm now trudging through the Fuller book (the related thread in the classical Chinese forum will be very useful for this).

[skylee]

I'll be on the look-out for new strategies to improve Cantonese in a viable manner.

You can give me a call, in Cantonese.

[xianhua]

Well, first and foremost, the last year has finally given me some structure and direction in my studies after drifting without much progress for 3-4 years. This forum has certainly played no small part in that. After all, when you are self-studying and rarely meet other people studying the language (they're in the minority round these here parts), how does one find out about valuable resources like Lang-8, Anki, Skritter and NCIKU?

Ok, enough rambling. Objectives:

1.Characters: Finish learning to write the HSK2 list of characterswords in Skritter. Many of which I recognise, but have yet to learn how to write. It's also a useful resource for tone practise.

2.Listening: Continue to listen to the Slow-Chinese podcasts. I find the level is just about right with each lesson introducing the odd new word or phrase. In addition, watch more films. Also, continue listening to the lessons from Boya Hanyu - in the car, on the way to work etc..

3.Grammar and vocabularly: Finish off the few remaining lessons in Boya Hanyu, Inter-Intermediate level before moving on to the two Intermediate-level books. Write out key phrases from each lesson and transfer them into Anki (I've given up on adding just single words after deciding that words need to be learnt in context to stand any chance of being remembered). Also, email the key phrases to myself at work the night before and check them periodically throughout the working day.

4.Writing: Continue with Lang 8 journal entries. I've recently acquired a penpal and now exchange emails with them. Possibly acquire more penpals if time will permit.

5.Speaking: Continue practising with my wife when we have time. Make an effort to find a language partner at the local university to ensure practise with someone who isn't familiar with the words I know.

Non-language:

1.Move to a bigger house in a better area ready for the little one to go to a better school in 2012. Ooh, the pressures of parenthood.

2.Complete the second year of my Masters (by distance learning) in Chinese Business and IR, before starting my dissertation in September.

3. Get someone to tell me where all those posters on here from years past disappeared to, and try to avoid the same fate if possible.

[Meng Lelan]

Started French classes about six weeks ago

I trust that those of us in the new French forum here would be most interested in your progress. Come post there some time and let us know how's it going.