The 2012 Aims and Objectives Progress Thread

[icebear]

For earlier Aims and Objective Topics, see 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008

Ok, so I'm nearly done with finals and during the last one will have one foot out the door to my holiday vacation, so before vegetating I thought I'd revive everyone's favorite thread and put down my annual plans for the first time. Sorry if its jumping the gun by 10 days; if you must wait you can let your plans stew for 10 more days before sharing My goals are a bit clearer with some context; I worked in China from 2006-2008, but during that stint only had time to study Chinese independently. I reached a socially functional level, but not much beyond functional. This past summer I was back in Beijing for 2 months, visiting friends and taking a short-term formal course (3 hours per day, one-on-one) to refresh, where I realized my social Chinese might be generally passable but I had a lot of major holes in my vocabulary and grammar from never having looked at a formal textbook. Also, I’d previously learned sight-recognition of characters, but never handwriting, which started to reveal itself as another gap when studying harder material (where characters are increasingly similar looking). At the same time I also realized my nostalgia for Beijing was well founded, and decided I’d like to move back once I finish my master’s degree (not related to Chinese). Those realizations have led to three broad goals:

1. follow a textbook series from the beginner to intermediate stages,
   
2. learn to write every character I review/relearn/learn along the way, and
   
3. move back to Beijing once my graduate studies are complete.
   

This leads to my more concrete Chinese goals below, which are mostly process-focused, not results-focused (as described elsewhere in this forum); a much better approach in my experience. These are of course constrained by the fact that I’m living outside of China, and engaged full time (or more!) with my masters degree until March or next summer (when the finals, and then thesis, are respectively due); I'll probably revise these once my graduate studies conclude and my fall plans are more concrete. Roughly in order of importance...

1. Relocate to Beijing - Ok, one result-focused goal. After a good experience with formal Chinese studies last summer I’ve decided I would like to enroll in a full time, 1 academic-year program (20-30 hours per week). I'm confident I could find a job immediately, but in the long run I think a better approach is to really drill the Chinese intensively for a year and then maintain and slowly improve it afterwards, as opposed to working immediately which probably would provide minimal time to improve the Chinese. Ultimately my goal is to be able to comfortably converse about and read news/documents related to my profession and the other "high-brow" topics that interest me, but we’ll just see how it goes along the way; achieving more fluent conversational skills and generally better reading abilities are closer on the horizon. In the spring I'll be applying to schools in Beijing, as well as for eligible scholarships.
   
2. Skri​tter - just started with writing in September and am finding it a huge boon to my reading comfort/comprehension. Feasible goal so far, which I plan to maintain, is either clear my reviews each morning, or Skritter for up to 1 hour, whichever comes first.
   
3. ChinesePod - one lesson per day. Intermediate and below are too easy, but are still worthwhile to maintain listening comprehension as well as add basic words to Skritter, while Upper-Intermediate are challenging enough to be overwhelming if I do more than one or two a week; thus I alternate among these 4 levels each day. Passive learning, but this is incredibly easy to maintain as I can listen on my daily walk to school and Skritter interacts easily with ChinesePod.
   
4. NPCR - one lesson per week (or two weeks later on). I’m up to lesson 18, which so far is a very easy review for me, but as I’m learning to write these words for the first time, and reviewing grammar more formally, I’m sticking with the once a week pace to avoid burnout. Once I’m into mostly novel material (around lesson 40, I think) I may slow it down, depending on how the other commitments are going. Ideally I’d be done with Book 4, certainly with Book 3, by the summer. The rate I maintain mainly depends on keeping my Skritter queue realistic with my other commitments.
   
5. Chinese Reading - read one news article per day. I don’t add more than 1 vocabulary item per article, otherwise I get in the vicious cycle of flooding my Skritter queue, which I end up just deleting a day later when I realize its unrealistic with my other commitments and that I’ve probably added many nice but non-priority words, considering where my writing skills are. So this is more for improving my ease with reading in new contexts (and using Zhongwen Pop-up as needed) rather than adding more to my Skritter responsibilities. I will try to transition towards material related to my field of study/work, as comprehension improves (for now quite general articles).
   
6. Chinese Media - try to watch a movie every two weeks. Anything more and I won’t keep up. I’ve tried Chinese TV but in general I find it pretty bad, and also slow to load outside of China, so I’ll stick with movies for now (as the quality is good, if one is selective).
   
7. Chinese Speaking - considering all my other commitments (Chinese and beyond), and my location, I can’t do much about this except infrequently Skype with Beijing friends. Oh well. Anyway, I find that speaking comes back painfully, but quickly, once back in an immersive environment. And I think my speaking habits (pronunciation/tones) are decent already so reading aloud should help keep my tongue loose until my return.
   

[OneEye]

Here's a quick review of last year's original goals:

- Improve spoken Chinese. Check (huge improvement)

- Work on Classical/Literary Chinese. Check, but I still have a LONG way to go.

- Read through some course syllabi related to Chinese history and linguistics. Check.

- Take the GRE. Check.

So I had a successful year. I also said "I'm moving to either China or Taiwan this August. It mainly depends on where I get a scholarship (if I do), but one way or the other I'll be moving over there, and hopefully starting grad school when I get back after a year. My goals mainly revolve around that." I'm in Taiwan now, studying at National Taiwan Normal University's Mandarin Training Center (MTC) in Taipei. And I'll be here a total of two school years instead of one. In Fall 2012 I'll be beginning to apply to graduate programs for admission in Fall 2013. My goals this year mostly point to grad school admissions.

1. Continue to improve speaking. My goal is to take Thought and Society 思想與社會 at MTC during the Winter term, which, as it says on the cover, is an advanced text for spoken Chinese. I've had a look through and I think it's a good (high, but achievable) goal for the year. It will require me to do very well in my classes until then, or I won't make it to that level by then. An important reason for focusing on speaking (besides the obvious) is that I will need very good spoken Chinese if I want to be competitive for TAships in grad school. My metric for this will be my grades in class, since class is focused on speaking ability.

2. Reading. This is priority #1 for me. I need to be able to read academic articles in Chinese for grad school, so that is my goal for my time at MTC. I want to be somewhat comfortable with a newspaper by the end of this year. I'm using other textbooks to supplement the one we use in class, adding all the words to Pleco. I'm also reading 亂馬1/2 and occasionally 國語日報. I'm also reading translations of 四書 into modern Chinese alongside the original, which is great. 三民's 四書讀本 is absolutely fantastic. Which brings me to...

3. My 文言文 also needs to improve a lot before I start grad school. I'm working through the intermediate texts in Fuller's An Introduction to Literary Chinese, along with the aforementioned 四書讀本 (just started, I'm sure there will be plenty I can't manage yet). Whereas last year I worked on this very much part-time, this year I will be doing some work on this every day. I have 1-2 hours before class every day to work on whatever, and 文言文 will be first every day.

4. I need to get in touch with professors at the universities I'll be applying to. Every edge I can get helps, and if they recognize my name that's a good thing. I've already contacted a few and have gotten some great, encouraging feedback.

5. Work on my statement of purpose and re-working my writing sample. I may scrap the writing sample and write a new one, in which case I need to think of a topic for a paper.

6. Read some in English. I brought a bunch of Chinese history books with me to Taiwan, and I'd like to make it through some of them in my spare time.

7. Find some students to tutor privately. Money's tight.

8. Start playing chess again. This one keeps getting shelved, but it really helps me to clear my mind, so I'd like to play some.

That should do it. Plenty to keep me occupied this year, I think.

[JenniferW]

I cannot believe it's almost time to commit myself to another years's aims and objectives!

2011 was the first time I did this aims and objectives, and although I didn't achieve everything, it certainly made me look at what I was doing differently, and in a much more constructive way.

[Silent]

My goals:

- Read my first book in Chinese. With book I mean a book aimed at native adults. This most likely will be: 许三观卖血记, 余华 (I hope to make a start this year)

- At least double, hopefully triple, my vocabulary from about 2500 now to 5000-10000.

- Diversify my Chinese skills. To achieve this I intend (on average):

> to work on grammar at least an hour a week.

> spend at least 1/2 an hour a day on listening (watch movies, soaps, audio books, real excercises)

> start to actively use chinese (maybe find language exchange, tutor or abuse some chinese friends)

> 4-6 weeks of travel in China this summer.

[Wang7]

To the OP: could you further expound on your "short-term formal course (3 hours per day, one-on-one) to refresh" experience. What-in-heavens name didn't you review in that time span? How many "days" did this intensive study go on? You're definitely a hard charger, and as the saying goes "there is no substitute for hard work.." Way to go, icebear.

[Meng Lelan]

For the year 2012:

1. Skritter: I now have 3000 characters (both trad and simpl) in the Skritter queue. So I want to end the year 2012 with 5000 characters in the queue.

2. Middlebury: Pray that I get $$$ to go there now that I've been admitted. Then go to Middlebury this summer and get started on a master's in Chinese pedagogy.

3. Wushu: Compete in the Boston tournament while I'm at Middlebury. Compete in a Texas tournament if there is one in the fall/winter.

4. Blog: Just continue to blog. Simple enough.

I was going to put in "get job as Chinese language teacher" goal but there's no way I can ever get that unless I relocate, and that's not possible for another 3.5 years, for reasons I am not going to explain here.

I was going to put in some read-a-book goal but in the last several years I have been more and more attracted to writing while more and more disliking to read, in any language. I don't know why this is so.

That's it for goals, any more than that I am going to expire.

[roddy]

Ignore, not paying attention . . .

[imron]

Ignoring and not paying attention is a strange goal to have, especially if you'll be doing it for an entire year

[muirm]

I don't think I've participated formally in this topic before, but here are my goals for 2012 (in no particular order):

1. Concentrate more on listening comprehension (movies, TV shows, radio, etc)

2. Join/start a 武侠 book club in the Bay Area after I move back

3. Continue working through modern novels, mixing in some non-Kung Fu selections

4. Make friends with the Chinese people at work (and speak Chinese with them)

[WestTexas]

My goals are simple.

-Improve listening comprehension. I want to be able to understand 80-90% of TV shows without looking at subtitles

-read more Chinese websites

-add 15-20 cards a day to my Anki Deck, on average, and do all the scheduled cards every day

-sleep with a Chinese girl who doesn't speak English. Without paying, obviously.

[jasoninchina]

1. Complete HSK vocab level 5. Upon completion, put together and study my own deck of 500-1000 words and expressions.

2. Make at least one "good" Chinese friend who I spend time with at least once a week.

3. Read my first native-level Chinese book

4. Watch and listen to Chinese TV and radio consistantly every week.

[laurenth]

I'll chime in with jasoninchina and Silent. My top goal for the year is:

- "read my first book in Chinese. With book I mean a book aimed at native adults". In my case, it will most probably be 活着, because I've read other books (in French translation) by 余华 and liked them and because I can use the thread about the book in this forum. 3-4 more readers to go before that.

Daily:

- I want to add 20-25 words daily to my Anki "word" deck, drawn from daily readings and listening (see below). I should have 9000 cards by this time next year.

- Add at least 2 characters/day to my Anki "characters" deck (I have two separate decks), if possible drawn from my daily dose of new words - if not, from a frequency list. I should have 2700 characters by this time next year.

- Read some Chinese everyday, first my remaining readers, then anything but textbooks and readers.

- Listen to some Chinese everyday, anything.

Weekly:

- Continue taking 2 hours/week of formal class (already paid my subscription for the year, so no choice).

Sometime during the year:

- Take new HSK 4 if it's not organized too early during the year.

Finally:

- Not become crazy (I've started dreaming about characters, lately).

[rezaf]

1-I finally got the courage to take fewer classes this semester in order to finish all the 30,000 words and phrases in my wordlist by the end of this summer, so I'm going to review and recite the words in A, B, C, D and E (about 7400 words) a few times by the end of next month and then I will continue with the rest of the wordlist starting from February.

2-review 診斷學，中藥，方劑，腧穴 by the end of this summer

[grawrt]

Im still new to chinese && really aspire to reach a speakable level!

My Goals:

- Be able to converse for atleast 10 minutes in Chinese

- Be able to read and understand a simple chinese text (Comic book or poem or news article)

What I will do:

- Listen to podcast daily; 1 lesson per day and review material covered extensively.

- Write/Learn 5 new characters per day; After learning, form simple sentences to understand different ways to use the word.

- Watch a chinese drama or movie once per week

- Get through rapid chinese literacy series (I bought this a while ago and never got around to reading it *so sad*)

What I want to do:

- Find a language-exchange partner; Id really like to do this but I still feel super insecure at my level right now and will probably not do this BUT I add it on the list as a *MAYBE*

- Go to China this summer; Mostly for study but regardless even for traveling id love to go and visit. But things come up and have a chance of messing with plans so this is on the *MAYBE* list. But most likely because im feeling super determined this year. Preferrably for 2 months.

- Attend a chinese-conversation meetup; I just noticed this maybe last week. It sounds interesting but again, I get nervous at my level of chinese. But its on the maybe list because it sounds really interesting. The group also teaches, and has cute events like attending a KTV,etc. We'll see !

I tried to keep it simple, hopefully I will stick with it *fingers crossed*

[Wang7]

Before I post my ambitious goals for 2012, I hope someone can assist me with this recent learning "block" I'm experiencing. Although I'm fairly new to this, I know about 1000 simplified characters, however, I'm starting to forget many of the recent characters that I've learned after a day or two. It's frustrating as hell, but yet, I'm still committed to my studies. Has anyone experienced something like this, and if so, how did you adjust your study plan in order to retain most of what you've learned? Thanks.

[Meng Lelan]

Wang7, I had the same problem until there was Skritter. That's why you see Skritter in my 2011 and 2012 Aims list.

[JenniferW]

Wang 7 - as regards forgetting characters you've learned after a day or two, I've been saved by anki. I've been using anki for about two and a half years and I'd say it transformed both how many characters I 'know' and also how I study. I just wish someone had introduced me to it years before - and that it had existed years before it did. I'd never have found out about had I not been using this forum. I use it both for learning character recognition and for testing my ability to write characters.

[大肚男]

This is my first aims and objectives thread.

Here are my goals for the new year...

1) Finish Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi Vol. I, as I have been stuck at 900 characters for a long time. I want to finish by March.

2) Finish Pop-Up Chinese Elementary and Intermediate podcasts. I am more than half-way done with their Elementary catalog.

3) Listen to Chinese materials on a daily basis. I just started listening to 黑米公主 and 锵锵三人, based on another thread. While I barely understand anything said on 锵锵三人, I would like to make this a daily habit, just to train my ear to listening to normal speed Chinese.

4) Read a Chinese book. I want to start this once I finish with goal #1. I tried reading a book earlier in my studies, but it was frustrating. Recently, I started testing the water by reading comics, and I wasn't looking up too many words. I hope that by the time I finish with Heisig, I will be in a good position to read a full fledged book.

5) Visit China by May. The last time me and my girlfriend went to China, it was for only a week due to work constraints, and we lost couple of days in Japan due to the earthquake. Hopefully next time we will be able to take a 2-3 weeks tour of China, and stay couple of day in her hometown.

6) Start speaking with my girlfriend's roommates in Chinese. They are pretty nice and helpful about it, but they seem to quickly forget that my listening comprehension and vocabulary list are limited.

[semola]

my 2012 goals:

1)improve my pronunciation in Italian, English and Chinese so people can finally understand what I'm saying.

2)read 14 books during the year

3)Listen to 3 chinesepod podcast a week

4)Translate excerpts from an Italian rock climbing book into chinese.

5) Write on my blog 3 times a month.

6)Doing 15 minutes of flashcards a day.

7)Reading one brief news article every day.

climb an 8a+ and onsight 7bs constantly, save enough money to stay in Getu for a month or a little longer (rock climbing is always on my mind, no matter what I do and where I live)

The first and the last goals are mandatory!

[Tangmu]

Ok so here goes...

Last year my main objective was to keep up consistent improvement, improve the fluidity of my colloquial chinese and pass the HSK advanced exam (old version) by the end of the year, as well as working on listening, grammar and all the other skills enough to achieve that. Well.. although I have kept up several hours of lessons most weekends and I have improved my spoken Chinese, the exam in October was a fail - not by a gigantic margin, but there is still quite a way to go. As usual I was too ambitious, I only moved permanently out to Beijing in January and I've had to cope with a new (very busy job) since then. So I guess I just have to keep chipping away..

This year's objectives:

Pass Advanced HSK in April and if I fail on that attempt re-take in October (and ad infinitum..). Further to that I need over the next few months/year/as long as it takes to do the follows, in order of what I think priority should be (although they are all important):

1. Complete my "grammar sentence structures" notes. I have these written by hand, but I'm putting them into word format. Most of the structures cover the advanced level, but I need to further memorize and consolidate these and also add structures for the medium level exam to ensure that I also have a really comprehensive grasp of these down (i.e. work them with examples and get my teacher to check them, which she is already helping me with). Unfortunately although 北京语言文化大学出版社 did I think once publish a comprehensive list of examined HSK grammar structures for the old HSK advanced exam I'm basically having to recreate this (I think Roddy mentioned on another thread he may once have had a copy but it now seems to be out of print.. I have a friend doing research for a PHD so I might perhaps ask him if he can try the China national library for this..).

2. Listening. I have a collection of HSK listening exams, that I will start working my way through shortly. Although most of the content is at my level, unfortunately when listening to something without context, at a fairly high speed and once only I'm too-often still lacking detailed first-time comprehension. Unfortunately the HSK is not a test of whether you can understand something, for instance if it were repeated and if you were given more time to think about it, but of whether you can get the full meaning first time and without pondering the answers to the questions for too long. I just have to work through it and really improve my listening skills and also my exam technique on this section.

3. Writing. In my opinion writing free hand is the hardest skill because it tests so many aspects of one's grasp of the language (full memorisation of characters, composition, grammatical use..). Errors made when speaking appear to become magnified on page. I simply must start writing every day. For me (I would be very interested to see what others experiences are) I need to keep this up a little but often with faultless consistency or I just won't reach the level I need. I tried to practice hard for a couple of weeks before the exam, but although I could certainly write some prose in the main written portion of the exam, I'm still lacking the ability to write something that is well formulated and clear when I'm under time pressure. I initially thought that if I prepared a few essays beforehand and if I could partially re-write those if necessary it would be enough to get me through - but I have now changed my mind. Writing, at least free hand, may not be very necessary in day to day life anymore, but it is the ultimate way of consolidating and refining the use of language and this has a beneficial "spill-over" effect for all other language skills. Writing is also not just confined to some prose writing in the advanced exam in any event (part of the reading comprehension requires written answers) so a strong writing capability seems fairly essential for a high grade.

4. Knowledge of characters. Generally to focus on learning characters, rather than words, is not the way to go with Chinese. However I have been trying to review those characters of the most common 3000 that I am less familiar with. I'm also learning which key words these characters are found. That way from now on if I encounter an unknown character I will be fairly sure that it is at least not one of the 3000 most common and therefore not one that I necessarily have to know (I will also feel less fed up when I see characters I don't recognise!). Longer term I would like to know the first 3500 (maybe this achievable this year, I would certainly without question want to know "over 3000"), then the first 4000 and so on until eventually I know the first 5000, which is roughly what I understand an college educated Chinese would generally know. The aim is not to become a scholar of hardly-used characters but to ensure any gaps in my knowledge are generally unavoidable.

5. Vocabulary generally. I have some vocab books for the HSK, as well as the HSK dictionary and also a 近义词词典. I need to continue to go through the vocab primers and try to ensure a) I have the correct understanding of words I already think I am familiar with and b) fill in gaps in the specified examinable vocabulary where these still exist.

Phew! I love studying and it really is a pleasure - but there is always so much to work on it is hard to know where to start, even when I have a fairly clear idea of what I need to do. This year I'm going to try very hard to do each of these from 1 to 5 down a little and often every day if I can..and that probably means getting out of bed early .

Otherwise, I want to continue reading for pleasure, computer games in chinese, film and tv and hang out more with Chinese friends - this is the easier objective, time permitting!