On the right track?

[Vanessa7]

I will be getting a new little Chinese nephew sometime in August and I would very much like to go to China with my brother and sister in law to pick him up. My goal is to learn as much Chinese as humanly possible between now and then in order to: 1. Help my brother and sister in law with day to day communication and 2. Speak a little Chinese to the little guy (14 months old in August) to make the transition a little less stressful for him and 3. Pick up a few children's books while I am there to read to him and 4. Show my brother once and for all which of us is more awesome ;).

I am not starting at zero but I am pretty darn close. My plan is:

Learn 1000 characters on remembr.it

Read all of the Chinese Breeze books

Listen to the whole Learn in Your Car set

Continue in New Practical Chinese Reader (I do that with my son so I won't be able to get further than partly into the second book)

I am the homeschooling mother of 4 kids so I am very busy but I also spend a lot of time in the car and I do get up a couple hours earlier than the kids so I think I will have about 3 hours of study time per day (including listening in the car)

What do you think of my plan? Is it possible? Should I do anything differently?

Thanks in advance for any help or advice.

[giraffe]

I would definitely recommend Skritter over remembr.it. I'm finding it much easier to remember characters now that I'm actually writing them out. It makes a huge difference to understand the character as a combination of various building blocks rather than try and 'swallow them whole'.

[gato]

Since there are only 4 months left until August, that's not much time.

I would try to do as much of New Practical Chinese Reader as possible because it gives you a more well-rounded background.

You should use a flashcard program to review words that you've already learned, and do as much listening practice as possible.

If you have an iPhone or Android phone, you should definitely download Pleco Chinese dictionary, which has a built-in flashcard program. It's the best Chinese dictionary program on the market. It also has a optical character recognition function that allows you to scan in Chinese characters with the camera on your phone. That'll be very handy when you are in China.

Review of Pleco app

[Vanessa7]

Thanks for the advice. I have switched over to skritter and I have also downloaded Pleco on my phone. So far the studying is going very well. Benny Lewis watch out! (Just kidding)