The "Your Sucess of the Day" Thread

[Lou]

Hey everyone!

(I hope I'm right that such a thread doesn't exist here right now.)

I think we desperately need a "Your Sucess of the Day"-Thread, after all, we are all walking on a quite difficult path. The concept is simple:

Just post your sucess of the day! It doesn't matter whether you just archieved a really important goal (such as finishing "The Dream of the Red Chamber" in the Chinese original) or you only had a tiny litte sucess today (such as being able to write one character more than yesterday)-as long as you had any kind of sucess that makes you feel proud, you can it post here and share it with others.

I'm starting right off:

My sucess of the day is to have done a "writing" exercise of the NPCR that seemed really frightening at first-I was supposed to write a dialogue between two people who just met for the first time. They should introduce themselves and ask and answer questions about their well-being, the well-being of their parents, their nationality, their major and some other general information. All in hand-written characters. I managed to do the exercise without looking any character up, not even one. I'm pretty proud of myself, I didn't think I already knew so many characters.

[edelweis]

This month I started writing in Chinese again, here and on Lang-8 (my last lang-8 post before that was in 2012...)

[querido]

I don't believe it, but my teacher said today that my Cantonese is now better than my Mandarin was.

[Lu]

Today I finally, finally finished the book I've been reading for about four months. Last week I got the sinking feeling that I was never going to appreciate it even when I finished it, there was just too much going on, too many interwoven stories and characters and whatnot. Today someone who knew the book gave me his perspective on why it was good: it's about how life is never simpy working hard to achieve your goal and then achieving it, there's always a lot of 阴差阳错 and unexpected developments. That made a lot of sense, so perhaps this book is not entirely lost on me.

 

Also 阴差阳错 was a phrase I recently came across a few times and now I understood it in conversation. That was quite nice too.

[mackie1402]

Yesterday I used Skritter for a whopping 7 minutes!

 

Sounds silly I know, but I just kept putting it off as my reviews built up to just shy of 5,000.

 

Was in the underground carpark waiting for my girlfriend and had no access to internet. Only had one app I could use on my phone. Skritter!

 

Let's hope I can double that time today. ;)

[NotChinese]

When I arrived here to learn Chinese I couldn't say a single thing.

 

I'm now into my second semester and am friends with people who have just started their first semester, so they're at the stage I was at originally.

 

I was with a guy today who needed to buy something. He went to a shop and was all, "我要这个，我要这个！",  with wavy hand gestures and he'd taken along a version of the item to hold up and show the shopkeeper. I realised I could have quite fluidly done that without any problems at all.

 

I guess after seeing his desperate (but of course successful) attempt to accomplish his task, my proud moment was the realisation that I've come on in gargantuan leaps and bounds from that stage, in the space of just one semester. Of course my friend will also advance in the same way, but it was cool for me to be able to compare and see my own progress.

[querido]

Fifty days, 500 Glossika Cantonese sentences.

[edelweis]

Bought a laptop yesterday. Lots of disk space to store all kinds of Chinese stuff etc. And switching the UI to Chinese is supposed to be easy with Windows 8.1. And it has a webcam of course, so I might take skype lessons. Well, maybe.

Had lunch at a Chinese restaurant and recognized an instrumental version of 甜蜜蜜 that they were playing on the stereo.

Edit: well, I even managed to remove the RJ45 plug which was stuck in the socket of my brand new laptop... had to use the tip of a scissor blade to unbend the little metal stoppers. Should work better now. Go me.

[Geiko]

I wanted to learn some Chinese input method based in root shapes instead of Pinyin, to help me remember how to write characters by hand, and I chose Cangjie to practice traditional characters. I've been practising for four weeks now and I'm very happy with my progress! I can now write long paragraphs without much trouble, I only have to check some character every now and then, and I don't type too fast, but I don't spend so much time proofreading, it's more precise. I still need to improve, though, because right now I mostly copy texts, that is, I can type a character if I'm seeing it, but I have trouble visualizing it in my head.

[Shelley]

My small success of the day was maybe more of a realisation but that realisation points to a success.

 

I was reading something I had typed out into pinyin a year or so ago, after the first line I thought this would make much more sense if it was in characters.

 

This made me think, wow, not sure when that happened but I get more meaning from characters than I do from pinyin now.

 

This definitely feels like a good thing

[AlexanderLivius]

I look forward to the day that I am on your level, Shelley!

 

My elementary Chinese finals are looming.

As the summer-long intensive draws to a close,

I am looking over all of the Quarter's assignments that I will soon submit.

 

I see mistakes, oh so many mistakes!

Which is great, errors that I would have caught a few weeks ago

are now plain as day.

 

I made a good run of it, onto Chinese Ic!

 

 

[Shelley]

My elementary Chinese finals are looming.

 

Hope you do well.

[Flickserve]

The other day, a lady looked at me whilst I was getting some bubble tea from a street stall. I thought she recognised me from somewhere - I didn't recognise her. Then she came up to me asking for directions in Mandarin. This is the first ever spontaneous conversation in Mandarin that I have had. Amazingly, I understood all of it except for the destination. :-( I thought she was saying the name of a building. I sort of looked blank and then she said 《出租車》。OK. I got it then. And gave her directions in Mandarin which was pretty simple as it was straight down the alley way.

But I wondered what she was saying before...then it clicked 《的士》。So I have made partial progress.

[LiMo]

Went mental and did a ton of cleaning that needed doing! Took me hours. 

 

On the Chinese side of things, I spent an hour dissecting my freshly printed HSK five specimen paper. It was harder than I had expected but not quite beyond me. I think over the next few months I shall try to increase my ability to comprehend formal Chinese writing (which seems to be what HSK 5 is getting into). 

 

I'm also in dire need of writing practice. There are so many words and phrases stuck in my passive vocabulary and I'm starting to realise that the only way to kick them into the active zone is through the oh so fearful practising of writing and speaking. Must get a language partner again. Where did I leave my address book....

[edelweis]

Today I had an opportunity to use a document written in Chinese to actually do my job

 

Okay, there were some diagrams in the document, and I had an example program implementing part of the features. It's not like I had to understand every single word. Still, I managed to find the information I needed in order to test an additional feature without using a dictionary

:mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

 

well apparently there's a limit on the number of emoticons allowed per post.

[TheBigZaboon]

Today, I found this thread. It's a mood lifter for sure. I really enjoyed it.

It's upbeat and forward-looking. It does what I try, often in vain, to do: celebrate the little victories. They're so few in number... So when I get one I try to squeeze all the pleasure I can from it.

Keep up the good work.

I hope to have something else to report soon.