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Beyond that, I'm terrible at remembering grammar patterns and my own procrastination may be the death of me.

 

I've nothing earth-shaking or global to add, but I wanted to point out that the key to this problem is using them a whole lot. Over and over, until they become natural.

 

Use the important sentence patterns both in speaking and in writing. Make a special point of it every day. Abuse those people on Lang-8; show them no mercy. Soon correct speech will become second nature. I think that vocabulary often gets more emphasis than it should and that sentence patterns, good Chinese syntax and grammar, are given short shrift by self-motivated learners.

 

Early on Chinese friends I was chatting with would say, "Oh, you must be studying such and such a construction." I would laugh and admit it. I would beat these new things to death: even with taxi drivers, shopkeepers and so on. I was absolutely shameless about it. Eventually learned when they were situation-appropriate and when they sounded bookish and stilted.

 

Courage is essential to your pursuit. Fear of appearing foolish needs to be pushed way far into the background. Need to adopt a relentless mindset.

[roddy]

"Really struggling with knowing when to recognise 得 instead of 的 in listening passages."

Honestly I'm not sure it's that important. If there were all that many cases where you needed to know that to understand something, the pronunciation would have evolved to differentiate. You could compare it to your / you're in English. It's the kind of thing your maybe going to notice in writing, but if I was saying this out loud there's not much chance of you're noticing my errors. 

 

I guess you should be able to think about a sentence and say which one it should be. But there's no need to be able to give a very quick response in the course of live listening. 

[Flickserve]

Are you working with any tutors with a textbook? Or all self directed learning?

how will you fit in all that learning material and a full time job at the same time?

[stapler]

And to add to Roddy's comments: even many older books don't distinguish between 的 得 and 地. The meaning can always be inferred from context (hence why even though they are homophones they don't cause Chinese speakers to misunderstand each other when talking).

[Mati1]

Hello Napkat / Chris!

 

I have recently started to make a daily effort to learn more Chinese myself because I did not make much (any?) progress at all.

You should get some graded readers. Even if you don't like reading that much (or are short on time) you'll need the reading practice eventually. Check out the Chinese Breeze series, it comes with mp3 cds. I'm currently listening to them myself.

For those times when you can only listen to audio recordings ChinesePod is great too. The difference to Glossika is that the hosts explain a short Chinese dialogue in English. The lower the level, the more English is used.

I prefer to know a base set of characters before trying to remember words and read texts.
Learning all radicals at the beginning is alright (I am too lazy for that) but not necessary. One can cover more ground by learning the base components when encountered for the first time while learning characters. Of course in the long run it doesn't really matter and it may not matter in your case since you're not an absolute beginner.
A good character book can help you remember; I do not know how well characters are introduced in NPCR.

I don't have plans for taking an HSK exam (anytime soon) but finally reaching a solid intermediate level in 2017 would be great, so we're in a similar situation ;)

Good luck with your studies!

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[roddy]

Fair enough - in that case just read up on the rules and remember 'em ;-) 

[Shelley]

I see you use Grammar wiki, here is the page relating to the 3 de's.

 

https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Structural_particle_%22de%22

 

I take it these are the rules roddy meant.

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I made a Chinese friend this week! I might ask her for help with explaining the annoying particle that is 就。

 

Great way to run off your new Chinese friends. Think about it. Would you like a casual friend to hold your feet to the fire and try to make you explain some feature of English grammar that you have used automatically all your life since age 5 or 6?

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[abcdefg]

Haha! Understood! She sounds like a good lady to know! I would probably buy her dinner, all other things being equal.

 

Best wishes in your quest to understand the language, make friends and grow roots here in China. Sounds like you are on the right track.

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Thanks very much! I appreciate it. 

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[imron]

Try to find 'fun' mandarin resources to work through. I need entertainment that counts as listening practice.

When you do this, try to find several of different 'fun' resources, so that when you finish one, you already have the next one ready and waiting to go.

 

Having a ready stack of material you plan to watch/listen to/read reduces the downtime between finishing one and starting the next one because you don't need to go searching for the next one (and possibly give up for a few weeks if you can't find anything) once you finish the current one.

[Guest realmayo]

I agree with Imron. Recently I've decided that the most difficult thing about studying for me is the non-studying aspect, i.e. administration, and I've now basically allocated a third of my study time to it: finding materials for the next couple of days, organising documents, fighting with the printer, shortcutting to audio or movie files, putting recently noted vocab into Anki, previewing upcoming material for new vocab, literally bookmarking a (hard-copy) textbook ... so now when it's time to do a slug of study, it's 100% hassle free. Previously that hassle was sapping willpower and causing me to delay actual useful study. In fact cutting admin off as a completely separate activity from studying has made me feel much better about the world... and of course if I finish the admin tasks early then there's plenty of study ready and waiting to be done.