The 2018 Aims and Objectives Progress Topic

[Meng Lelan]

Yes, it's me, back on the Forums momentarily before I disappear again. Friend from Taiwan coming to visit tomorrow. 

Goals for the year 2018. 

1. Skritter practice 5 minutes a day. 

2. Read 青銅葵花

3. Get certified in disaster response and management/CPR/First Aid/AED, from my work and life in Louisiana and Texas there's been multiple disaster situations...hurricanes, mass shootings, fires...

4. Visit schools for the blind in Taiwan and provide some cane travel instruction. If I can find an affordable plane ticket. 

[陳德聰]

Those sound like some great 2018 goals!!

 

For me...

1. Open a Chinese language resource centre and flounder/flourish (Jan-March hard deadline) - 2018/02/16 DONE

2. Take and pass the Canadian Translators, Terminologists, and Interpreters Council certification exam (May) - 2018/05/12 EXAM DONE, 2018/08/17 PASSED CHINESE-TO-ENGLISH YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAH

3. Host or find and attend weekly 粵語 meet-ups (all year!?) - 2018/04/17 DONE

4. Enroll in a 書法 class (ideally September or something)

 

Bonus: Produce a sassy 吐槽 webseries about Vancouver life that isn’t “Ultra Rich Asian Girls.”

[Meng Lelan]

Oh! The new like options are new. I must be old...we used to have the dislike button which at times had endlessly comical outcomes. I trust that imron and roddy would remember those good old days, oh they were awful. Best wishes to your goals and thank you for your kind words, 陳德聰!  

[艾墨本]

First thoughts on what I want to achieve this next year. I hope to flesh this out further and include more measurable outcomes by the end of January.

 

Primary:

1) determine my thesis topic, research it, and write the rough draft by years end.

2) Fine tune pronunciation (next semester's focus, 2018/3-2018/6)

 

Secondary:
3) Pass HSK 6 with a score over 200 - this is mostly a challenge of the test itself, rather than my language ability. But I need this to maintain my scholarship.

4) Learn how to teach HSK 1-5 grammar

5) Find an internship in teaching Chinese that will allow me to complete whatever research I need to do for

[Flickserve]

Same as last year which were;

 

A) listening skills -

review sentences in topics like glossika style. (worked OK but sometimes boring). Analyse interviews going through them with a tutor.(didn't do much of this) 

Do active listening by putting sentences into an mp3 player and then using the shuffle function. (found out shuffle function not really needed) 

 

B) speaking skills.

Mimic sentences. (can be understood, can be better pronounced) 

Pick out key phrases and practice them at work with colleagues. (hmm, forgot about this) 

Practice sentences that I have said poorly when having dialogue with tutors. (didn't really get going) 

 

C) grammar -

maybe try and get through NCPR vol 2! (one can hope) 

 

 

D) reading -

improve by reading a bit more. Not a big priority (rather lazy) 

 

E) writing - not a priority.

 

 

 

Objective - by the end of the year 2017, be able to hold a five to ten minute discussion with a person on a topic of their interest whether it be a complaint about airlines, food or whatever. (lots of gaps, so it's a 2018/9 objective) 

[xinhuar]

Goals

• Pass the HSK6 & HSKK高级 before leaving China in July
• Finish at least 10 Chinese novels (by reading at least 10 pages a day) 
• Memorize 5000 characters (currently at around 3500) on Skritter
• Write ~400 character summaries of news and magazine articles to prepare for HSK6 writing (3 per week)
• Conduct man on the street interviews and put together some (hopefully) interesting videos (biweekly?)
• Finish memorizing 三字经 (currently about halfway)

[Tomsima]

My 2018 goals:

 

1. Start and finish 古漢語 1 by 王力

2. Finish memorizing 千字文 (already 500 characters in and it's starting to get difficult)

3. Get to grade 10~ level on 古琴

 

Last year's goal was to pass HSK 6, and I did it! I feel like 2018 is gonna be largely dedicated to old Chinese. Good luck everyone!

[陳德聰]

These memorization goals are impressive!

[imron]

16 minutes ago, 陳德聰 said:

These memorization goals are impressive!

I dunno, even a 3 year old can do it

[Publius]

My goal is to write a loooong post about Qian Zi Wen.

[BearXiong]

Goals:
1) Add 5 new words (learned in context) to Anki everyday. I started doing this based on some advice I read by imron. I haven't missed a day since I started over 550 days ago. This should increase my passive vocab from about 4300 words to over 6k words.

 

2) Finish going through a 3000 character recognition Anki deck. I started doing this 6 months ago, and have currently gone through the first 1570 characters. Right now I'm going at a pace of 5 characters per day but might have to drop it to 3 or 4 per day when the characters get rarer. (Edit: Done!)

 

Those are my two easily quantifiable goals. I also hope to get better at listening, especially to heavily accented, unclear, slurred or very fast speech, also in situations with background noise.

 

[js6426]

Goals:

 

1. Get to 2000 characters (for reading, if I can write the same amount then that's a bonus)

2. Pass an HSK 5 practice test (I'm not going to pay to do the real one when I intend to do 6 during the course of my degree)

[imron]

7 hours ago, BearXiong said:

I haven't missed a day since I started over 550 days ago.

Well done!

[AdamD]

That’s fantastic, BearXiong. I second imron’s advice — my unbroken chain is well over 1,100 days and it’s made an enormous difference.

[DrWatson]

2018 Goals:

 

1) Finish my Cangjie learning objectives - I made good progress in September, but got derailed by work at the end of the year...work always derails everything I try to do, I need to figure out how to prevent that from happening this year. I plan to go at this goal hard in 1Q2018, it was just starting to pay off!

2) Read one article per week on Caijing and build small, impactful vocabulary lists from the material - I have always been interested in economics so hopefully I can find something to keep up the reading motivation. And I need to get the vocab down to a reasonable amount, I always over do it with anki decks and put too many vocabulary in the list.

3) Listen to Chinese material during my commute to work at least twice a week. I think I'm done with Podcasts...just too much English and not enough Chinese in the Podcasts. So I need to find something to replace Podcasts.

4) Hire an online tutor and practice once a week - since I'm not in China/Taiwan, I need a chance to practice speaking, even if its just for a little bit.

[imron]

Split discussion on unbroken chains here.

 

I don't want to hijack this thread, but...

If you don't want to hijack a thread, starting a new thread referencing discussion in the old thread is the preferred way to do it :-)

[biyalan]

My 2018 goals:

 

1) develop a reading habit. I want to be reading 30min/per day. Once I've done this for a bit I might revise to a more specific goal (number of books or something) but for now my goal is to start the habit.

2) Pass the HSK 6. This is a bit of stretch goal, but I think I can do it with some concerted effort. It's probably the best way for me to get my active skills (especially writing) back up to a reasonable level after some deterioration. I haven't taken any of the HSKs before, but I do find tests somewhat enjoyable and motivating. 

 

I'm keeping it simple for now - who knows what the rest of the year will bring?

[大块头]

Here is a link to my final report for 2017. Over the past several months I've found the Pomodoro Technique useful for managing my commitments. When I refer to a "pomodoro" below I mean an uninterrupted work session of 25 minutes.

 

My main goals this year are to: (1) improve my listening ability, and (2) increase my reading speed.

 

Listening

I intend to spend 25 minutes/day (1 pomodoro/day) transcribing Chinese podcasts.

 

Reading

I intend to spend 25 minutes/day (1 pomodoro/day) reading Chinese books.

 

Speaking

I intend to spend 30 minutes every week speaking Chinese with a language exchange partner. I've usually found Chinese graduate students or visiting scholars on campus to be my language exchange partners, but I've found it difficult to coordinate my schedule with theirs. I think I've found an alternative, however. There is a senior center near my house that serves a large Chinese-American community. I've submitted an application to be a volunteer and work with their Mandarin-speaking clients, and I will start next week.

 

SRS Study

I intend to clear my Anki queue every day and then spend the rest of the pomodoro studying Chinese characters with Inkstone. 

[happy_hyaena]

Reading

- Finish reading and mining the textbooks I brought home from China that are used by the advanced classes at university I visited. Hopefully this will be done before June as I suspect there is already a big overlap with the HSK wordlists that I have already gone through.

- Read one novel (e.g., 活着).

- Be able to read the 3000 most frequent characters. I don't like blindly following frequency lists, but I'm not too far from this already and I feel like 3000 is a nice round number.

 

Listening

- Use Subs2SRS on at least one drama and then watch it without relying on the subtitles.

*- Work on understanding a greater range of Chinese native speakers.

*- Listen to more audio content, like radio, podcasts, audiobooks, etc.

 

Speaking

- Continue attending language cafes once or sometimes twice a week.

*- Use the WeChat voice recording function more to communicate spontaneously with my friends.

 

Writing

*- Continue chatting with my friends in Chinese.

 

SRS

- Do 10 to 20 words a day in Pleco, depending on how much free time I have for doing reviews, relying on the above mentioned aims to supply me with material.

 

 

* = bad, vague goal

 

Honestly I think it's very difficult to plan ahead for a whole year. I'm much more clear on what I intend to do in the next 3-6 months. Regardless, I think that 2018 will be spent on continuing to expand my passive vocabulary by focusing on a lot of reading and listening. I plan to take the HSK 6 test for the first time at the end of 2019 and really getting a decent score, so 2019 will be spent on making my Chinese grammatically correct and making it come across a lot more idiomatic. So a lot more writing essays and having them be corrected, as well as more handwriting practice in order to get a clearer mental picture of Chinese characters.

It will be interesting reading these goals again in 2019 and evaluating how it all went.

[mlescano]

Vocabulary

1) I'm using Pleco SRS to review vocab and learn 10 new HSK 6 words every day. Having already studied Heisig and HSK5 vocab, most HSK6 words are easy to absorb. At the current rate I'll finish by the end of April.

 

2) Last week I finished compiling a list of the most frequent vocabulary used in my religious organization's literature (Simplified Chinese). I included all words that showed up 500 times or more in the literature (painstakingly copied the frequencies from an alphabetical index in the digital library), and ended up with a list of 3,386 words, which, according to my calculations, cover about 90% of any given text. I ordered them by frequency in a spreadsheet, divided them in 5 levels (10,000+ times, 5,000+ times, 2,000+ times, etc) and now I'm adding pinyin and a short Spanish definition, using only the most common meanings and pronunciations in our literature. This year I'll be sending each level to my friends as I finish them. EDIT: I better set goals:  Finish level 1 by January 15th, level 2 by January 28th, level 3 by March 1st, level 4 by April 10th, and level 5 by June 21st.

 

HSK 6

Last december I sat for the HSK5, which I'm almost certain I passed (EDIT: I passed with 238 points: 听力 76, 阅读 82, 书写 80). On december this year I'm taking HSK6. After taking HSK6, I'll start to learn to write Traditional Chinese with Heisig's help.

 

Reading

Almost all our literature is multi-language, and I have to read every day, so I just switch to Chinese and this way I kill two birds with one stone. Still, I'm starting to also use the Chinese version of Quora for some questions.

 

Writing/speaking/listening

A Chinese teacher living not far from me (who was my teacher at the CI during HSK preparation classes) befriended me and keeps inviting me to his home to help me with my Chinese for free. He's also learning Spanish, so I think we'll be doing some language exchange. I plan to write something each week and have him correct it. (EDIT: We're starting this Sunday)