The 2018 Aims and Objectives Progress Topic

[艾墨本]

On 1/3/2018 at 8:49 PM, happy_hyaena said:

I'm much more clear on what I intend to do in the next 3-6 months.

Consider dividing your goals by completion dates then.

 

Like:

 

Next Three Months:

do this

that

and some of this other thing

 

Next Six Months:

Keep doing this but more intensely

start this new thing

finish that other thing

 

Next nine months....

 

The best goals will be quantifiable and measurable with clear deadlines. Hit all three and then it's much easier to set smaller milestones. I.e. not just "hsk 6 by december" but also "HSK Vocabulary for the first three months, listening for the next three, reading for the next three and writing for the last three." You can break that done even further into monthly/weekly/daily goals. However, I caution being to specific at the smaller scale to allow for some "life" to happen. This is also helpful in recognizing when your goals are unrealistic and merit adjusting.

[happy_hyaena]

5 hours ago, 艾墨本 said:

Consider dividing your goals by completion dates then.

The best goals will be quantifiable and measurable with clear deadlines. Hit all three and then it's much easier to set smaller milestones. I.e. not just "hsk 6 by december" but also "HSK Vocabulary for the first three months, listening for the next three, reading for the next three and writing for the last three." You can break that done even further into monthly/weekly/daily goals. However, I caution being to specific at the smaller scale to allow for some "life" to happen. This is also helpful in recognizing when your goals are unrealistic and merit adjusting.

 

 

No, you're right and I totally agree with you. Measurable long-term goals that can be divided down to a week or are very important. I just feel like it's difficult to have any sort of idea of what kind of progress you will have made over a whole year. The further into the future you plan, the more you start get into "butterfly effects", as small things you do everyday (or don't do) can have enormous consequences. To give an example, what if attending that language cafe once or twice every week actually does more than just "maintain" my speech, but actually significantly helps me with my listening as well, causing me to have to revise my goals in 9 months time? Anyway, it was just an unnecessary off-hand comment from me.

[AdamD]

I never seem to meet specific annual goals, and the whole thing’s gone to crap anyway, but this year I intend to focus on voice language exchange online — getting over my anxiety about failing and just doing it. I’ve already started and it’s been great so far. That’s it.

[陳德聰]

I hate to be “that guy,” but it is now September and while I have been periodically returning to this thread to update my original post with the goals, I realise that we didn’t do any sort of mid-year check-in. How is everyone doing?

 

To recap:

 

I set out to open a language centre, which I have now been running for half a year, with ups and downs but it is constantly changing so that seems like a positive.

 

I took the English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English Canadian translation certification exams and passed the Chinese-to-English one, entering into the some 30-odd certified translators in that pairing for my province. I was about 15 points shy of passing the English-to-Chinese one, which is equivalent to one less major error and one less minor error, or three less minor errors, so I am confident I can pass it next year.

 

This might be cheating, but instead of going through the effort to track down a Cantonese meetup in my city and then vet it, I leveraged my language centre and started my own Cantonese weekly meetup which has been going steady for about 5 months.

 

I currently only have left my calligraphy class goal, and my bonus web miniseries goal left. At this rate, it looks like I may not find a calligraphy class but I realised I should focus on my just overall 楷書 character writing aesthetic before trying to move on to anything else. I bought myself a 字帖 but I have to admit I have never actually used one and I kind of hate them so far. Also, I could have probably guessed, but reading Hofmann’s book about graphemics would probably be more helpful if I reviewed and practiced with it.

 

As for the web miniseries... that might actually start with videos exploring the basic political topics that have come up over this past year with conservative Chinese-Canadian groups making fools of themselves blindly protesting things all the time (sex ed, supporting housing for homeless people, municipal politics, refugees, etc)

 

I hope everyone has had great progress! Or at least encouraging progress!!

[Tomsima]

My first goal was to do shadowing every single day for 2018. Within the first week or so I settled into a rhythm of a minimum of 30 mins of shadowing a day. On a good day I'll hit an hour and half before my voice starts croaking, on a bad day I have only just made the 30 min mark. I have only missed one day so far this year, and it was after going travelling with friends in Xi'an and collapsing from tiredness and sleeping through to the next morning accidentally

(Sorry its vertical..)

I have shadowed (in order of use): mp3s from the advanced boya chinese series, podcasts from the 得到 app (谷歌方法論), speeches taken from the textbook 高級口譯教程 （上海外語教育出版社）, audio clips from 愛情公寓 and the boring but formulaic 婚姻歷險記. In the last few weeks I have taken things right back to basics to get much more confident in my flow by shadowing the Defrancis reader series, starting from Intermediate Chinese reader 1. It has been going great, I'm really happy with my progress and am looking forward to a strong finish by the end of the year (I'll probably just keep going to be honest, such a great habit)

 

Second goal was to reach a high level in playing 古琴. 

So by April I hit my goal of being able to play 搗衣 with a high degree of confidence and accuracy. But I'll be perfectly honest, I was not enjoying myself at all. All I wanted to do was dedicate all my free time to my calligraphy, and constantly felt like 古琴 was getting in the way. Everyone's different, and although I think 古琴 music is amazing, by May I decided I didn't want to pursue any higher, and this goal got put on the back burner as it were.

 

As of May, I decided to change my second goal to 書法. I've been studying cursive for a fair bit of time, and found an amazing teacher and class last october (good luck to you finding something @陳德聰 , as we all know a good teacher and support group can make a world of difference). I've mainly been using 孫過廷 and 皇象 as models for improving my 草書, but it is gonna take a long time before I can move away from the 臨帖 stage (ie. a few years of solid dedication) I've managed to build another great daily habit in studying 書法. Recently I have been 通臨孫過廷的書譜. Here's a pic from last week:

[Flickserve]

5 hours ago, Tomsima said:

minimum of 30 mins of shadowing a day. 

 

Damm, so this is where I have been going wrong 

[imron]

8 hours ago, Tomsima said:

I'll probably just keep going to be honest, such a great habit

Habits beat motivation every time.

 

8 hours ago, Tomsima said:

I have only missed one day so far this year, and it was after going travelling with friends in Xi'an and collapsing from tiredness and sleeping through to the next morning accidentally

And life always finds a way to interrupt (hence the importance of habits).

[艾墨本]

On 12/26/2017 at 3:54 PM, 艾墨本 said:

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 

 

Well, it turns out I never fully fleshed these out before January, but these goals were the guiding principles of my study this last year.

 

1)? Completed part of this and am currently doing my research. I have to finish this one or I can't graduate, so that's a good motivator.

2)? I've spent more time than ever before on my pronunciation and it's work, but much slower than I thought. I'll spend a bunch of time working on this aspect of pronunciation only to uncover another aspect that I'm sorely lacking in. The latest discovery is my gross, if consistent, habit of saying my forth tones as something that is closer to a "half-third tone". It's particularly pronounced while saying fourth+first tone, so that's what I'm working on now. This has turne dinto more of a full year project rather than a single semester.

3) ?Passed the HSK 6 with a 212. I'll call that a success. I hope to take it again in another year or so to pass the 250 mark. That'd be awesome!

4) I never took the time to do this. Disappointed here. But, it's looking like my post-grad job won't be teaching Chinese and thus the motivation to achieve this one has dwindled

5)? I'm currently interning at CIEE in their student services office. It's been great and provided a lot of insight into how programs like this work. I'm also doing my research here, so double win here.

 

Mostly work and research now with a side of pronunciation. I'm also reading more books in Chinese but don't want to formalize that as a goal. I'm just having fun jumping from one to the next. Started 迷藏 by 亦舒 this morning. Good start with plenty of drama. Also 150 out of 250 pages of the way through an awesome book on cross-culture communication between US and China.

[BearXiong]

On 12/29/2017 at 2:29 PM, BearXiong said:

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.

 

Today, I'm very happy to say that I finally got to 3000 characters in my Anki deck ?! It only took me 1 year and 4 months to do it. Most of this was at a pace of roughly 5 characters per day, but I did 10 per day in the beginning as they were characters I was familiar with. There's still a long way to go and many common characters to learn but I think I'll use the remaining two months this year to consolidate these characters and improve my reading speed.

[Tomsima]

What with it being Dec 31st, I think its about time to bump this thread, would be great to see how others have been getting on with their goals this year. 

 

Here's my summary for my 2018 goals:

 

Goal 1: Do a minimum of 30 mins shadowing every single day of 2018. 

Result: Success. Well sort of. I had a perfect run of every single day until October 2nd (bar a mistake in August, see above), then I started an MTI masters course. Then life finally got in the way, and I haven't managed a single day this December. I still count this goal as successful though, as I made HUGE progress from about 10 months of shadowing. Very pleased with this, would highly recommend to anyone wanting to improve their accent, tones, speech rhythm etc.

 

Goal 2: Reach a high level of playing ability in 古琴; play 古琴 every day

Result: Failed, as it became so impractical taking my 琴 whenever I was out on the road. But I managed to reach a good level, and can now play 搗衣.

 

Goal 3: 背千字文

Result: Success. This goal was completed back in March, and I have done some refreshing every few months or so. I will post a video here at some point when I have the time. Learnt absolutely LOADS of history, cultural tidbits, classical Chinese, and studied a lot of 書法 books, which is always a plus. Highly recommended!

 

Aside from my 2018 goals, this year I also managed to achieve:

 

Learnt a lot of 草書 (living the dream), read a book on 孫過廷書譜, read a book on 離騷, and submitted my first original piece of 書法 to 湖北書法家協會行草展, which was 離騷 written in 章草. I didnt get selected for the exhibition, but feel like it was a big step being able to produce something I was satisfied with at that level. Really happy! Thanks to all those in this thread, keeping us motivated, looking forward to hearing how others got on.

 

I guess its time to start a 2019 goals thread now...

[Flickserve]

On 12/26/2017 at 5:18 PM, Flickserve said:

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) 

 

Working with a tutor totally dropped off.

Didnt listen to sentences at all.

In my circle of contacts the last half year, there were a couple of native mandarin speakers so I got bits of practice actively listening and speaking to them.

 

Speaking skills. Didn’t get moving until 3Q. End of year took out a 12months subscription to Glossika. Apart from the recent cold that I had, that seems to be quite satisfactory. 

 

Didn’t go through NCPR at all and donated three volumes to charity book sale. 

 

 

 

[roddy]

Depinning this to make room for the 2019 Topic - which is already at 6 pages, compared to 2 for 2018 over the entire year. Guess we were busy studying ?