The 2019 Aims and Objectives Progress Topic

[艾墨本]

Well, it seems about time to lay out my 2019 aims and objectives. I delayed this since I wanted to start my new year goals in February after turning in the first draft of my thesis (though the editing process that I am now in is just as burdensome).

 

Last year was pretty much filled with successes and I hope I can make some obtainable goals again this year. My life will be changing a lot with being a full-time student coming to an end. So I will be setting more modest goals to allow for time to transition.

 

The theme of this year, from a Chinese language perspective, is pronunciation and reading. My grammar and writing have gotten to a comfortable point as a natural result of writing a thesis in Chinese. That was exciting to realize. Woohoo!

 

So the goals:

 

1) Finish one Chinese book every month. With a stretch goal: put the top 300 most common unknown words into a Pleco deck and learn them (10 new words a day, 3600 new words by the end of the year).

2) Pick one phrase that I am struggling on the pronunciation with per day and put it on a note card in a sentence. Have a Chinese friend record themselves saying it and work on imitating them.

 

And that's it.

 

I do want to say more about what books I'll read. I asked my middle school students which books they actually enjoyed reading during class, today. One is a series called 皮皮鲁和鲁西西 that according to reviews is a difficult book for first graders. I'm so down for this. They also recommended translations of the Japanese author 东野圭吴's books, one of which I already bought.  Outside of fiction, having previously enjoyed 费孝通《乡土中国》 I've also picked up his 江村经济. I also put the first 204 words (all words that I don't know and appear >5 times) from《看见》into Pleco and started working on those. I hope that by the end of the year I can pick up 三体 or 欢乐颂, both of which are books I want to read but still require too much dictionary work. I'm doing this alongside diving back into reading English classics in preparation of teaching English lit. It was so exciting to pick up a novel and finish it in three days. I forgot how easy it is to read when it's my native language... So, really, my first goal is two books per month, one English and one Chinese.

[Publius]

Thumbs up for the Woohoo.

東野圭吾's 『容疑者Xの献身』 was the first Japanese novel that I actually finished. Quite liked his style and went on to read 『白夜行』 and several short stories from the Detective Galileo series. So 東野圭吾 to me is like 余华 to you. He's very popular right now in China. Just hope the translations are up to scratch.

[murrayjames]

@艾墨本

 

Good luck on your goals this year! Are you overestimating the difficulty of reading《三体》? Reading《三体》seems much easier than writing a thesis in Chinese.

 

Also, have you written on this site about your experience writing a thesis in Chinese? I want to know how you did it ?

[Lu]

I agree on 三体. Obviously it contains a relatively large amount of very specialised and for that reason very difficult words, but apart from those it's not that hard. Harder than 活着, but easier than most other literature I've read. Easier than 三毛, even, I think.

[艾墨本]

6 hours ago, murrayjames said:

Also, have you written on this site about your experience writing a thesis in Chinese? I want to know how you did it ?

 

I have not, yet. I’m waiting to finish the whole process instead of doing incremental tidbits. So, I’ll post about it after defending it in March or April.

[roddy]

Bump.

I don't have any Chinese specific goals at the moment, so I'm not an official participant in this topic. To justify my bump though, I am trying to get my running at least back to where it was after a couple of lazy years. Aiming for 3 times a week and 1,000 km - modest, but much better than I've done the last two years.  Finally, if I can find the time, I might also try to become a helicopter pilot.

[Lu]

Alright, update for the second New Year:

- Start and maintain a blog about Chinese literature: done. It has my real name on it, which I try to keep somewhat separate from my posting here, but if you read Dutch and are interested, send me a message and I'll send you the address. Only soft-launched so far, almost nobody is reading it yet.

- Continue to diligently study Cantonese: going well.

- and keep learning Mandarin vocab: going... somewhat well.

- Take and hopefully pass the test in May that will make me a certified translator: diligently practicing at the moment, going well.

- Make more money than last year: working on it. Last month was not as bad as I feared it was going to be.

- Exercise twice as much (from once a week to twice a week): going fairly well. I'm going rowing (on the machine) again tonight.

[murrayjames]

@Lu, best wishes with your blog! I wish I read Dutch.

[艾墨本]

Well less than a month in, seems time for an update.

 

All is going well with my two goals. I finished my first book on my list and am working unknown words through Pleco now. I bought 3 more 皮皮鲁和鲁西西 books as I find them the perfect amount of challenge while allowing my to focus on more than just vocabulary in my reading (i.e. speedy and reading out load).

 

My second goal has gone smoothly but shifted slightly. It was too much a burden to get Chinese people to record sentences. I do it when it happens naturally,s till, but not every day (I've got about 20 sentences so far). I am doing much more read out loud but trying to get it to sound more fluid which means: 1) increasing the speed in which I process characters and their sounds/raising the bar on what "knowing" a character means. 2) Learning more vocabulary so that I can, you know, say them. 3) Consciously practicing moving my gaze slightly beyond the words that I am saying so that I can process in chunks rather than words. I'm finding this last bit the hardest part but also necessary to get all the shifting tones correct when reading unknown text (in contrast to just achieving this through repetition and familiarity).

 

Side note, I also finished my English book but am hoping to get a second in this month. I finished Dune previously and am now reading Wuthering Heights.

[emuboy]

Been getting decimated with uni the last 3-4 weeks and have really been struggling to keep up the Chinese. Some days I get home so late that I barely have time to do a few flashcards on Pleco before sleeping ... tragic :(! Previously I would make up a lot of Chinese study when moving around between places (on the train, bus or waiting in line), but now it's all taken up by my Anki flashcards for uni. Hoping I can get things more under control !

[AdamD]

On 1/23/2019 at 1:38 PM, AdamD said:

2019 goal: find a way to get back on the horse

 

Found one. It turns out breaking the chain was the best thing I’ve done in years.

 

Keeping a chain was great for maybe the first year (2015), but it quickly became a chore. In the end I was keeping it up because I had to, not because I wanted to. This is not to say chains are bad — they’re not bad at all, if you respond to that type of motivation — but I was already motivated enough without building structural guilt into my study routine.

 

I kept it up until it hit 1,500 days, just for the milestone, then shut it down and did no Chinese at all over the Christmas break. After a month I was ready to jump back in, and have been loving the hell out of it ever since.

 

So now I’m focusing on what I like most: reading, character learning, grammar and online chats. I’ll get to listening and speaking later when I find my mojo.

 

I’ve also booked a flight back to Taiwan, but this time I’ll put a lot less pressure on myself, and will take a completely different approach to language exchange. Last year’s visit was incredibly stressful, mainly due to the expectations I put on myself.

[Tomsima]

2 hours ago, AdamD said:

1,500 days

 

thats...quite a milestone. What was your daily routine?

[AdamD]

Minimum 15 minutes reading and 15 minutes listening every day. Honestly I’d rather choose to have short breaks than go through the motions, but 1,500 days was probably ridiculous too.

[rebor]

The last time I posted was in the thread for 2015. The goals I set were very nice ones. Unfortunately they still remain figments of the imagination. Pesky Life, always getting in the way.

 

So what have I done since? 

 

I've nuked my deck, not sure if that's once or twice. That was likely a wise move. 

 

I've plowed through all of the flashcards for HSK 6. And then all of the flashcards for the old HSK. No harm in it, but likely less wise if accounting for opportunity costs. 

 

I read half of 圈子圈套 (1). Then I gave up. Then I came back and started over (after quite the hiatus) and now I only have a few chapters left (they're much shorter at the end of book!?). The experience is getting quite comfortable and my reading speed has picked up immensely (from snail to old lady?). Word boundaries are not as intimidating and I feel more like I'm reading than doing block by block translation. So even though volume has been low, there has been progress. 

 

I could set lofty goals, but I have a lot of other things going on in my life, and Chinese is a hobby. So I will set one goal. Being:

 

- I will read at least one page of a Chinese novel every day. 

 

Basically, the flashcard habit is ingrained in me. It'll get done. Reading is my second best activity, but I tend to miss a few days (weeks) here and there. So I will make it a daily habit. Hopefully I'll read more than the one page. It seems likely that I will if I get started. But one page will still count as a passing grade. When that habit is established I'll move on the next one, likely listening of some sort. Then and not before.

 

Up next is likely 家 before I circle back (see what I did there?) to 圈子圈套2. Chinese Text Analyser (bought it! Thanks for the great tool Imron!) will feed the flashcard beast enough unknown words that I get to 95% recognition. Old habits die hard.

 

I realize the profound irony that this promise to create a chain comes at the heels of AdamD's breaking his. In 1500 days, perhaps I'll be there. Given my track record, that'll likely be around the next time I write a post.

[imron]

6 hours ago, rebor said:

Up next is likely 家

From personal experience, I would probably skip this for now.  家 was one of the first novels I read and it was slow going in parts (doubly so for the sequel 春, although things picked up a bit again in 秋) and these novels all had more complex and in some cases outdated language compared to modern novels.   I think it's worth reading the 家 trilogy eventually, due to the cultural and historical background you'll learn from it, but in hindsight I wouldn't have read these among the first few novels I read.

 

If I hadn't been forcing myself to read everyday I probably wouldn't have finished them.

 

I know you mention you are going to be forcing yourself to read everyday, but I think there are other more suitable entry-level novels that will require less forcing.  I often recommend 余华 because his writing style is quite easy to read.  《活着》and 《许三观卖血记》are two of his easier novels, and with your current reading experience I think they'll be more suitable than 家.

 

家 isn't going anywhere (it's almost 90 years old already), and if you come back to it after 5-6 novels you'll have a much nicer reading experience.

 

Whatever you decide, make sure you have the next novel on hand before you finish your current one (this goes for all future books as well).  That way when you finish one, you won't need to spend any time thinking about what to read next, which can sometimes stretch in to days and then weeks and months of not reading.  Instead, you'll just pick up the next book from your pile and carry on.

 

6 hours ago, rebor said:

I realize the profound irony that this promise to create a chain comes at the heels of AdamD's breaking his.

1,500 days is really impressive.  I've never had a chain go that long.  That said, it's always a good idea to regularly assess the study habits, techniques and methods you are using to see if they are still working for you.  What works at days 1-30 might not work at day 1,500 and it's ok to make adjustments as necessary.

 

Always be in control of your tools, rather than letting the tools control you - which incidentally is why I also recommend regularly deleting flashcard decks.  I hope you keep up with that practice as you start to read more.  You'll find that regular reading acts as a much better 'spaced repetition' algorithm anyway.

[Flickserve]

On 2/18/2019 at 5:56 AM, AdamD said:

So now I’m focusing on what I like most: reading, character learning, grammar and online chats. I’ll get to listening and speaking later when I find my mojo.

 

I’ve also booked a flight back to Taiwan, but this time I’ll put a lot less pressure on myself, and will take a completely different approach to language exchange.

 

Knew you would be back ?

 

[Lu]

15 hours ago, rebor said:

Up next is likely 家

I hesitate to disagree with Imron, but as I remember 家, it's not particularly difficult. It has some old-fashioned Chinese, but it is written in a relatively small number of words, so once you've encountered a word, you'll likely see it again until you remember it. If (when) you start on this one, make sure to check out the dedicated 家 thread. (It says 'Book of the Month', but don't worry about that.)

[imron]

6 minutes ago, Lu said:

I hesitate to disagree with Imron

It wouldn't be much of an interesting discussions forum if everyone always agreed with everyone else.

[AdamD]

20 hours ago, imron said:

That said, it's always a good idea to regularly assess the study habits, techniques and methods you are using to see if they are still working for you. 

 

Yeah, and I didn’t reassess. Perhaps the best plan is to aim for a 200 day chain, or just leave enough leeway in your goal that you’re not effectively wasting time and making the whole thing a chore. I completely forgot to enjoy myself.

 

14 hours ago, Flickserve said:

Knew you would be back ?

 

…I’m trapped in this language, aren’t I? ?

[roddy]

1 hour ago, AdamD said:

Yeah, and I didn’t reassess. Perhaps the best plan is to aim for a 200 day chain, or just leave enough leeway in your goal that you’re not effectively wasting time and making the whole thing a chore. I completely forgot to enjoy myself.

I've been trying 12-week years for... well, just over half of one, I suppose. The idea is here, although I haven't used the website and only skimmed the book very quickly. But the basic idea of quarterly goal-setting seems solid (every company ever can't be wrong). So aim for an 84 day chain, then reassess. It's long enough to get something substantial done, but not so long you forget what the point was in the first place.