The 2019 Aims and Objectives Progress Topic

[roddy]

13 hours ago, 道艺黄帝 said:

Where are you in the world that doesn't have Chinese people?!

Loads of places, once you get away from cities and universities. Looking at Scotland's 2011 Census, 140,000 identified as Asian. That includes Pakistani / Indian / Bangladeshi alongside Chinese. I can't spot data on how that breaks down, but I can see Pakistani identities (you can reply 'X, X Scottish, X British') account for 1% of total population, so that leave 90,000 between the other three, across a population of 5 million. If you live next to a university, no shortage of Chinese students, and as always the cities tend to be more multicultural. But pick any random town or village in Scotland and the chances are the Chinese population is tiny. And quite possibly not Mandarin-speaking.

[道艺]

What's Chinese for 'whoosh'? 

[Shelley]

We do have lots of Chinese people here, it is a university city and has one the highest intakes of Chinese students in the south, I don't know why but its very popular with Chinese students.

 

My local supermarket is awash with young Chinese students, all speaking to each other in one form or another of Chinese, I hear mostly standard mandarin, but I think they must be from all over but have settled on Mandarin as the lingua franca between themselves.

 

We have a mini China town near the university to cater to the students, I can buy all sorts of amazing and wonderful things and fabulous teas there.

 

Trying to strike up a conversation with these young people would be something of a joke, I don't know any of the things they are into, I don't share anything in common with them. They would probably run a mile if this weird lady tried talking to them in broken Chinese.

 

it is fun to just to catch bits and pieces of what they are saying and understanding it without them knowing it. It can make me smile the things they say.

[道艺]

10 hours ago, Shelley said:

They would probably run a mile if this weird lady tried talking to them in broken Chinese.

I do have to say, this is probably as far from the truth as it can get.

[Shelley]

9 hours ago, 道艺黄帝 said:

I do have to say, this is probably as far from the truth as it can get.

 

Why do you say this?

[Weyland]

1 hour ago, Shelley said:

10 hours ago, 道艺黄帝 said:

I do have to say, this is probably as far from the truth as it can get.

 

Why do you say this?

Because; the vast majority of Chinese are very appreciative of people learning their language, because it is not expected of them. It's completely opposite to the western perspective where we judge people for speaking broken English. I really think you should try getting to know some Chinese people, as this might give you a better perspective on the language you're trying to learn. Learning in a language in a vacuum, especially on that is as vibrant and full of meaning like Chinese, can be crippling to progress. Language often dictates culture, and change in language often dictates a change in culture and values. While Pleco does offer correct definitions to whatever word you type it, it often doesn't tell you its cultural significance (like being pejorative vs. negative). 

[Shelley]

@Weyland I agree with the reasons you give for getting to know chinese people. My personal situation makes this difficult. Not wanting to go into details here, but I am happy with what I do now.

 

[道艺]

Yeah there would definitely be a warm welcome if someone outside of China out of the blue spoke their language

[∞保罗∞]

Quick update

 

sat hsk 4 on Saturday morning and hsk 5 sat afternoon. Hsk 4 at this stage wasn’t a problem.

 

hsk 5 audio felt pretty easy to be honest should have passed but reading and writing not great, definitely didn’t pass the exam as a whole but gave it a shot but really wasn’t ready for this level. The hsk 5 exam was just full of teenagers from Chinese families and it was amazing how quick they flew threw the reading. I guessed most of the reading answers -had a massive headache at that point and found the paper incredibly difficult.

 

for hsk 5 I’m expecting 60-70 in the ting Li and 20 in the reading 20 in writing lol over 100 would be ok for the day that was in it.

 

hsk 4 would hope to be around 270 - missed a few simple marks because of concentration in audio . I passed hsk3 with 287 or 290 last November - could have sat the hsk 4 much earlier.

 

the last 6 months after various real life things and more work responsibilities I haven’t been doing the one hour a night book work.
 

Virtual no reading and writing practice in that period but religiously listening in car and watching tv shows every day 2 hours approx Massive improvement in real talking terms and real understanding terms but big difference from original goal of 48 hours per week. When I did read the text book I wasted a lot of time writing out hanzi pinyin and English for all the vocab and then not reading the text haha as at that stage I was tired.
 

im recording all hsk5/6 words in a pimsleur format - that is saying the Chinese word 3 times with space so when I listen back I can repeat followed by the English translation. At least I can practice that in the car.

[murrayjames]

very short update

 

Last week I achieved my goal of reading 1,000,000 characters in books and articles in 2019. I’ve posted about my experience here.

 

Good luck to everyone who has posted in this thread. I hope you all reach your aims and objectives this year.

[Tomsima]

My updates for this year: stopped watching the news in Chinese everyday after a solid 9 months of watching every day. It just got so so tedious, i mean i knew cctv was repetitive, but every single show just copies and pastes scripts from each other. I felt like I wasnt getting enough variety, so dropped this goal last month, and my quality of life has improved dramatically ? 

 

As for character practice, im now working on building my 楷書 back up, as I have written so much 草書 this year i realised i was actually forgetting the full forms of some more complex characters, especially muddling up simplified and traditional variants. Overall this goal is still going strong, and I'm really happy with how much progress has been made!

 

anybody else up for sharing their 2019 progress while there still a month to go?

[艾墨本]

Taking a look back at this year, despite my rather modest goals, I still failed to meet them. However, I did a great job with them up until I started my new job, so I'll call that a success. As for reading, I read 3 books in the 皮皮鲁和鲁西西 series, one and a half books by 东野圭吴, the first 100 pages of 《看见》 and the first 10 pages or so of several other books. I did, however, read for more English books that I previously established with my goal.

 

As for pronunciation, I enrolled in pronunciation classes (at GoEast in Shanghai, which I recommend) and worked intensively on my pronunciation for about three months during which I saw tremendous improvement in my pronunciation. After heading to the states during summer, I stopped working on pronunciation and was never able to get back into it without the support of a proper class. My pronunciation has since regressed some.

 

Overall, my Chinese is on the back-burner as I work to further establish myself in a new career teaching English Literature. I anticipate that Chinese will not be the focus of my life for at least another year. The energy to push myself to do things that i had previously used to make sure I was studying Chinese everyday is now being allocated to ensuring I spend more time at the gym and maintaining my mental health. Even opening Pleco and doing a few words each day is a burden I don't want.

 

Fortunately, the go-to language among my co-workers is still Chinese, so that is leading to a lot of more passive learning. Unfortunately, the progress I want most is in my pronunciation and that requires very active and consistent practice to develop for me.

 

On 1/24/2019 at 10:29 PM, 艾墨本 said:

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.

[Lu]

- Start and maintain a blog about Chinese literature.

I started a blog, but did not maintain it. First it was once a week, then every other week, then once a month, and then nothing. I still have some simmering hope that I'll pick it up again at some point in the near future. I did start a Twitter account and I have managed to keep that up without any problem. Went from some 30 followers when I started to over 120 now, all while posting about Chinese literature, so that's a win.

 

- Continue to diligently study Cantonese

I studied diligently for a while and then stopped once classes ended.

 

- and keep learning Mandarin vocab.

I never really stopped learning Mandarin vocab but it has not been going well of late.

 

- Take and hopefully pass the test in May that will make me a certified translator.

I passed!! Now I need to do the paperwork to actually make me certified. I'm not blaming myself for not having done it yet, because first I had a big deadline, then I was on holiday and then I was in China.

 

- Make more money than last year.

This has failed. It has not been a very good year income-wise.

 

- Exercise twice as much (from once a week to twice a week).

Succeeded somewhat. I don't think I exercised twice every week, but I did in many weeks.

[roddy]

6 hours ago, 艾墨本 said:

Taking a look back at this year, despite my rather modest goals, I still failed to meet them.

That's my line!

 

I think when I sit down and review, I'll have done fairly well this year. Passed my classical guitar exam (Grade 6), should have passed the Spanish one (A2, which was a safe level chosen to make me spend more time on speaking and filling in low level gaps, neither of which I really did). Running, as I said, has been very good, 1235km, slowed down a bit with winter (I don't mind the cold, but running on icy leaf-sludge isn't great) but have been at the gym instead. Only abject failure was doing more outdoors stuff - did very little walking, and didn't use my tent once. Need to figure out what to do about this next year. 

 

'Course, when I actually look out what I wrote up at the start of the year, I'll probably find lots of goals I've completely forgotten about. "Become helicopter pilot.... hmmm, don't remember writing that one down... let's leave that for 2021."

[murrayjames]

8 hours ago, 艾墨本 said:

As for pronunciation, I enrolled in pronunciation classes (at GoEast in Shanghai, which I recommend) and worked intensively on my pronunciation for about three months during which I saw tremendous improvement in my pronunciation.

 

Ooooh. Sounds interesting. Did you take their classes on campus or online? Group classes or private?

[PerpetualChange]

I never set goals for 2019 but it would be interesting to do so for 2020.

 

• In late 2018 I bought "Discussing Everything Chinese" and started working through it by myself. I had finished it sometime mid year, so I bought Discussing Everything Chinese 2, but I didn't like it nearly as much. Same learning program as the first book, but IMO the subject matter was even more dry. 
• I started with a Preply Tutor over summer, first once per week, now once every 4-5 days. An hour with her is really no more expensive than going to the bar to watch a game, and I get a lot out of it. She's very literary-minded - in the beginning she would give me readings about classical Chinese culture that were far more interesting than Discussing Everything Chinese and now we are working through a Taiwanese Jr. High Textbook (mostly the readings) together. 
• I've managed, outside my tutor, to have Skype or Wechat calls with other native speakers at least 1-2 per week. Usually these are 30 minutes English, 30 minutes Chinese. 
• I started watching dramas, probably accumulating over close to 200 hours of passive practice this way. Although I do not watch them deeply (i.e., rewinding them over and over to be sure I heard correctly), I watch them with Chinese subtitles on, or else no subtitles. I watched 真愛趁現在，真愛黑白配，致我們的單純小美好，致我們的暖暖小時光，一千個夜晚, and parts of others.  
• My wife of 5 years finally started to show an interest (I'm going to say, almost totally on her own). Now we share this hobby, which is new for me but rewarding in its own ways, it is really interesting to see a total beginner, and has called into question some of my beliefs about how people should start learning this language from scratch.

 

That's it, mostly.  I surrounded myself with Chinese this year, without really much of a goal or purpose, but just because I liked it and I liked the escape offered by it as a hobby. For 2020, I'll seek to set some hard goals, probably force myself to read more and retain more of what I read by studying it, since being able to pick up any novel and read it is becoming a chief priority of what I want to get out of this language. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[艾墨本]

25 minutes ago, murrayjames said:

Ooooh. Sounds interesting. Did you take their classes on campus or online? Group classes or private?

 

In person, private classes. For high-level pronunciation classes, I'm afraid that anything else would be to time consuming to make progress in. I really needed someone to take me step by step through each sound, rework how I was forming my lips and placing my tongue, the speed and pacing of my sentences, etc. It took a lot of, "no, yes, no, no, no, yes, no, yes" until I was able to consistently reproduce the proper sound.

[Tomsima]

My first goal this year was to watch 新闻联播 every day of 2019. As I said last month, this goal got repetitive with very little reward after about half a year - I pushed on until September, by which time I just dropped it as a waste of time.

 

My second goal was to learn cursive. This appears to have turned into my mission in life apparently, as I have ended up not giving an extra half hour a day to practice handwriting, but is now around an hour a day in the morning for 硬笔 and an hour in the evening for 毛笔.

The morning is for speed writing basic sentences from one of those huge 10,000 sentences anki shared decks, dry but does the job. On average I manage to write 50-60 sentences a day, with the time spent on each card around 1 minute (although I would guess a sentence is about 30 seconds). Handwriting is messy and dips in and out of cursive depending on how much I feel I want to practice the 楷 form of a character. I also write all noticeably different simplified forms after their corresponding traditional character (eg. 調 doesn't need to be rewritten as 调, but 醞釀 does need to be rewritten as 酝酿).

 

 

Heres my morning set up. I use an LCD writing tablet coupled with a Wacom pen (doesn't need it, any writing implement will work, I just had one lying around and its comfortable to use). I would still recommend using a real pen and paper, but this is pretty close, and it has many benefits like being able to instantly delete everything before your eyes auto-skip to a character you just wrote to check how to write it again. I still use paper occasionally, but I can use this on the train without worrying about pens, ink, mistakes, wasting paper etc. That being said, brushstrokes can get a blobby. If you're interested in writing, its worth a try at least, as it might encourage you to write more on a daily basis.

 

As some will know, true cursive is not just about writing at speed, but is also about streamlining a character for aesthetic reasons. I love coming home in the evenings and practicing cursive using a 毛笔, it actually makes practicing cursive really enjoyable, especially compared to using fountain pens/pencils. I'm lucky, in that I have a fantastic and relatively well-known calligrapher as a teacher (程立雪, student of 鲁大东), and any mistakes or bad habits I get into are corrected before they become ingrained. I would always recommend anyone interested in learning proper cursive with a brush to first seek out a good teacher, although I guess theres no need to labour this point; we all know how important face-to-face interaction with a teacher is.

 

 

Here's two photos from my current project, studying 怀仁集王羲之圣教序. Its a mixture of cursive, semi-cursive and kai characters, so really good for internalising good writing habits.

I'll post my 2020 goals in next years thread. Great to hear how everyone else has been getting on too, keeping us all motivated!

 

[murrayjames]

20 hours ago, Lu said:

I did start a Twitter account and I have managed to keep that up without any problem. Went from some 30 followers when I started to over 120 now, all while posting about Chinese literature, so that's a win.

 

Impressive! I’m a bit jealous: how come the Twittersphere gets to read your insightful thoughts on Chinese literature but we don’t? ?

 

[Lu]

14 hours ago, murrayjames said:

Impressive! I’m a bit jealous: how come the Twittersphere gets to read your insightful thoughts on Chinese literature but we don’t? ?

I'm flattered but I don't know how to answer that :-)

 

Mainly my goal is that everyone in the Netherlands will read Chinese literature (and I get to translate some of it). Since most of the Netherlands is not on here, I've been trying to reach them elsewhere.