Weekly studying necessary to make progress

[Jan Finster]

The last couple of weeks I was quite busy at work and did not have as much time to study Chinese as I had before. I did maybe 3-4 lessons at TCB per week and maybe 10 minutes of shadowing per day. I spent the rest of the time I had left preparing for my one-hour-a-week lesson with a Mandarin tutor. Both my tutor and myself noticed that I struggled more with listening comprehension, speaking and reading characters than in May and June. It seems as if I am not just simply not making any progress, but actually regressing. ?

 

Did you guys notice the same?

Have you noticed a minimum amount of study time that is necessary to maintain your level and a minimum amount of time to make progress? 

[Flickserve]

I personally wouldn't worry about the speaking. You could just catch up quickly with shadowing, especially as you have decent basics and know lots of shadowing will improve fluency.

 

I wouldn't like to go down with listening comprehension.

 

Sometimes I stop for a couple of months and get better!

[杰.克]

I wouldn't stress out too much! It's our human nature to beat ourselves up about these things. You are not going to regress. I find with anything I've learn -  its a little like a garden path. Once I've built it with stone slabs (i.e learn something), the weeds may grow over it if i don't use the path for some time. But once i start using the path again, and slowly clearing the weeds through my use, the path becomes more visible again and easier to walk down. Its not like the stone path ever disappeared, its just a little harder to see and walk down,  then when i first built it and their where no weeds obstructing my view.

 

As for do you need a minimum amount of time? I've never been able to set myself a weekly time and commit to it. Im just not that type of person. Im 7 years deep into learning now, and its a lifelong thing, so i want it to be fun. So really my weekly "study" time ebbs and flows. Thats not to say, you don't need concerted effort to progress. If i want to learn new words, i still have to put the time in at a desk, looking at my books and focusing. But i just go with the flow mostly. 

 

My personal advice, don't beat yourself up,  you will not be regressing. If it takes some anxiety away, commit to an amount of time per week that is at the very conservative end of what you can do. Otherwise you'll say OH im going to study 8 hours every day, and fail.

 

But yeah, don't worry.  This is a lifelong journey. Is your bigger picture trend that you are improving? in a years time, if you continue what you are doing right now, will you be better? absolute definite YES.

 

Week to week, yeah you'll doubt yourself, and be like im sure i knew that word a month ago. But this is just a word, or just a grammar point. You are gonna ebb and flow, but whats the overall trend? If your attending class, and doing some studying - then definitely upwards!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

[mungouk]

20 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

Did you guys notice the same?

 

Absolutely.

 

Everyone has different circumstances, and they change over time of course, but I've found that unless I'm having 3 lessons per week I just don't keep moving forward. 

 

For me, self-directed study tends to be just drilling vocabulary. Unless I have a lesson coming up and homework to do, I typically won't get around to it.

 

My teacher gave me this quote early on, and I find it very relevant:

 

    学如逆水行舟，不进则退。
    Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.

 

 

[Moshen]

I find that without constant study and/or practice, my weakest communication channel regresses.

For all the languages I have ever learned, listening for me remains the strongest channel. For one language that I learned in my teens and have rarely heard since then (years might go by with no listening), my listening comprehension is still effortlessly quite good. For me, I don't forget through listening that much.

However, with Chinese my weakest channel is visual - recognizing characters and reading. I was at the level of HSK 4/5 and did not study Chinese at all for two months while I was traveling in Europe, and when I came home and took it up again I had to go back to HSK 3/4 and review for a month or more until I was back where I was before. With visual things I forget much more quickly. This doesn't affect my other languages which have the Latin alphabet, because one doesn't forget that. But it affected Greek also, which I studied for two months, starting with how to pronounce its alphabet. Now I can hardly remember some of the letters, which are which.

So for you, Jan Finster, maybe listening is your weakest channel.

[Demonic_Duck]

20 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

The last couple of weeks I was quite busy at work and did not have as much time to study Chinese as I had before.

 

Bear in mind that a lot of factors can affect language ability in the short term - stress, general mood, distractions, lack of sleep, drugs (including caffeine and alcohol), and so on.

 

Each of these can in turn be affected by being busy at work, so there could indeed be a causal relation, but an indirect one. Once the work subsides again, your ability will bounce back to its previous level or even better.

 

On the other hand, if you go through long periods (months at a time) spending very little time studying, you may find your baseline level really does degrade somewhat. I've noticed this happening before, even while living in China. There really isn't an easy fix for this beyond trying to expose yourself to as much low-effort Chinese immersion as possible - face-to-face and written conversations with friends, music, TV, and so on. As for what "low-effort" means to you, that depends on how disciplined you are and how much mental energy you have available to spend on it.

[Jan Finster]

8 hours ago, Moshen said:

with Chinese my weakest channel is visual - recognizing characters and reading

I do struggle with characters the most. If I do not expose myself to them again and again, I tend to forget them. 

 

On 8/2/2020 at 5:40 PM, Flickserve said:

I personally wouldn't worry about the speaking. You could just catch up quickly with shadowing, especially as you have decent basics and know lots of shadowing will improve fluency.

 

With speaking I do not mean tones and pronunciation, but rather forming sentences. If I study a lot, when I try to form a sentence, words tend to pop up in my head from my passive memory. In the last couple of weeks even super simple words did not pop up anymore.

 

Anyway, thank you all for your replies.