The 2021 Aims and Objectives Progress Topic

[Woodford]

With the year about 1/3 over, I have read a couple of books and have reached over 16,000 total vocabulary flash cards. My ambitious goal for 2021 was to go from 15,000 to 20,000 words, but even if I get halfway there (17,500), I'll be thrilled. My SRS flash card review is about 175 per day (rather painful), and I feel like the return on my investment is diminishing--the better I get at reading, the more slowly I improve.

 

I feel like my listening skills are starting to mature, so I have a strong urge to lay aside reading for the summer months of June - August, stop adding to my SRS cards (which will dramatically reduce my daily review quota, perhaps from 175 to 80 or less), and spend my study time just listening. I imagine I'll be using YouTube, and I'll have a routine like the following each day:

 

1. Listen to a new 15-minute segment of audio without Chinese subtitles, then again with subtitles, then again without them

2. Listen to yesterday's 15-minute segment, first with subtitles, then without them

3. Listen to the 15-minute segment from two days ago, without subtitles only

 

The whole process will take 90 minutes, which replaces the 90 minutes of reading time I have now.

 

By September, I hope I'll have a greater ability to casually listen to Chinese podcasts as I go about my day, and I hope to start reading again with my eleventh book (Qian Zhongshu's "Fortress Besieged," which I expect to be somewhat challenging).

[imron]

12 hours ago, Woodford said:

My SRS flash card review is about 175 per day (rather painful), and I feel like the return on my investment is diminishing

If SRS reviews are painful and you are reading regularly, you might as well just delete your deck.  There will be little-to-no negative impact, and significant positive impact.  See here for the reasoning.

[Woodford]

4 hours ago, imron said:

If SRS reviews are painful and you are reading regularly, you might as well just delete your deck.  There will be little-to-no negative impact, and significant positive impact.

 

It's indeed something I've thought about a lot! When I was less mature in my Chinese study, I tried learning all 5000 HSK words in a year using SRS, with four different Pleco score files (writing, listening, reading, speaking). Of course, I've since learned that there's nothing magical about HSK vocabulary lists, and my time would have been better spent elsewhere (for a certain stretch of time, I had 800-1000 SRS repetitions a day!). Now, two and a half years later, those cards are almost depleted. It's just a 15-minute-a-day review.

 

My other word list has 11,000 additional words I got out of books. Some of them are quite obscure, antiquated, barely have an entry in any of the Pleco dictionaries, or (and this is a funny thing I've encountered) represent words that I don't even know in my native English language (one fun example is "isotropy," 各向同性). When I read English, I don't often bother looking up words I don't already know. But when learning a foreign language, I feel obligated to do so. Ironically, my Chinese vocabulary might outpace my English vocabulary someday.

[Woodford]

I have now undergone the first week of intensive listening practice (90+ minutes a day) with Chinese YouTube videos, and...wow. A bit more work than I thought. A lot of new vocabulary, topics, accents, and speaking styles. I can almost never follow along with a speaker until I replay the video with the help of 字幕 (though sometimes I can understand large chunks, and that keeps me going). I guess it also provides me with the opportunity for reading practice (speed-reading practice, no less)! New vocabulary piles up in a queue, and I only introduce it to my SRS review at about a rate of 14 cards per day (i.e., about 5000 a year) to keep things from getting out of control. My eventual goal is to not need captions and to not need to review things over and over, but it does feel good when I learn the words and watch the video for the third/fourth/fifth time (and I can now understand it). That's when I feel that sense of "immersion." And it's delightful and strange.

 

A friend from Tianjin suggested that I watch the 中国通史 series, warning me that "it might be hard." He wasn't kidding! So many historical terms, and so much lavish narration filled with chengyu. At least the speaking is slow, crisp, and clear.

 

I don't entertain any super high hopes (I've come to learn that learning Chinese is a slow, long-term endeavor), but I hope that little by little, the spoken language will become clear to me. 

[alantin]

I didn't make official new year's resolutions in the beginning of the year but intensifying my Chinese study ended up as a goal for the year. I've increased my one chatting practice with tutors from about 2 per week to 5 to 6 week and I also committed to doing at least 10 minutes reading, 10 minutes listening and at least some writing everyday. I have also changed two of those sessions with tutors to HSK5 grammar study with the tutor. Before I haven't really studied any grammar patterns and instead trusted on only picking them up naturally. It has been working well but I find that after going over a few new grammar pattern a week with a tutor, I'll suddenly see and hear them all around me.

 

I have kept these habits up for about a month now and it feels to me like they are working well to help me get more natural at using the language. Especially chatting over WeChat is getting easier and easier and I can now have all of my sessions with the tutors completely in Mandarin without resorting to English. I have very little trouble understanding my tutors even though they have very different approaches to how speak to me. One obviously considers what words to use in order to keep new words to a comfortable amount while others just seem to speak like to any friend and don't seem to be trying to dial down difficulty. However understanding youtube videos or television shows or movies is still impossible for me without stopping to read the subtitles.

 

The 10 minutes rule is also working wonders. I now tend to listen to at least an hour or two and read for 15 minutes or more. I'm going to keep these targets at least for the foreseeable future and keep to the 5 to 6 chat sessions for at least the next two months and maybe dial them down again in September after holidays. I expect to be a lot more conversational by then.

As a goal to strive for, passing HSKv3 band 4 or band 5 next spring would be awesome. Currently getting passing scores in HSK5 but need to increase my reading speed to be able to read everything in the test within the given time.

[imron]

9 hours ago, alantin said:

The 10 minutes rule is also working wonders.

Habit beats motivation!

[Tomsima]

My goal for this year is to reach a shorthand writing speed of 150 words/minute. The skill is indirectly related to Chinese in that I use it in C-E interpreting (which I am still bad at, but seem to be slowly improving). 

 

Coming up to halfway through the year and I'm currently writing at about 70-80wpm. Getting over 100wpm is proving to be some serious psychological barrier. Happy to say I now mentally see the English shorthand symbols for many common words/concepts when they are said aloud in Chinese, as an automatic response similar to how you might see characters or words as they are spoken. A great feeling!

[imron]

17 hours ago, Tomsima said:

as an automatic response similar to how you might see characters or words as they are spoken.

Glad I'm not the only one who does this.

[BearXiong]

Here's my almost-half-year update.

 

1) Have 150 hours worth of voice calls on HelloTalk.

I've done 126.8 hours as of today. Logging hours and making this goal has motivated me to spend more time on this than I would've otherwise. Lesson learnt: log hours to track progress and keep motivated!

 

2) Learn 4 new words per day in Anki.

I bumped it up to 5 and have stuck with it. One thing I learnt is that in the past I was too conservative with my Anki answers, i.e. tapping 'hard' when I should've tapped 'good'. By being more aggressive with my answers I can learn more in less time with little impact on learning quality. 

 

3) Go through 500 new characters in my Anki deck.

Done! I've now gone through 4000 characters in my Anki deck which I'm super happy about. I know the 3000 character figure gets brought up a lot but I can honestly say there's a pretty big drop in unknown characters encountered while reading when going from 3000 characters to 4000 characters.

 

I watched 10 minutes of 御赐小仵作 (ep 14, 25-30min) and encountered six characters not in my deck: 驸瑾栾黔稷觑. The first four appeared in names and by the 14th episode I already knew their pronunciations without putting in conscious effort. I asked one native speaker and they knew all 6 characters. All in all, there's still many characters to learn to get to native-level character recognition but I'm happy with this small milestone nonetheless ?

 

4) Watch at least one episode of some TV show a day.

I've missed a few days here and there but I also binge watched some days so I guess it balances out.

 

Edit: Coincidentally, 觑 turned out to be the 4003th character in my character deck (my character deck is premade based on weighting various frequency lists).

[calculatrix]

So, now half of the year has passed. Time for a review.
 

On 1/12/2021 at 10:06 AM, calculatrix said:

Finish the last three weeks of "Chinese for HSK2"

Done

On 1/12/2021 at 10:06 AM, calculatrix said:

reward myself with a good Chinese grammar book

Bought. Read. Twice.

I like grammar.

 

Then I tried to work with Heisigs book. But it did not work for me. Absolutely not. Maybe I will give an analysis in an other thread.

Then I bought "Discover China" volume 2, did the first four lessons and gave up.

The reasons for that are quite silly and trivial:

First, the book is (as its title says) too much focused on travelling through China, which made me grumpy. We have a pandemic and travelling is impossible. So all these dialoges about  "in the taxi" "at the reception" "the terracotta army" feel so strangely theoretical.

Second, the pages are too glossy. When I used a higlighter to mark text I always got colored fingers. That also made me grumpy.

 

Then, in another thread in this forum @somethingfunny and @mungouk tought me a bit about effective learning techniques and pointed to the HSK Standard Course series.

So I tried the HSK3 Standard Course book, and that is great.  Well structured. 

I first created three sets of Anki Cards (took me three days):

One set with words. These I learn in both directions, from and to Chinese, and writing. To see the words in context I also have all sentences containing the respective word on the back side.

One set with all sentences, here I only learn from Chinese to pronounciation and translation

One set with charaters on the front and all words containing the character on the back side. Here I try to remember as many words as possible for the character.

That works. Currently I am pre-learning the words of lesson 15, have read and worked through the grammar of lesson 13, and have done all the exercises up to lesson 7 (ok here I am a bit lazy. Maybe next weekend I will do more ?).

 

I also rewarded me with some graded texts: The rainbow bridge starter bundle for Pleco. I like the stories. I do only read them. No learning of words, no exercises. They are the cherry on my cake which I do for fun and not for learning.  

 

I still have no plan, what to do, when I have finished the book.

Maybe the Coursera-Mooc for HSK3 to solidify everything.

Maybe a second grammar book (it's always good to have a second opinion).

Maybe a real life course. Post-Covid.

I think, even when the pandemic is over, I will try to find time to continue learning Chinese.

It is sometimes hard, often boring, but so much fun.

[Tomsima]

7 hours ago, calculatrix said:

Then I tried to work with Heisigs book. But it did not work for me.

 

Always a good reminder how different people find success and failure in learning in such different ways. I absolutely thrived on Heisig, finished both books and continue to use the method for new characters to this day!

[Jan Finster]

8 hours ago, calculatrix said:

Maybe I will give an analysis in an other thread.

Please do!

 

8 hours ago, calculatrix said:

Then I bought "Discover China" volume 2, did the first four lessons and gave up.

The reasons for that are quite silly and trivial:

First, the book is (as its title says) too much focused on travelling through China, which made me grumpy. We have a pandemic and travelling is impossible. So all these dialoges about  "in the taxi" "at the reception" "the terracotta army" feel so strangely theoretical.

Second, the pages are too glossy. When I used a higlighter to mark text I always got colored fingers. That also made me grumpy.

 

I know you did not mean to, but this had me rolling on the floor ?

I can totally see how "traveling to China" must feel like reading "how to survive quicksand". Not something we will have to worry about for a while...

 

8 hours ago, calculatrix said:

It is sometimes hard, often boring, but so much fun.

True words!

 

[Woodford]

I have now spent about 75 days listening to 90 minutes of Chinese content on YouTube every day. It ended up being more time-consuming than that (like 2+ hours), because I would pause and un-pause the videos to get the definition of unknown words and phrases. Ultimately, it proved to be a huge load on my schedule, and it's brought me nearly to the bursting point. My original goal was 90 days, but my other responsibilities are calling to me, so I'm going to move on from that strategy for the time being.

 

The strange thing is that I know I likely made progress with listening, but I'm not sure how, or to what extent. There's a general increase in comfort and familiarity, getting more immersed in the patterns of Chinese speech. I can usually get the gist of what I'm hearing, but to really get decent comprehension, I'm heavily reliant on subtitles. Sure, I understand it all very well after that (98%+ comprehension), but only because I have now seen the subtitles. Someday, I want that to not be the case.

 

Ultimately, it's a long, long road that requires a steady effort over many years, and I don't have to pressure myself to go all-out in some kind of effort to get awesome results fast. I had done very casual, passive, daily listening exposure before this summer, and I am surprised at how far even that tiny effort got me.

 

At this point, I am excited to enter into a much more sustainable phase of practice:

• About 20 minutes of deliberate listening practice a day, rather than 120+
• Hours and hours of more passive listening practice as I listen to Chinese language podcasts while working, commuting, doing household chores, going out on walks, etc. Yes, my attention will fade in and out, but I think there is some benefit to be had here, without cutting into my productive time.
• A deep dive back into reading. It's starting to get more fun and easy. My third year of reading Chinese novels begins this September. Rather than "drilling" through books (reading them multiple times), I'm just going to read them straight through. My minimum goal is 10 pages a day, but my ambitious goal is 14 pages a day (5000 pages this coming year). At any rate, I will have covered more ground than my first two years combined, and I'm excited about what that might mean for my reading skill and general grasp on the language.

[Guest realmayo]

Let me put in a recommedation for (now off-air): https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/42490-qqsrx-list-of-episodes/

[Hijinks]

September's a perfectly good time to list my 2021 goals, right? Right?

 

I've maintained around HSK 5 level for the last few years (completed HSK5 标准课程, loosely maintained with Anki) and finally, finally want to tick it off before the year's out. To this end, the main goal/aim is:

 

Pass the HSK 5 with 200+

• Completely 'learn' all HSK 5 vocabulary from the HSK 5 Skritter deck (in my case, re-learning forgotten ones). 100 reviews/day and 20 'new words'/day. Currently 52% down.
• Practice HSK 5 reading materials/graded books until consistently scoring 80+ on the reading section.
• Create an Anki deck of sentences showing weaker grammar points in use.
• Write on Lang-8, and/or other services if better.
• Maintain 1hr/week lessons on Italki with a teacher.

Although some of those bullet points may chop and change depending on how progress and feedback, I'm happy with that for now. I'm hoping some sage advice and wisdom from those who've crushed the exam might also help me along the way!

 

Good luck everyone for your respective goals - 加油！

[Liebkuchen]

Also a late starter listing my goals for the year...

 

My main goal is to be at HSK 1 standard by the end of December.

 

I'm going to do this by:

• Using memrise every day
• Using the Mandarin Companion Breakthrough Readers and audio books until I can read them fluently.
• Practising writing characters daily
• Watching some sort of native tv/news/film daily
• 2x weekly 1 hour lessons on italki
• Occasional language exchanges

 

 

[黄有光]

This year's goal for me is as follows:

 

(1) Develop a stong grasp of the fundamentals of chinese cursive handwriting

 

(2) Reach a passive vocabulary in excess of 15.000 words

 

(3) Read a total of ten books from start to finish

 

 

 

[purple]

Back to studying chinese after a few years long break... Would appreciate any advice.

1. Finish Boya quasi-intermediate 2 again. Went through the first chapter today and was easy. It's been quite a while since I've last actually written anything, so my focus will be on remembering how to write the characters again.

2. Reading 3 books. Will focus on cheesy romance, since it seems the easiest. I just want to start reading again, and as long as I can understand the gist of the story I'll call it a win. I'm starting with one I have already read before.

3. Not using english subtitles anymore. Currently watching 你是我的城池营垒 still able to understand what's going on, at least during the cheesy romance part. Will be using it to learn new words.

4. Start anki again.

5. I'm considering learning to type using cangjie, if it can help me remember the characters.

 

[Tomsima]

Approaching the last quarter of the year, here's my update:

 

1. Reach 150WPM in shorthand. Well sometimes life just happens - I spent a minimum of an hour a day practicing my speed in shorthand all the way to about July time, then I started getting RSI in my writing hand. I think I was gripping too hard for long periods of time as I pushed for faster speed. Unfortunately this meant I stopped shorthand a few months ago, and as a result it has also thrown off my plans to take a few CI jobs. That being said, as of July I unexpectedly had an hour slot for studying set aside in my schedule that I was no longer using. I started to shadow Cantonese again (last studied in 2018), and I have been going strong since then. An unexpected positive out of a negative!

 

2. Fill a book with shorthand forms for interpreting purposes. This also stopped around July, but again an unexpected positive came from this. I now have a base of about 600~ vocab items that I revise through listening rather than reading. Its done wonders for listening comprehension, lots more clarity when watching more complex dramas. That being said, I finally got round to watching the whole of 长安十二时辰, and to be honest couldn't understand as much of the story as I would have liked, I just kept forgetting who was who and missing the more subtle plot lines. Maybe I'll try it again in the future. 

 

For the last quarter of the year, here are my revised goals:

 

1. Cantonese every day - min 1 hour

2. Mandarin vocab building  every day - min 30 mins

 

Hope everyone else is more on target that me!

[Woodford]

I continue to spend around 20 minutes a day doing active listening, and 90 minutes a day reading Chinese novels and collecting new SRS vocabulary flashcards. When I began last January, I said I would be happy if I reach 17,500 flashcards, but now I have over 18,500. I use a very simple SRS algorithm (in Pleco) that doubles the delay from 1 day to 2, 4, 8, 16 days, etc., every time I get a word correct. My strongest cards are delayed to 512 days. Likewise, when I get a word wrong, it cuts the delay in half. I guess I could have programmed it to be "smarter," but this system has worked very, very well, with an astounding accuracy (when I fail to remember a word while reading a book, I often see that word promptly come up for review in my SRS test--it knew I was about to forget the word). Right now, my review is about 200 words each day, taking about 40 minutes (so my study routine is roughly 2.5-3 hours). I think vocabulary acquisition will slow down, because I'm encountering less and less new words, and I would have to do a LOT of reading to maintain my customary pace of 15-20 new words a day. 

 

I am attempting an all-out effort over the coming months to perfect my reading skills as much as possible, so I'm finishing books at a much faster rate (I'm on my 15th book). Of course, each subsequent book brings about a lesser and lesser improvement to my skills. Borrowing from my own observations and those of other people in these forums, it seems like after 8-12 books, one can say, "I can read (just not very confidently)." After 20-25 books, one can say, "I can read fairly well, with some  obstacles." After about 50 books, you're really starting to fly. By early 2022 (i.e., a few short months), I plan to be past the 20 book mark. I want to get to 50, but because that's such a long-term effort, I want to relax a bit and not burn myself out trying to get there. It will be a good time to start integrating other tasks into my study routine, having a better balance with listening, speaking, and perhaps even writing.

 

To be honest, because I'm such an introvert, I have emphasized reading skills the most so far. But as that skill plateaus, I really need to start speaking Chinese more often, and perhaps seeing whether I can find someone to correct my writing/grammar. I have a friend from Tianjin who's willing to do a language exchange every week or so. Beyond that, I'll probably have to resort to iTalki or some similar platform, which I know isn't always an instant success, because you need to find someone who is personally compatible with you and does a good job. I think it will be the hardest part of my journey, but I just need to do it, likely starting next year.