The 2021 Aims and Objectives Progress Topic

[malazann]

On 10/19/2021 at 1:52 AM, Woodford said:

. 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

tbh I've found iTalki to be fairly reliable even when I've chosen cheapear tutors. Look at
1) The ration of students/lessons given

2) Their Profile (intro video and teaching philosophy which mean seem to write).

I am sure I (and others) can reccommend tutors depending on whether you are after fun conversations or more academic structured lessons. I think in your case you just need to build up  your speaking hours so you probably want casual conversations.

[Woodford]

On 11/2/2021 at 1:15 AM, malazann said:

tbh I've found iTalki to be fairly reliable even when I've chosen cheapear tutors.

 

That's good to know! Thanks! Yeah, at this point, it's just about getting the chance to speak. Working on pronunciation is good, as well being told, "That's not the right way to say that--we say it this way instead." But it's primarily about the casual conversations at this point.

[alantin]

On 11/2/2021 at 5:30 PM, Woodford said:

That's good to know! Thanks! Yeah, at this point, it's just about getting the chance to speak. Working on pronunciation is good, as well being told, "That's not the right way to say that--we say it this way instead." But it's primarily about the casual conversations at this point.

 

I've been using iTalki for about two years now mostly for this kind of casual conversations. There are truly awesome people there and you don't need to break the bank either to find them. If you like, I can recommend someone great who also reads a lot too.

[Woodford]

I'm quickly coming up on that time when I reflect on this previous year and look forward to the next one! This year's goal was to read books, approach 20,000 vocabulary flashcards, and improve my listening skills.

 

Since the beginning of the year, I've increased the amount of books I've read from 8 to 18. Admittedly, I've always been chasing a magic number: How many books do I have to read until I feel like a much more fluid, comfortable reader? I have to say that reading still doesn't really feel comfortable. I'm improving, and I have a lot of great moments, but there's still more work to do.

 

I started the year with 15,000 vocabulary flashcards (which I review via SRS every day). Now, I'm approaching 19,500. Again, as with the number of books, I've been chasing after a "magic number." Laughably, there was a time when I thought that the 5,000 HSK words would be "enough." Now I'm discovering the sheer immensity of the Chinese language. I run into new words all the time, even as I approach 20K acquired flashcards. Granted, whereas I used to encounter 1000-2000 new words in any given 300-page book, I now only encounter 300-500, or even less. I still don't feel like I can fully ignore the dictionary when I read, but I am getting close. At some point, I'd love to encounter new words so infrequently that I can say, "I don't know what this word means, and I don't care to look it up. I'll just keep reading." Like a native reader would do, really.

 

Last summer, I had the privilege of binging on Chinese YouTube videos and drilling them over and over. Since then, I have tried to maintain a listening habit of around 20-30 minutes a day. I'm convinced my listening skills have improved, but it just doesn't feel that way. My growth is never really felt. I guess that's how physical growth works, too. As a child, you don't feel yourself grow, but you can look back on old pictures and say, "Wow, I was a lot shorter 2 years ago!" Can I say in confidence that I can listen to Chinese and understand it? Ehhh...not really. Not without qualification, anyway. It's still tough. If I'm listening to slow and/or simple stuff, I can totally understand it. Otherwise, my comprehension fades in and out.

For some reason, the motivation is still here, and I might as well take advantage of it. I have no immediate plans to go to China, and no practical use for the language. Improvement is really slow and no longer comes in quick spurts. The learning process can be endless, grueling, and sometimes really dull. But for some odd reason, I really enjoy it, and I think practice will pay off in the long term. This coming year should be a big one, especially if I incorporate more speaking practice.

[黄有光]

On 10/18/2021 at 4:52 PM, Woodford said:

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.

Um, are you me? ?

[jannesan]

On 12/23/2020 at 5:58 PM, jannesan said:

My project for the year will be learning 繁体字 so for my year goals:

• study 简化总表 (list of character simplifications) | ✅
• add 繁体字 to all Anki cards, existing and new | ✅
• read 1-2 textbooks in 繁体字 | ❌, couldn't bring myself to read textbooks, too boring
• start consuming some news written in 繁体字 | ✅, not as much as I hoped though

Goals for every month:

• read 1/2 book ｜ ✅, almost, will have read 5 books this year instead of the planned 6
• write one article by hand and correct it together with a teacher ｜ ❌, only did this for the first 4 months

Every week:

• watch some TV show episode(s) or/and some movie(s) ｜ ✅
• listen to at least 1,5 hours of podcast (故事FM while cooking is a good combo for me) ｜ ✅
• 1-2 Italki classes, but less free talking than this year, more concentrated study ｜ ✅, still mostly free talk though
• one session of 50/50 German/Chinese with my girlfriend, with focus on more complex topics than the everyday 家常 | ✅

Every day:

• Anki review + at least 5 new words | ✅, probably not quite 5 new words per day on average
• write entry in dream journal | ❌, did this for this first 3-4 months only

 

Overall I'm satisfied, next year I plan to stop reading a book if I don't like it instead of sticking to it though.

[黄有光]

Unfortunately it looks like I won't meet my goals for this year. I had originally wanted to have a solid grasp of 行书 by the end of the year, but unfortunately an old neck injury flared up and made practice impossible. I also took a month-long break from my studies, which put me behind schedule. But, I'm still VERY happy with what I have accomplished this year. I started this year with a vocabulary of ~5000 words, and I am ending the year with a vocabulary in the range of ~15000 words (currently ~14500 and still rapidly rising). And with that enormous vocabulary growth have come absolutely incredible improvements to my practical abilities. I can express myself quite well now, and it is rare that I need to look up a word when texting unless it is to remind myself of pronunciation. I have also read 7 books from cover to cover, and am working on my eighth -- my first ever YA novel in Chinese. When I started studying at the beginning of this year, I was so excited to finally be reading children's novels. Now, I get to look forward to reading some pretty serious adult literature in 2022. So by all accounts this year has been a smashing success for me. I can't wait to see what things look like a year from now.

[Jan Finster]

On 12/25/2020 at 11:20 AM, Jan Finster said:

Because the first 3-4 months of 2021 will be super busy work-wise, my main goal for the first third of 2021 is not to regress. I am a bit hesitant to make any goals for 2021. I guess, I will be happy with 2021 if I look back and I have:

 

1) read and listened to at least 1000 articles in TCB (at least 50% at HSK 5 level)

2) my reading speed has increased from around 50 CPM to to 150 characters per minute following Imron's method (https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/20007-what-to-study-after-heisig/page/3/)

3) I have completed Chinese Zero to Hero's HSK 4 and 5 videos [I have bought it during the Black Friday sales, but have not looked at it]

4) Finish 2 non-fiction books in Chinese

5) considering (according to Lichess) I have spent the equivalent of 21 whole days playing online blitz chess from April 2020 to December 2020 , I hope I can find a way to make learning Chinese as relaxing and addictive. Sadly, I believe I have not spent the equivalent of 21 whole days learning Chinese since April. When I am super tired from work and I have to choose between Lichess and Chinese, Lichess feels much less like "hard work". How do you make Chinese a "zoning-out activity"?

6) Continue shadowing and eventually start online speaking sessions again.

 

So, here is my reality check after 12 months:

As some of you know, I have changed my goals to that of listening to all TCB lessons. I did this very intensively for about 3-4 months and completed HSK 1-3 on TCB and I am half-way through with HSK4 (https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/50831-the-chairmans-bao/?do=findComment&comment=482025). Somewhere in summer 2021 I lost my Chinese focus due to relationship problems and I became massively interested in taking my English to the next level after reading Christopher Hitchens and feeling humiliated as to how many English words I (still) did not know. So, I have been inhaling several English books from authors such as Bertrand Russell, Theodore Dalrymple, Josef Conrad, etc and collected tons of new words and interesting expressions. I also started to read more books on psychology and philosophy (Rollo May, Nietzsche, Jung, etc). To my surprise, I found them quite accessible and it made me wonder if studying Chinese has made me smarter (?) Maybe, compared to Chinese, everything else becomes pretty trivial and a low-effort exercise (!?) 

So, since summer, Chinese has been on the back burner. I still passively listen to the old TCB audios for 0.5-1 hour per day, but I am currently at a crawling pace in my "TCB marathon". Nevertheless, it was a sucessful year: I am writing this sitting jet-laged and sleepless in a hotel bed at 4 a.m. Just 30 minutes ago I switched on the TV and to my surprise I understood remarkably much from the CCTV channel 4 news. I could pretty much always tell what they were talking about and very many expressions were familiar from TCB. I am far from understanding everything, but complete unterstanding no longer seems out of reach [this is after studying Chinese for ~2.5 years].

 

As for 2022: I will continue my TCB audio marathon and I will try to read more. My reading skills are lagging behind my listening. Reading still feels like a chore. Of course, I know what I would have to do: read and re-read easier material, such as TCB HSK 3 articles. I hope I will eventually cross the skill threshold where reading finally becomes fun and I can pick up new expressions on the fly as I do with English books. 

[imron]

On 12/15/2021 at 9:21 AM, Jan Finster said:

My reading skills are lagging behind my listening.

This is a good problem to have. Many people find themselves in the opposite position. 

[Moshen]

Quote

I became massively interested in taking my English to the next level after reading Christopher Hitchens and feeling humiliated as to how many English words I (still) did not know. So, I have been inhaling several English books from authors such as Bertrand Russell, Theodore Dalrymple, Josef Conrad, etc and collected tons of new words and interesting expressions. I also started to read more books on psychology and philosophy (Rollo May, Nietzsche, Jung, etc). To my surprise, I found them quite accessible and it made me wonder if studying Chinese has made me smarter (?)

 

When it comes to the kind of books you are tackling, there are two kinds of difficulties in understanding that might overlap but often do not.

 

1)Not knowing the words or not being able to follow grammatically complicated material.

 

2)Not understanding the gist, what the author is driving at.

 

I am guessing you must be in tune with the manner of thinking of the English-language authors you are reading in psychology and philosophy.  Bertrand Russell prided himself on having a clean and popularly accessible prose style, so I believe he would be relatively easy on both #1 and #2 counts.  However, I have to say that, as a philosophy Ph.D. who had little problem with Hobbes, Hume, Heidegger, Sartre and even Kant and Derrida, I found Nietzsche one of the hardest authors ever to understand.  His words and syntax were not the problem.  I simply had a hard time understanding what he was driving at.  I knew he was supposed to be profound and important, but what was he saying, really?

 

In studying Chinese, I have both #1 and #2 types of problems.  In comparison with other languages I have studied (German, French, Spanish, Latin, Hebrew), I have much more of the #2 type of problem than with other languages, even when reading Chairman's Bao articles and also with articles in the official HSK books.

[Jan Finster]

On 12/15/2021 at 10:41 AM, Moshen said:

Bertrand Russell prided himself on having a clean and popularly accessible prose style, so I believe he would be relatively easy on both #1 and #2 counts.

 

Bertrand Russell and Theodore Dalrymple are genius writers. Really easy to understand in terms of language. I read them mostly to improve my style. In terms of content, I found Russell fine as long as it was non-mathematical (which is not my cup of tea). I found Hitchens' style quite dissapointing and the content boring (at least his essays, which touch on UK/US matters of the 80s and 90s that I can find no time or attention for). But Hitchens is a walking thesaurus, a bit like John Bercow, so he is a great source of non-standard vocabulary for ESL speakers (I have yet to find the mundane word "very" in his writings). As for Nietzsche: I do not believe anyone like me, who never even had basic philosophy in high school, can understand him by just reading his books. So, I first watched several lectures on Youtube that cover his main ideas. Now at least I can find those main ideas in his texts. It gets really interesting when you read Jung's interpretation of Nietzsches Zarathustra, because neither of them are intuitively accessible.  As a German I found myself in the interesting situation of actually prefering the English translation of Nietzsches' 19th century writings. 

 

I am not sure why you struggle with the gist of the TCB articles. Are they not rather mundane? (I guess there may be cultural implications that escape me).

 

[Moshen]

Quote

I am not sure why you struggle with the gist of the TCB articles. Are they not rather mundane?

 

Yes, they're mundane, and I do get the overall meaning and much of the details.  However, quite frequently they say what seem to me to be really strange things and it drives me nuts not being able to understand the context.  A simple example:  in an article about a crackdown on illegal fireworks being sold in Shanghai, they talk about what is rendered in English as "cold fireworks."  What the heck does that mean?  Are some fireworks cold and some hot??  Then they talk about these fireworks generally being set off indoors.  What???  How can someone set off fireworks indoors?  Even if that's very simple firecrackers, how would that not immediately burn down the building, every time?

 

https://www.thechairmansbao.com/illegal-cold-fireworks-confiscated-by-police-from-shops-in-shanghai/

 

Maybe I ask too many questions.  Or maybe the articles are written poorly by journalistic standards.  In English or Western journalism, those unanswered questions would have been addressed, I believe.

 

P.S. Bertrand Russell won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.  In letters to his mistress, he referred to his works for the general public as "potboilers."  (That's a word generally used for low-quality fiction, like romances or adventure stories.)  He wrote them mainly for money!

[Jan Finster]

On 12/15/2021 at 12:25 PM, Moshen said:

English as "cold fireworks."  What the heck does that mean?  Are some fireworks cold and some hot??  Then they talk about these fireworks generally being set off indoors.  What???  How can someone set off fireworks indoors?  Even if that's very simple firecrackers, how would that not immediately burn down the building, every time?

 

? 

 

Here is an example pic of indoor fireworks:

http://www.rscaiyan.com/lyh/361.html

 

So “冷烟花”是一种采用燃点较低的金属粉末 (http://www.xinhuanet.com/2021-02/06/c_1127071545.htm)

 

(As the text says they have a lower ignition point but then burn really hot.)

 

I agree, in this episode the author did not have the cultural awareness and should have put “冷烟花” ("cold fire works") in quotation marks.

 

(But so far, I have not come across many such texts on TCB)

[黄有光]

I have not yet gotten to the point where I am reading advanced enough literature to be having this kinds of problems. These says my biggest problem is usually sentence-level grammar -- I just finished reading a chapter and there were probably about 4-6 sentences I had to run through DeepL because I just could not wrap my head around what the sentence was supposed to say. Of course, as soon as I did that, it all clicked into ppace with an "aha" moment.

[PerpetualChange]

My listening lags behind my reading,  but I think it's mostly because I have yet to find a mode of listening practice that is at all enjoyable for me. Having to constantly stop and rewind a podcast or video really kills the flow and enjoyment of whatever you're trying to listen to. 

[Woodford]

On 12/15/2021 at 9:26 PM, PerpetualChange said:

I have yet to find a mode of listening practice that is at all enjoyable for me.

 

I can relate--listening practice is absolutely the most soul-crushing for me. Intermediate-level stuff is okay, but crossing the gap into native-level content is the real challenge. I've spent many hours just listening to audio that's only marginally comprehensible. "Hey, I understood that phrase! Great, I understood two sentences! I think these two people are talking about the rising cost of housing in the Chinese market, but I'm not sure!" If I said that my listening hasn't been getting better, I'd be lying--it is getting better, and at this rate, it will eventually be what I would call "okay" or "good." Even now, if a tutor speaks to me with an awareness that Chinese isn't my first language, I can understand everything. If I listen to a Chinese podcast, I can generally keep up with the contours of the conversation (I do get completely lost when people talk over each other, laugh while talking, make inside cultural references, use slang, etc.). But listening practice, historically, has felt way less fruitful than reading practice.

Lately, I've been focusing exclusively on one speaker on YouTube, Li Yongle. I used to listen to the widest possible variety of speakers, but now I'm just going to come under the tutelage of a single person and use that as my "springboard" into more speakers in the future. I'm starting to get good at understanding him. I find that it's worked really well to try listening to him without subtitles, then replay the video segment with subtitles, pausing where necessary, and then watch the segment a third time without subtitles. 

 

I am surprised at some minor milestones lately. I recall that in the past, I found it impossible to understand Yuan Feiteng's channel (he's a history teacher with what I think is an extreme, almost flamboyant Beijing accent). Today, I could actually make out what he was saying. Likewise, there's a really silly comedy channel, 贤宝宝，that I've found myself watching just for fun, without having to study it on a formal basis. So I think it's coming along.

[imron]

On 12/15/2021 at 10:25 PM, Moshen said:

how would that not immediately burn down the building, every time?

It’s been known to happen.   

[phills]

For the next year, I'm also looking to do more listening practice to level that up, now I have reading under control.  Right now, the best candidate for high volume, tolerable effort listening practice I can think of, is to listen to audiobooks of books I've read in the past. 

 

The problems I have are mainly: 1. words are being spoken too fast, and 2. I can't understand a thing when I'm not paying absolute attention.  I have to play movies at 50-75% speed in order to understand them, with subtitles (either that or pause often).  Whenever I zone out even slightly, I'm lost and it takes me a long time to regain the context. 

 

If someone yells something at me (like car coming from the left), I'm never going to understand it, unless I'm already expecting it.  E.g. I'm playing Gujian3 now, a computer rpg game, I can follow it if I'm doing nothing but listening and reading, but the second I have to do something, fight, click a button to make a choice, I want to switch back to English, because I just missed all the clues / instructions.

 

Just like reading, I think quantity of words listened to is the only thing that'll fix that.  To get through a large volume of words spoken at normal speeds, I'm going to need training wheels (i.e. books I've read before).  I'd like to do as much practice as possible with no subtitles.  Ideally even when doing other stuff, once I get good enough.  Fortunately, there are hours and hours of Chinese audiobooks free online, including everything I've ever read.

 

My main concern with my plan is that I'm going to miss a lot of purely conversational language, so eventually I'll have to supplement my listening diet with more day-to-day, informal convo material.  So maybe I'll switch to @woodford's approach after listening for 100 hours (~2 million chars / 10 books).  But that's my tentative plan for now. 

[黄有光]

I believe I will probably do something similar -- listen to audiobooks, once I'm far enough along. And the advantage there is that there are no pesky subtitles that would otherwise draw my attention. But I also love Chinese history, so I'll also be watching lots of documentaries in the future.

[phills]

I think there's at least 2 aspects of being able to spend time doing something.  One is interest, of course, but the other is stamina. 

 

I just tried listening for an hour at regular speed, with less than full understanding but just letting myself flounder rather than look at text / subtitles, and I didn't have enough stamina and had to stop.  Just like when I started reading, I had no stamina, and couldn't get through a few hundred characters.  Building up my stamina is going to be my first step.

 

At some later point, I'll have to figure out something to measure so I can mark my progress (like with reading), but stamina first!