The 2024 Aims and Objectives

[matteo]

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The proposition for the new year is to resume studying regularly with a focus on listening and speaking. I bought a couple of textbooks and I'll try to get back in the routine. 

The most important thing however is to find and retain motivation. A trip to China (or Taiwan) would be great for that. 

I  dug up my new year's resolutions for 2023 and I'm proud to say I've smashed them. 

I definitely put studying Chinese back on top of the priority list, and my trip to Guilin in September has been a huge help in keeping my motivation up. 

I've been keeping up with self-study for at least half an hour a day, and having conversation classes once a week with my online teacher.

Reading on the side helps enormously with growing my vocabulary and the speed of comprehension - slowly but steadily.

Late last year I started increasing the emphasis on grammar, to raise the quality and consistency of sentence structure in my spoken (as well as written) Chinese.

 

I'm solidly on the intermediate plateau, and need to work hard to break through it. 

My goals for 2024 are (first draft, I'll probably think about it and come back to refine them):

 - improve my listening to a level where I can easily understand faster conversation on the first listening (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/@onecallaway3444 and https://www.youtube.com/@dashumandarin)

- watch and enjoy a tv series with chinese subtitles only 

- read at least two of the books I bought in Guilin

- plan for another trip to China or Taiwan (probably in 2025...)

- master intermediate grammar and be able to use it in real-time conversation (this is hard to measure, other than by my teacher's feedback...)

 

 

 

 

[lordsuso]

One random goal of mine for this year was to read books in "pretty" brush-style fonts (Kaiti). So far it's way harder than I expected, I hope it doesn't take a lot of getting used to.

[dakonglong]

On 1/3/2024 at 9:22 PM, dakonglong said:

Well it's officially 2024, so it's finally time to admit that I did not achieve the Chinese goals I listed out last year for 2023. Specifically, they were to:

 

1) Publish a travel vlog in Chinese.

 

Well, I'm about 4 months late, but I finally did produce a Chinese language travel vlog documenting my honeymoon. Here is Part 1:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNiHyy1KpPM

 

Any feedback both positive and negative is extremely welcome as it will help me when I go to produce Part 2!

[Woodford]

My activity on this website has been minimal since early last Summer, but my Chinese practice has continued. These days, my daily routine is basically the following:

 

1. 5-10 minutes of handwriting practice with the 5,000 HSK1-6 SRS flashcards. I've been using this deck since around 2018/2019, so the cards are very, very spaced out, and it's a nice way of maintaining my character writing without spending too much time.

2. 20-30 minutes of reading. I read whatever I can find. Sometimes I read Chinese news. Sometimes I read long posts on Zhihu. Recently, I've begun to explore magazines on WeChat Books. I bought single issues of 读者 (kind of like "Reader's Digest," with short stories), 看天下 , and 百科知识. It's nice to have color pictures and diagrams, as well as higher journalistic standards than Zhihu posts. Sometimes I get a bit lost, because the authors assume that you already have some kind of cultural knowledge/context to understand what they're saying, and they don't explicitly give it. 读者 is my favorite so far. After I read through these, I may explore other kinds of magazines.

3. Intermittent listening practice. Sometimes I listen to a podcast while working. Sometimes I watch a 20-minute YouTube video. I don't have a strict quota. My skills are good enough to follow along with most things. In the next 2-3 years (as I approach 10 years of practice), I hope my listening comprehension gets less and less spotty.

 

I've been tempted by ChatGPT's "advanced voice mode" feature for speaking practice. I tried it out, and I have the following reservations:

1. Without a monthly subscription, you can only get a very brief "free trial" version.

2. A monthly subscription is $20 USD. Not crazy expensive, but a bit more than I'm willing to pay for a tool that I otherwise have no use for.

3. Even with a monthly subscription, the advanced voice mode has a daily limit on the amount of time you can use it.

4. It can't (at least as flexibly) correct your errors in real time. I.e., "That's an awkward way of saying that. You should say it this way instead!" Or, "Your pronunciation/tone was slightly off!" It's good at understanding what you're *trying* to say, even when you're saying it the wrong way, and it responds with the correct phrasing (e.g., I said "打小提琴," and it responded with, "Oh, yes! 拉小提琴! That's a great thing to do."). I'll give it credit for that.

5. The pace/rhythm of conversation has improved, but it's still not like a 100% natural conversation. If you're too slow in your response, the chat bot will interrupt you. It tends to give long and detailed answers, which is good for listening practice, but you'll probably spend more time listening than talking.

 

 

[Woodford]

So I just had another session with ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, and I guess I stand corrected from my original post! It was a positive experience this time around.

 

--I made my native language (English) the basis of the whole lesson. I began with, "Hey, I'm a native English speaker who wants to practice Mandarin Chinese. Can you ask me a question in Chinese, and I'll try to answer it?" 

 

--Whenever things got difficult in Chinese, I would simply switch back to English and say, "I was struggling to communicate what I meant there, but what I meant to say was XYZ. How do you say that concisely in the Chinese language?"

 

--There were actually a couple of times when ChatGPT said, "I understand what you're trying to say, but that's an unnatural way of saying it. Here is a better way to phrase it in Chinese...." Wow.

 

--As I said in the last post, the bot is rather long-winded in its responses, which (on the bright side) can be a more immersive and active way to practice listening comprehension. The audio content is driven by what you've spoken beforehand, and you're having to listen carefully so you can respond afterwards. So it's more engaging than listening to a pre-recorded monologue.

 

--When you exceed the time limit for "advanced voice mode," the voice chat doesn't get interrupted. It just gets a little bit dumber.

 

--Finally, as other people have pointed out, if you're nervous that you can't talk fast enough and the chat bot will interrupt you, you can just hold down on the screen with your finger until you're done talking, and the bot won't try answering until you release it.