The 2025 aims and objectives

[Jan Finster]

Every year we have a thread on this and 2025 should be no different. 

 

This is to invite you to reflect on your progress and activities in 2024 and your aims for 2025.

[Jan Finster]

A year has passed since I wrote my plans for 2024.

 

I spent a total of 9 weeks in China related to work and I got to travel independently in Yunnan, Qinghai and Gansu. I loved travelling in China even though I felt it was way more cumbersome than travelling in Japan even though I know zero Japanese. 

 

In terms of learning activities I mainly focussed on shadowing native content and my pronunciation, tones and fluency have greatly improved. I spent about 1 hour per day doing this. Sadly it did not really improve my active oral outputting skills (forming sentences, having dialogues). I tried 2 sessions with italki teachers but sadly I did not really feel motivated to stick with them. 

 

So, my plans for 2025:

More shadowing
More listening

Using Chatgpt to help me outputting (sentence forming exercises) 

Hopefully get myself to finally start outputting (speaking) with an Italki teacher. 

 

How about you? Really looking forward to reading your plans

[Tomsima]

One thing I've always said I would do, but never got down to doing before, was studying an entire dictionary. At the end of January I pulled a chengyu dictionary off my shelf and decided I was going to learn a page a day until I finished it. I haven't missed a day yet since, I'm on page 329/557 and have now studied 1932 chengyu. In total the dictionary has ~3000 to learn, so I've still got a while to go. My one takeaway from the experience so far: understanding TV has become increasingly easy, I am able to pick out nuance in meaning, puns, deeper cultural themes. 

[pinion]

On 12/22/2024 at 7:22 AM, Tomsima said:

At the end of January I pulled a chengyu dictionary off my shelf and decided I was going to learn a page a day until I finished it. I haven't missed a day yet since, I'm on page 329/557 and have now studied 1932 chengyu. In total the dictionary has ~3000 to learn, so I've still got a while to go. My one takeaway from the experience so far: understanding TV has become increasingly easy, I am able to pick out nuance in meaning, puns, deeper cultural themes. 

I'm curious because this is almost the diametric opposite of my approach to improving my Chinese, which has been just about 100% focused on immersion and native content ever since I learned enough hanzi for that to be possible. (Well, I guess a chengyu dictionary in Chinese is native content too, but you get what I mean, I think...) Do you feel like this is a more effective way of learning to pick out the kind of nuance you mention? Or is it just a matter of this being a sustainable/enjoyable way for you to study?

[lordsuso]

I am learning Chinese mainly for reading novels, and of course one of my long-term goals was to read the 4 classic novels. I am definitely not ready yet, but I am considering reading one in the near future, because I only have 2-3 years left before life gets very busy, and it might be good to tackle one while my pain tolerance is still high. It won't happen in 2025 because I want to finish jin yong's condor trilogy first, but maybe 2026...

 

Otherwise I don't have any particular goals for 2025, actually I am finally going to take the foot off the gas. After ~2.5 years of pretty intense studying I think I can mantain my current level without much effort now, so I will just engage with Chinese more 'naturally' and hopefully keep improving at a much slower rate.

[Tomsima]

On 12/22/2024 at 2:01 AM, pinion said:

Do you feel like this is a more effective way of learning to pick out the kind of nuance you mention? Or is it just a matter of this being a sustainable/enjoyable way for you to study?

Its definitely not more effective, your strategy of immersion and native content is still the right way to go. I have just found that over the years that although I have been able to absorb many chengyu, actively using them correctly has consistently seemed to elude me. Learning the specific situations and usage cases through the dictionary + sentence mining tv shows is helping me to get over this hurdle. Nothing revolutionary, but you guessed correctly, it certainly has been fun and helped me sustain daily study.

 

 

[jannesan]

On 12/22/2024 at 12:07 PM, Tomsima said:

Learning the specific situations and usage cases through the dictionary + sentence mining tv shows is helping me to get over this hurdle.

 

Could you elaborate on your process for this? The flashcard looks like it was generated? I feel like your approach to drilling Chengyu or more broadly idiomatic expressions could be a great thing for me to try as well. 

[Tomsima]

The daily process is: sit down and review flashcards in the morning (average 26 mins/day according to my anki), then add the new page for the day (~30 mins)

 

I make the anki flashcards entirely from scratch - I record the 'keyphrase' for every card myself using an external mic (F5 records directly into an anki field on a computer), and I use this website to generate speech samples for each chengyu, which I record using Audacity and add to the card manually. I do this so that I don't need to look at a screen while reviewing (though I still often take a look when the English>Chinese recall is ambiguous/nuanced) and it has helped massively for listening comprehension when chengyu turn up in real life conversations. In the evening I watch Chinese TV for an hour, taking screenshots when I bump into chengyu I have already studied. I do not take screenshots of ones I have not studied in the deck, as when I did this at the beginning things got out of hand very quickly. Once every few weeks I go through the screenshots and copy them into the 'tv' field for their respective card.

 

Each page of the dictionary has around 4-5 chengyu, the name of the dictionary is 汉英成语手册 and is from the 1980s, its a great dictionary, but I still need to refer to the 'Duogongneng Chengyu Cidian' in Pleco for the all important usage, 近义, pronunciation disambiguation and analysis notes. I go through each chengyu carefully, making a note of anything I think will be important to remember in the 'details' field of my anki card. The details field often gets more notes added later when I use a chengyu in real life and it doesn't quite land like I thought it would (if I can, I ask what went wrong - working with Chinese colleagues means I'm very fortunate to be able to ask a lot).

 

Hope that gives you a good idea of what the process looks like. I would recommend anyone reading this who is thinking about jumping into learning chengyu to use the '500 Common Chinese Idioms: An Annotated Frequency Dictionary' initially, don't take my approach straight off the bat, you'll definitely burn out if you haven't done some groundwork first.

 

 

[dakonglong]

For several years, my primary goal with Chinese was to be able to read a Chinese novel as I would an English novel (not necessarily understand every word, but understand 99% of it without the help of a dictionary). Over the past few years, I mostly achieved this goal and was starting to feel a bit lost as to what I should do next. Looking back at the 2024 thread, I stated that "what I really want to do now is USE output for something fun so I can get better (publish a Chinese language blog/vlogs, contribute to Chinese message boards or social media, etc...)." Although I did publish one Chinese language vlog in 2024, I really just continued to do more of the same type of input-based studying I was doing before: learn vocab, read novels, and watch Chinese TV.

 

However, in an odd twist of fate I was offered a job in Taipei this year (completely unrelated to the fact that I can speak some Chinese), which I accepted. After the first month living there I realized: (1) to my great surprise, people seem to have zero issue understanding what I'm saying. After almost ten years of studying in the US, I was afraid my tones and pronunciation were terrible. Maybe they are, but I can at least make myself understood, which is all that matters to me. (2) I can understand some people 95% of the time, some people 50% of the time and some people 0% of the time. I have no idea if it's the accent, speed of speech or what, but some Chinese is still completely incomprehensible to me. I'm hoping this improves with exposure.

 

So now my goals for 2025:

(1) Learn the traditional characters (I am already 80% of the way there with this, but I still need some practice).

(2) Get better at parsing a Taiwanese accent (I can much better understand mainland TV shows vs Taiwanese TV shows).

(3) Third, and most importantly, I want to be able to work in Chinese. The company provides translators, which I rely on for Chinese-language meetings, but I want to be able to do what some of my coworkers can do and get by in both languages (English and Chinese) without a translator. To do this I think I need to learn more business-specific vocab and get more comfortable with fast speech.

 

So, if by the end of the year I can get by in my job without a translator, I will consider myself successful. I probably have a 50/50 chance at achieving this, so I'll call it a stretch goal.

 

 

[Lu]

On 12/23/2024 at 12:56 AM, Tomsima said:

The daily process is: sit down and review flashcards in the morning (average 26 mins/day according to my anki), then add the new page for the day (~30 mins)

 

I make the anki flashcards entirely from scratch - I record the 'keyphrase' for every card myself ... In the evening I watch Chinese TV for an hour, taking screenshots when I bump into chengyu I have already studied. I do not take screenshots of ones I have not studied in the deck, as when I did this at the beginning things got out of hand very quickly. Once every few weeks I go through the screenshots and copy them into the 'tv' field for their respective card.

I am in awe. Both the learning and the building flashcards is a lot of time and effort you're putting into this. I can imagine it paying off very nicely, but the effort is intimidating.

 

I've been using Chinese professionally for some years now. My previous goal was to be on some sort of stage as myself (not as interpreter), talking about Chinese literature and/or translation. I've achieved that. The goal I couldn't set for myself was to win some kind of award for translation; that is too dependent on the quality of other people's work, so not really a goal I could work for. But I did get a nomination for such an award, so I achieved it anyway. My next goal is to help someone new become a literary translator as well, with mentorship or teaching or some other way. Not necessarily in 2025, but it's the next thing to aim for.

 

Goals specifically for next year:

- Read more Chinese

- Do something with/for Taiwanese literature

- Learn katakana, so I can make sense of more Japanese text, just because it would be nice to be able to.

[Tomsima]

On 12/24/2024 at 10:26 AM, Lu said:

I can imagine it paying off very nicely, but the effort is intimidating.

This is why I've basically not said anything about doing it with anyone before now, these kind of long term goals are something I would have found daunting as a beginner/intermediate student. Of course, everyone has their own goals, milestones and paranoid weaknesses - working in an academic environment has forced me to face up to my own weakness in high register, literary spoken Chinese, and this has been my response.

 

Congrats on the talk and the nomination (no mean feat for sure).