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).

[liqi]

My 2024 has actually been surprisingly fruitful, I couldn't be happier with how much I achieved this year!  Last year, frustrated with life, I randomly decided to move to China after accidentally discovering that university chinese language programs are a thing. My initial "super plan" was staying 1 year, passing HSK5 and finish my undergraduate in China, but that was kind of a fever dream I never saw happening, didn't even think I would get to China in the first place. Welp, one day I randomly receive a package from China and lo and behold... an acceptance letter for Tsinghua's language program! (Which sucked btw :p). The initial plan kiinda didn't worked, turned out that against what I expected, I hated Beijing! Hahahaha

 

I moved to Chengdu in August and set the goal to pass the HSK5 until the end of next semester (July), which seemed pretty realistic. But to my surprise, when I looked at an HSK5 sample out of curiosity... it wasn't actually that hard! I'm taking it in around 2 weeks on the 12th, so fingers crossed! The fact that my initial fever dream plan might've worked is still pretty insane to me, go me! The only part that I still REALLY struggle is writing, I can't order those sentences even if my life depended on it 🫠.

 

I don't know, before I got here I've always read people saying that getting to HSK5 still means almost nothing in terms of comprehension, so I kinda doubted myself for quite some time. But that hasn't been my experience at all, I hardly struggle with colloquial content such as social media, modern novels, news (thanks to the uni cafeteria that runs CCTV13 24/7) etc. Always see people complaining that the HSK is too literary and useless but idk, I don't find the texts in HSK5 too different from a lot of native material. I feel like people set too high of a bar for themselves

 

For 2025, I want to focus on improving my output considerably, it's by far my worst skills. But as for a concrete goal.... I don't know actually hahaha, I'm genuinely quite happy (and surprised) at what I achieved, so it'll take a little while for me to calculate my next steps. Since I do wanna finish my degree here, I've been watching a few math classes on bilibili everyday to practice more specific and academic vocabulary, and it's been surprisingly smooth so far. Also bought a dodgy 2nd hand chinese calculus textbook and currently working my way though it (god, the original owner was awful at math!)

On 12/24/2024 at 6:26 PM, Lu said:

But I did get a nomination for such an award, so I achieved it anyway.

Omg, congrats!!! I have to admit I could never know how that feels, I've never set my goals that high yet hahaha 😆. But that made me a little curious, what does a translation award entails? I had no idea such thing existed! Do you work in the translation industry? And what (and how) are translations qualified for an award? Sorry if it's too personal of a question, but I'm curious now haha

[Lu]

On 12/28/2024 at 7:29 AM, liqi said:

The fact that my initial fever dream plan might've worked is still pretty insane to me, go me!

Amazing isn't it, when you look back and realise that wow, that goal I set that seemed impossible to achieve, I actually achieved it 🙂 Congrats on all the progress and on finding a city you like!

 

On 12/28/2024 at 7:29 AM, liqi said:

But that made me a little curious, what does a translation award entails? I had no idea such thing existed! Do you work in the translation industry? And what (and how) are translations qualified for an award?

I'm trying to remain somewhat anonymous on these forums 🙂 But here goes: I'm a literary translator, translating novels and other books and short stories. Many countries/languages have some sort of award for the best literary translation of the year, or longer-term awards for people who have done a lot of great work in literary translation. There is of course an amount of skill (and perhaps talent) involved in being nominated for such an award and winning one, but also some amount of luck: you have to get an assignment for a book that is good and also challenging in some way, and there should not be too many other translators that year who get such a book. Not long after the ceremony (I didn't win, the winner had made an excellent translation of a novel that was challenging in at least three different ways), I read a book that a colleague of mine had translated. The book itself was throroughly mediocre, barely airport fare, but the translation was amazing. But I think a book that mediocre would never get nominated, regardless of the quality of the translation.

[Singe]

I'm at about middle of intermediate as far as reading is concerned and 2024 was a good year for consolidation. I've made sure I've read something every day and have done a TCB reading exercise daily - in fact, i haven't missed a day since May 2023. It's been really good for confidence and I'm starting to breeze through a level 4 exercise. I've also dabbled with maayot this year and have just purchased DuChinese so it will be interesting to see how they all stack up against each other.

 

A big goal for this year is to read a novel for the first time. I have a couple lined up and think To Live will be the first. In fact, after browsing through, I can definitely now pick up far more than I previously could.

 

I learnt simplified character writing when I first embarked on my Chinese journey so have a good working knowledge, especially of radicals and the basic rules of stroke order. I've purposely not done much writing in recent times as many have suggested that learning characters early isn't necessarily the preferred way of learning, but I'd like to get back to writing again in 2025.

 

Listening is a different story and the word woeful springs to mind. I've shied away from listening and need to make the jump and just go for it. I made it back to China this year for the first time in a decade, even if it was only briefly, and I really enjoyed. Don't have the work commitments I used to have but I really enjoy my job (non-Chinese or language related) and have struggled to let go. If I do manage to slow down at work it would definitely free up time for Chinese, so let's see.

 

Best wishes to all for 2025. I love coming on this site.

 

 

[liqi]

On 12/29/2024 at 6:04 PM, Lu said:

Congrats on all the progress and on finding a city you like!

Thanks！🫠. And yeah, realizing you met a goal is such a great feeling. Today I got my Xiaomi air humidifier which I bought months ago, and there was some warning label on the top that I never bothered removing because I couldn't understand it and kept saying to myself I would just take a photo to translate it sometime (which I never did). I just now glanced over it and read "DO NOT MOVE WHILE FUNCTIONING" (whoops, done that already), it's silly but the me from 7 months ago would be proud 😆

On 12/29/2024 at 6:04 PM, Lu said:

I'm a literary translator, translating novels and other books and short stories

Oooh, that sounds nice, congrats on the nomination! My experience with that industry is that I have a close friend who's a writer, and she's always complaining that her translators are functionally illiterate. And honestly, seeing it in action.... it's hard to disagree. Not trying to imply anything about your job btw, I'm just now pondering that I've probably just met the "fast-food" version of the industry instead of the artistic side (which in retrospect sounds quite obvious 😅). Translation is hard work, I'm rereading a korean series that I read first in english but now in chinese, and it's pretty amazing how "simply" presenting the story in another language changes the dynamics between the characters so much, tons of hidden details that surfaced in the chinese version that were cut from the english translation

On 1/1/2025 at 10:54 AM, Singe said:

A big goal for this year is to read a novel for the first time

加油, I'm on the same boat! In fact, the book is literally right in front of me, waiting to be read hahaha. I'm not really afraid of the vocabulary or the difficulty (I think), but I'm lazy 😭reading a book in chinese of all things isn't easy for my poor ADHD'd brain. I'll get though it though.... eventually! 

 

offtopic: am i the only one that gets annoyed at the different spacing in punctuation between the chinese keyboard and the english keyboard? i keep pressing shift all the damn time and always mess up my writing by accident 😭

[Lu]

On 1/1/2025 at 8:06 AM, liqi said:

My experience with that industry is that I have a close friend who's a writer, and she's always complaining that her translators are functionally illiterate. And honestly, seeing it in action.... it's hard to disagree.

That sounds really unlike my experience! What kind of writing does she do? How does she come by translators, plural? And how can she tell they're bad? Or is she proficient in all the languages she's translated into?

 

On 1/1/2025 at 8:06 AM, liqi said:

offtopic: am i the only one that gets annoyed at the different spacing in punctuation between the chinese keyboard and the english keyboard? i keep pressing shift all the damn time and always mess up my writing by accident 😭

I've trained myself by now that if I press a key by accident, I always press it again straight away. Works well for the many accidental shift presses, less well when it's the tab key.

[Flickserve]

After procrastinating for a long time, I decided to take some action and give myself more exposure. I used LTL’s flexi classes. I pick mainly HSK 3 and 3+ classes to pick up more vocabulary and try to be more all rounded with my foundations.

 

Due to past practice with drills and levering off Cantonese, the teachers have said I am too advanced for HSK 3. The flexi classes package needs to be four lessons a week - something that I deliberately picked to help frequency and rhythm. My tones are rubbish because of the Cantonese that I use almost daily. Yet most mandarin speakers will still understand what I am trying to say. If there’s a lesson with only me, the teachers strike up a conversation for part of the time. I note the teachers are diverse and have different accents. This doesn’t bother me as they still correct my major tone errors. 
 

I am enjoying adding small amounts to my knowledge and this helps self confidence. I did try a HSK 4 class but there enough new material to make it a bit too far of a struggle.

 

Moving forward, I will finish off my package. Afterwards, I am considering doing one on one lessons with them using their slides as a revision process - to try and bring up the vocabulary and grammar structures to a more spontaneous level. For example, finish the package, do a package of one on one for reviewing then do another group lesson package. 

 

I probably have a visit to Chengdu in summer again. No plans for other places as of yet. Not even to Shenzhen just close to Hong Kong.

 

 

[liqi]

On 1/1/2025 at 10:02 PM, Lu said:

What kind of writing does she do? How does she come by translators, plural? And how can she tell they're bad? Or is she proficient in all the languages she's translated into?

She writes poems I believe, and yeah she's proficient in the languages of the translations (it's always portuguese -> english or english -> portuguese). I think it's more of an industry thing thought, because she's trapped (well not trapped, but writers needs to eat!) with a crappy publisher that doesn't really cares about the artistic value of the work and just wants to pump out new books quickly (which is a damn shame, she's quite well known in her circles as her poems are about struggles of black women). A bit

 

too, because they're one of the largest publishers in the country, but oh well....

 

As to why the translations suck is because they're inconsistent, badly written or just straight up made up stuff. From the top of my mind I remember once she showed me a book where a character was taking something out of a purse, but for whatever reason the translating team removed the purse from the text and she just pulls out stuff out of thin air all the time. Just a lot of silly mistakes without any clear motive and a lot of times with quite some awkward phrasing. But again, I think that's mostly just a "big corpo" issue than anything

On 1/1/2025 at 10:02 PM, Lu said:

I've trained myself by now that if I press a key by accident, I always press it again straight away. Works well for the many accidental shift presses, less well when it's the tab key.

Me too, but 搜狗输入法 has some sort of delay or something where I can't switch between the chinese and the english keyboard while I'm typing, which is an issue since I type really fast. I don't really know how it works or how I can disable it, I just know that I press shift a lof of times in vain waiting for something to happen 😅

On 1/2/2025 at 9:28 AM, Flickserve said:

I probably have a visit to Chengdu in summer again. No plans for other places as of yet. Not even to Shenzhen just close to Hong Kong.

Just be prepared for the living sauna outdoors! 😂 I don't really mind since I come from South America, but I have a close Irish friend who looks about to collapse at any moment during summer heh. I really really need to explore the national parks and mountains around Chengdu, there's so many! But HSK comes first, after that, freedom 😭

 

[jannesan]

My abstract goals for 2025:

 

- Listening: prefer TV shows over podcasts for listening practice to get exposed to more accents, quick and blurry speech

- Reading: keep reading novels + establish a routine to improve reading speed systematically

- Speaking: continue Italki classes, but focus on particular topics to have debates one instead of all casual talk

- Writing (stretch goal): write a blog post in Chinese or translate one into Chinese

 

also: do HSK6 and TOCFL speaking