Help with motivation

Hey ya'll,

Its been about a year studying Chinese intensively at first and now a bit less intensively, although still several hours a day. I'm able to get through a newspaper with just a little difficulty and I'm preparing for a run at the HSK to see what its about. I'm in China now and I'm sad to say I've started to have a motivation problem.

Anki(which has helped me so much) is piling up with overdue words. I don't like ChinesePod because it costs money and has a lot of English. Not watching Chinese TV anymore and although I'm hanging out with Chinese friends my oral Chinese isn't really improving. My immersion level has gone pretty low too.

I know some of ya'll have gone through this, too. Send me a few things that helped break through this please!

Will

although I'm hanging out with Chinese friends my oral Chinese isn't really improving. My immersion level has gone pretty low too.

Sounds like you are speaking English with your Chinese friends. Maybe you need to leave Beijing and move to a place with fewer foreigners and English-speaking Chinese? Or at least go to a school where fewer people speak English.

If you've done a year intensively and are still doing several hours a day, I'm not too surprised you're suffering motivation issues. Might be worth having a change - put the textbooks away and tackle a 'real' Chinese book? Buy a paper every day, but don't worry too much about the Chinese - just read it. Make an effort to be more chatty with random shop assistants.

To be honest, it sounds like you might just be due a break - call it 'a period of rest and consolidation' and come back refreshed after the summer

call it 'a period of rest and consolidation'

Or "rest and forget."

I just printed out a 余华 short story and I'm really enjoying it. Its one of my first non-textbook, non-newspaper reads. I agree with you Roddy, but I'd like to try and prepare well for the HSK which is about 2 months away. Still going to try for the 2 hour a day of morning class and then take a break in July for a bit of travel.

Really good post mate. I was going to ask a similar question as I've been going through very much the same thing. I was studying for the HSK too absolutely caning it like 6-8 hours studying per day for a couple of years. I'm now in the same boat as you with a backlogue of a whole textbook full of vocab i cant be bothered to sit down and learn.

I have really found what Roddy suggested useful.

First i picked up '高兴' by 贾平凹 and really enjoyed that, then recently i've been watching more Chinese movies and reading ‘风雅颂’ by 阎连科 which is truly excellent. I have found this has all helped.

I also think a good few months break helps. I really studied Chinese obsessively out of total passion before but have latterly felt my enthusiasm waning as i sit laboriously copying out reams of characters. I think as Roddy said breaking away from Chinese teaching materials is good as they are; generally pretty rubbish, filled with nonsense a lot of the time, can start to persuade you that all Chinese people are blinkered morons, and really kill you're enthusiasm for the language.

I've also found Phoenix Weekly a good way to spice up my insipid study life and even learning a few classic poems has been quite fun too.

Good luck man, i believe they are just slumps which a lot of people who have been studying intensively go through and they do pass. I came to the realisation that instead of getting conceptually 'deeper' Chinese just gets broader and broader and requires the same farily mechanical process for learning. If you stick at this intensively for a few years this makes for quite boring study and its only natural you feel a little lacklustre

Delete everything in anki that's over a month old. Get a Chinese girlfriend/boyfriend. Take a break. It's temporary.

'Real' stuff you could do with HSK relevance:

1) Keep doing the newspaper, short story reading, but concentrate on getting your reading speed up. Figure out a comfortable speed, and then see what happens when you try to get through it at different rates. What speed can you sustain and not lose too much comprehension. Any increase in reading speed will be a godsend for the exam. That's not really learning anything new, it's just getting better at what you can already do.

2) If you're in China you've got a wealth of listening resources in the form of FM radio, plus there are all the podcasts available. Do some earphones-in, sit-down, concentrated listening, taking notes, with news programs and interviews. Pay attention to dates and numbers, they love to test you on that kind of stuff. Again, don't worry too much about new vocab unless something is cropping up often or it's completely breaking your understanding of a piece - just get better at what you can already do.

3) If you haven't already got these (you should) then get hold of them and start dropping stuff into conversations with your friends. That'll help out with listening, and won't do your spoken Chinese any harm.

.

...And if you can't get a GF/BF for whatever reason, just friends that you hang out with a lot and speak Chinese with works fine as well.

When the Anki deck overfills (700+ cards) I usually just press Enter + 4 as fast as I can until all the cards are done. While I have done it the hard way a couple of times it isn't really worth the frustration.

yersi, did you know that there's an anki plugin called postpone, which shifts the piled up reps in one keystroke? The way it works: it asks for the number of days you want the pending cards to be spread over. If you key in 700 in your case, there will only be one rep left. One warning: if you plan to do some reps that day, do them before you use postpone.

Being bored with ordinary popular culture, newspapers and television, could be perfectly reasonable. I understand being bored with ordinary interpersonal interaction too.

Do you have a lifelong interest in something that could be interesting to explore in Chinese? For me, conveniently, children's stories, and remembering how happy I was in elementary school, is working at this time. Later, I'd like to read material in Chinese produced during the Cold War, as this is fascinating- as though peeking into a world that was sort-of forbidden when I was a child. I didn't get to politics/economics in Russian, but there was another lifelong interest: I read an autobiography in Russian of former chess world champion Anatoly Karpov. Again, sharing the thoughts and feelings of real people, from the other side of The Forbidden, was surreal. Of course, in chess, there was the potential for a special authority in materials produced by Russians; what are the fields in which a pearl of great price might be found hidden in all of the writings in Chinese?

What are you most educated in? There is likely to be some specialized vocabulary covering the subject, and there would be some additional thrill to think that only some subset of Chinese people would know this vocabulary. Stuck for a witticism at a party? Whip out your specialized vocabulary and search for someone worth talking to! ...worth it *to you* to talk to! ...and if it's a romanticizable entity...and if it's smarter than you...wouldn't that be great?!

I'm too much of a newbie in Chinese itself to have had this crisis of which you speak, but I had it in other fields. My advice doesn't sound good: If you're honest with yourself, and really don't want to do it, just quit. Later you'll probably remember the investment you made and want to continue, just like breaking up... and then wanting her back.

You're thinking of employment too, right? Well if you're studying for the sake of some future employment, then you must simply force yourself, as though you were at work already: there's money to be made, and harder times are coming.

You're in China. Maybe the mystique has worn off. This would be another reason to search for fulfillment in the world of ideas rather than in the daily goings-on of people. *Even in writing* it is hard enough to find rewarding and non-repetitive engagement. In ordinary conversation, even harder. But the world of ideas goes on forever.

Lastly, there's the example of the Chinese to live up to. They work very hard in school, don't they? I don't know what kinds of interactions you seek, but a perception that you're hard-working could win a lot of goodwill.

Maybe the acceptance from your friends has already given you everything you really wanted from your Chinese learning project. I'm sorry if that is the case.

Maybe its just me, but I don't believe in boredom; it's probably something else: Search yourself, Grasshopper.

Querido,

I think you've really hit it on the head, and Roddy I've taken a short break and slowed down on the studying recently.

I applied for the CSC, so cross your fingers that I'll get it and be able to study full-time. You all know that an ex-pat life means the coming and going of friends but more recently the going friends have been replaced by friends who are Chinese-speakers. A few of my lifelong friends from the States are heading out for good this summer, I think post-July there should be a big jump in my Chinese speaking time.

In other news I met 成龙, he looked at a watch I was wearing at a 媒体发布会 I was working at yesterday. It boosted my spirits.

Thanks guys for the advice, I really like the people on these boards for the time they put in and your helpful info.

Will