November ’22 Language Journal
Very delayed on posting this one. I’ve been very busy in December which I’ll talk about in my next journal.
Wins:
- Finished 活着
- More reading hours than last month
- Almost finished Intermediate Classical Chinese class
- Reading 撒哈拉的故事 at a faster rate than other books
Struggles:
- Still struggling on listening
- Trips/Thanksgiving Holiday threw off immersion schedule
- 黄金时代 very slow progression
- Phonetics feel way behind
Reading
Spent a lot of time this month reading. I began the month finishing off 活着, it’s a very troped book to read, but it is really fantastic. It’s a depressing story that really looks at the matter of people just trying to live life.
After finishing that I was excited to hop into the Refold Book Club book, 黄金时代，since it was continuing the theme of the Cultural Revolution. It took me a very long time to read the first section. Not sure I will finish reading for book club at this point given how difficult it was. At one point I re-read the entire first part of it again once I figured out what the crux of the story was. It’s pretty hard to follow and uses a lot of slang or referential language.
Because I was exhausted from reading the first part of that, I wanted to read something easier and shorter and switched to 撒哈拉的故事，which is an extremely pleasant read by comparison (and a nice change from reading about the horrors of Maoist China).
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Also continuing to “read the news”, now mainly reading the top 端 article of the day. I rarely get through the whole article, but it is definitely getting easier to comprehend.
Listening
I finished off Tea Time Chinese and moved on to trying to comprehend the “next level” of podcasts. I mainly listend to 聊聊東西. I enjoy their casual conversation, but I find, especially in the earlier episodes, their mic quality isn’t very high and they tend to trail off at the end of sentences making comprehension difficult. Additionally, I listend through the LingQ podcast, which I intend to go back through and listen to with dialogue on LinQ. Overall, this has been a difficult exercise. The gap between Tea Time Chinese and other podcasts feels quite large for me. I’ve started listening to these podcasts at .75 speed, which helps quite a bit for comprehension.
Towards the end of the month, I found out about “One Call Away” from the Refold server, which is similar in structure to 聊聊東西, but clearer audio and enunication. So far I have found it more comprehensible, though not as comfortable as I’d like.
Something I found I need to do more of is “active listening”. My previous thought was that “passive listening” while going on walks was likely just as effective as “active listening” though I’ve found that is not the case. My comprehension goes up dramatically if the only thing I am doing is sitting down and listening to a podcast or story. It has made me much more aware of how much brain power goes into driving or even walking. Something I want to work on in December (failing so far) is making active listening part of my daily routine.
Another activity I have been working into my daily habit is going through 30 cards on the Migaku Tone trainer. I am not very good at recognizing tone combos (some second tone initials really sound like first tones…). I basically want to keep this up until I can get a 100% on it every time. One thing I’m unsure of is how linked graded tone recognition is to effective listening acuity. I do feel my brain still is not prioritizing tones as important as the other phonetic components, though I’m really not quite sure how to get there except trying to explitly pay more attention to tones.
文言文
Lost a bit of motivation here to focus on reading normal books. I’m unsure how to balance this in the future. I have yet to finish the last two texts for the class, and had initially intended on finishing the textbook before year-end, which likely isn’t happening now. I’m still pretty happy with my progress overall throughout the year though.
Phonetics
My phonetics feel all over the place. It feels like I’ve spent a bit of time here, but am still very sloppy. The Refold Shadowing Challenges have helped. I really need to get into the habit of working on it daily. My (x, q, j) have definitely improved, and I have become much more conscious of it in normal speech. However, seemingly because the (q) and (ch) were so linked, my (ch) now sounds more like a (q), which I need to work on.
I also had an experience where I realized I needed to spend more time focusing on tones. I went to a Sichuanese restaurant nearby that I go to a lot and ordered my usual Mandarin. When the waitress came to give us our food, she quite a few times repeated what I had ordered to indicate how my tones were wrong for 辣子鷄. To work on this, I have been re-going through the Refold 1K Traditional deck, both to learn 繁體字 and grading myself on tones. Additionally, when reading I try to ensure that I get the tone right when subvocalizing.
Games!
I want to make a dedicated effort to play more games as it’s one of my core hobbies/work/etc and it fell by the wayside to really focus on reading ability. Lookup’s while playing games are still painful for me, and dabbling with OCR tools has mainly not worked. I want to try and play Chinese games, since I am largely unfamiliar with them and think it could be a good learning opportunity.
To that end, I started playing Detention (返校) which is a Taiwanese horror adventure game that mixed traditional Taiwanese horror folklore into a story about school during the Taiwanese Martial Law of the 1960’s. It’s been very fascinating so far and I’d like to finish it this month. I guess there’s a book that was published related to the game after the game release that I may check out.
Next I plan on trying to get into either the Sword and Fairy series (仙劍奇俠傳), Xuan Yuan Sword (軒轅劍), or Gujian (古剑). Last time I tried to get into Gujian though, it was very incomprehensible to me.
Japanese
My friend wants to go on a Japan trip soon which got me dabbling in Japanese last month. I had already been going through the JP1K deck. Still need to figure out if going on trip, and if so how much time to balance between Chinese versus Japanese. My Chinese really isn’t at the level I want it at.
Thinking about going through this process gave me a chance to do a retrospective of my Chinese learning so far. Biggest thing is I wish I had focused more on phonetics early on and listening skills.
One nice thing about time tracking is that I am very aware of how much dabbling I did, and it didn’t really go overboard.
