#(add to tracker)

[spiderziege]

Mordred Manor! (with close-ups under the cut)

edit: i just put up some new drawings on my ko-fi, so if you wanna print this out as a poster or something, you can find it there at full resolution in the 'Misc Art' folder! :) (personal use only!)

[catcherwrites]

The people voted for Corvus and Soren to be the next of my Arc 3 redesigns, and so it was done! I apologise for taking so long, things irl have picked up so I didn’t have as much time to spend on our guys.

Check out the more in-depth story and design choices below

Corvus

Story Choices

Following the events of Arc 2, Corvus, Soren, and Terry travelled with Pyrrah to find King Harrow but were unsuccessful for several months. Returning to Evrkynd empty-handed, King Ezran and Queen Amaya summoned Corvus, informing him that Amaya was stepping down as General of the Standing Battalion and wanted to name Corvus as her replacement. He was deeply honoured to be trusted with the responsibility and accepted the position, believing that he’d still have enough freedom to spend time how he wished. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple, and while Terry continued the search for Harrow with his new ally (who I’m keeping secret for now), and Soren returned to his Head Crownguard duties, Corvus was thrown into the proverbial deep end. Stuck coordinating recruitment and training, patrolling the borders, and going on aid missions, Corvus could only return to Katolis once a month for a few days. And while the distance had left his relationship with Soren…awkward, the Crownguard’s schedule was always suspiciously free during his visits (“Well, I have nothing on right now, so I guess we can go for that hike…”).

Design Choices

Designing Corvus was a fun challenge! I tried to communicate his promotion in the Standing Battalion without making him completely unrecognisable. However, because his Arc 1 and 2 designs outfits look like he cobbled together the most practical pieces of armour, they lack the cohesiveness one would expect from a leader – which meant I had to depart from his usual style. To bridge the gap between Tracker-Corvus, Crownguard-Corvus, and General-Corvus, I decided to take inspiration from his initial concept art and blended that with elements of the Standing Battalion uniform and Corvus’ old designs. His scarf, of course, had to stay – but you may notice it’s been stitched up, a strip of the scarf being a gift from Corvus to Soren before he left the Crownguard.

Soren

Story Choices

Soren’s been through quite a lot in Arc 2, dealing with the reopening, mending, and re-reopening of old wounds. He, Terry, and Corvus were sent to look for Harrow, but after a few months, they returned to Katolis defeated. When Corvus privately confessed he’d been transferred back to the Standing Battalion, Soren was happy and supported him through the adjustment period. Though Soren can’t quite explain why, he grew more bitter as the years went by – though he’s done very well to not show it. During the daytime, Soren trained King Ezran in swordplay, improved his poetry, and did his best to keep everyone safe and happy. In the dead of night, however, Soren would slip through the city streets and secretly meet the spies he’d sent to look for Claudia. No one else was allowed to know he was seeking her out alone, not until Soren himself could decide what he would do with Claudia when she was found.

Design Choices

It wasn’t easy to develop an Arc 3 design for Soren! His silhouette was fine, but I went through about 5-6 different colour schemes and 3-4 different cape designs, and I spent so long toggling layers to see which combination worked best. Soren’s armour is a blend of Arcs, but the cape design has completely changed to reflect his elevated rank. His hair is longer and tied back with braided cloth from both Corvus’ scarf and Soren’s cape, and he’s clean-shaven again. I wanted to show that while he’s matured a lot – Soren’s regressed a little since S7. Post-Arc 1 and post-Arc 2 share a lot of similar traumas (Viren dying, Claudia escaping) – but this time, he lacked the same support system. On a more upbeat note, that scar across his face? Hat had grown too big for Soren’s head and dug in to avoid falling. Now Soren only lets Hat rest up there when he has the downtime for it.

[gavfleetout]

Why is it that whenever there’s a wlw ship, it’s always the same two people in slightly different fonts?

On the left of each we have the dumbass jock, and on the right the often wealthy book and/or street smart gf who’s always 1000 gayer than their significant other.

And why is the dumbass one ALWAYS the main character? It doesn’t even matter if it’s canon or not. Like how did that happen?

[padawansuggest]

Anakin: *taking a call from Space CERN or some shit asking him to help them fix a machine and a hard equation* -listen, I’m sorry, I can’t actually travel all the way out to SPERN (Space CERN) right now, my grandkids are teething and my daughter’s husband is in over his head, I found him crying and panic eating cake last night-

SPERN employee: No, Master Skywalker-

Anakin: *flinches, shields going up because he doesn’t want the kiddo on his shoulder to feel it* Please, call me Jedi, I don’t like that term.

SPERN employee: *through gritted teeth* Jedi Skywalker, I ask you; do you know the purpose of the machine you are helping us fix?

Anakin: I don’t know; trying to find god or something?

SPREN employee: The Higgs Boson is what we call it; but it’s essentially a way to detect the force through gravitational waves-

Anakin: Yeah, that seems about right.

SPERN employee: -and the machine is constantly tracking you. Like a constant lock on your location. It’s- we would like you to come in and do some tests, is all.

Anakin: *sighing to the force for making him deal with this AND teething twins at the same time, for the second time, even* And as I have said, I don’t really have the time to travel to your planet. Now, do you need any other assistance with recalibration?

SPERN employee: -_- no. Thank you for your time, Jedi Skywalker.

[o2studies]

22:00 || ༻`` 1 June — Sunday

57 days of productivity, 39/57

Big jump from the last update being day 12 😅 And honestly, not sure what to start with now....

I have finished 4 exams so far and I've got 3 left (the next one being Math U.2 on Wednesday) and I feel alright about them. For each one I could've done a lot more work, but I was still pretty much as prepared I could be. I also revised the MOST I have EVER revised last week, being just short of 26 HOURS which is CRAZY. And my brain has been moooore than fried because of it... (I am miscounting days and times and I don't know what's going on anymore 😭😭😭😭)

But within all the bedrotting and bad habits and becoming a study-hermit, I have really begun getting my life together again! (once again screwing over Notion for an app that can do mostly similar things despite it not being it's primary purpose ;-;) I have created a sort of masterlist on google docs consisting of a mood board, different goals, Habitica challenges I'm in, tasks I've to get sorted and habits I want to implement — and I'm so so proud of how it looks!!! This is 100% something I'm going to keep adding to and making use of long term!

So recently I've been (among studying still ofc) cleaning a lot, reading even (I started Powerless by Lauren Roberts over a month ago and I'm finally picking it up again and it's so good!!), planning some more art projects (and I'm soooo excited for Art Fight to begin!), and done more smaller organisations.

For having not updated in so long I planned to write about so much more but that pretty much sums it up... :/ So I'll leave youse off with some pictures and the fact that the next TSJ entry will be uploaded tomorrow!

Oh and I also had my school leavers party!!! (img. 1) Been to 1 if my last violin lessons as I hadn't realised I'd be having so many exams on the days of them 😓 (img. 3) I've tried a reverse To Do list and it's working wonders!!! (img. 5) and I was invited on a family road trip with K and her family one of the days which was really lovely 😊 (img. 6)

Also! I bought myself a new, pretty notebook into which I'll add the likes of less important passwords (like for tumblr, AF etc.) and a savings plan for when me and K start work and properly begin looking for a place to rent together. But that's as far as I've gotten with ideas for it. I want the notebook to have more of those important, adult-y things, not for it to be another journal.

Any ideas for what else it could have?

Day / I decided to stop the counter during my exams and given the reason why, I think it was a reasonable choice

Day 0

Floor time ☑️ // 🍊

[retroautomaton]

February’s Palette is OUT! 🛏️🦩

This month’s dreamy theme is Sleep L*o*ver and includes a 13-Color Palette, A Sleep Tracker Procreate Sheet & 6 Digital stamps to accompany it! For the special commission two characters of your choice in an old school coloring style!

Ko-Fi Shop! ☕️🎀

[hawnks]

Iida trapping you into a quirk marriage with him because he’s truly in love with you but you don’t even want to look at him……

[foreos]

bad kids family tree (blurry edition, because tumblr destroyed the quality)

[self-indulgent-paw-patrol]

🎄🌟 Secret Pup 2024 🐾🎁

HO HO HO PUPS AND PEOPLE

Christmas is now around the corner (says the artist who didn't finish the Halloween requests yet lol), so why not celebrate between the Paw Patrol fandom too? And while at it, make sure to join the Paw Patrol Community here on Tumblr, if you haven't yet!!

For this Christmas project, I ran some ideas with @cottoncandyswirl828 and now we bring to you the Secret Pup 2024, our own version for an online Secret Santa!

Read more for the details and links to join the Secret Pup 2024 and the Paw Patrol Community!!

How does it work?

First, no physical gifts are needed. We won't be sending physical goodies to each others - internet safety and all, don't go around sharing addresses or whatever!

Only "Digital" gifts allowed. There are many ways we can do that, the most common are fanarts, but it doesn't need to be necessarily that! You can work some short story, or a poem, some screenshot edits, a fancam (is that how those short videos are called?) or maybe even gift a Paw Patrol game on Steam for your Secret Pup 😂 (in the case someone wants to give a Steam gift, I'll go collecting the Steam usernames from everyone participating so no one will know who got who anyway). There are several possibilities!! Just try to give your best on what you do and it'll be alright!!!

To join the fun-filled gift sharing party, you just need to answer and submit to the forms below and that's it. Leave your DMs open!!! I'll be drawing the usernames and DMing you on who's your Secret Pup on November 30th, so you'll have a little over one month to work on your idea for your Secret Pup.

DON'T PUBLISH YOUR GIFTS UNTIL THE DUE DATE!!! We'll publish everything on January 5th, after we're all done with being busy about Christmas and New Year celebrations XD That'll be a very nice way to start our new year, don't you think?

Hope you guys like this idea and will join us!!! See you there!!!

Google Forms to join the Secret Pup 2024:

[fanfic-obsessed23]

Octonauts episode poll 2 {Part 21}

Octonauts episode poll 2

Hi again my dear Octonauts tumblrs, another poll for the release of the new episodes,

the new options are

• Mangrove Mission ft. Selva and CJ (Calico Jack) • Snake invested sea foam ft. Paani and CJ • Long nosed bats ft. Ryla and Tracker • Creature coach upgrade ft. Haraka and Natquik

personally I’m choosing to vote for creature coach, mostly because Natquik is in it and apparently hasn’t been in an episode since the building of the reef base

Octonauts poll 1

Octonauts poll 3

TC part 20

TC part 22

[templeofvengeance]

We'll see if I go back on this one:

The Jake on this blog doesn't wear a fake mustache, mostly because it's never occurred to him yet to wear one casually/seriously. He does envision himself with a mustache and stubble if he was ever in any kind of mindscape/astral form. (Steven is the one that keeps them clean-shaven, and it honestly annoys the hell out of him.) He doesn't like mirrors. Both because his reflection looks wrong, and the idea of seeing one of the others. Kinda makes him look like a vampire, between that and usually being out at night, huh? Unrelated, and (hopefully) won't come up much, but the Jake on this blog is also claustrophobic. It was something he was already uncomfortable with, and being trapped in a sarcophagus in the Duat made it ten times worse.

[blinday]

My dudes I think we all missed the potential for TPN as an analog horror.

[cometzz]

shoutout fantasy high friendships & moving in place by shauna dean cokeland

[bccksmarts]

@heartscfvalor  :  continued from [ X ]

  It was devastating to find out such a thing. She was pregnant, and with Draco Malfoy's baby, no less. After a night of fun, what she thought was change for the both of them, turned out to be a disaster the following morning. They'd had drinks, flirted backed and forth and inevitably slept together.

  They'd had fun! It was a perfect night, or so she thought. He was gone the next morning, only leaving her a little breakfast for her to wake up to. Not him. He left her no note, nothing in a way to contact him… needless to say, she was utterly gutted. No—devastated.

  A few weeks pass and she's heaving her guts up in her bathroom, and then a quick muggle test and… positive. Great! Just bloody great! Just what she needed! In those following couple of months, she had a few appointments with wizarding healers, just to do things right, but ultimately decided to keep the child. Not for any other reason other than she wanted to. Keeping it from her friends had been a nightmare, and when her bump started to show? …There wasn't any hiding it any more, no big, fluffy jumper could hide it. No matter how hard she tried. Not that she was ashamed, of course not—but she knew her friends and how they could react.

  But she felt like she should give the father the first breaking of the news first—that was the right thing to do, wasn't it? He had a right to know; after all, it was a joint effort. She walked into his apothecary, asking his assistant politely to take her to him ( they'd be talking about that, no doubt ), and here they were. In his office, the Malfoy heir staring at her as if she was a ghost or something, but then… to her stomach. Well, nothing like getting straight to the point, right? ❝Is this how you treat your customers, Malfoy? No ❛hello❜, or ❛welcome❜?❞ Her eyes rolled lightly, one hand resting on her hip as the other came up to rest on her stomach. Sighing lightly, Hermione's eyes lowered to the bump, taking it in before closing them, ❝…Yes. Yes, Malfoy, your eyes aren't deceiving you— I'm pregnant.❞

[capn-twitchery]

my stupid ass like huh i'm getting real close to 7 TW with no zee menaces but i need at least one so i can draw cards for TW reduction....i'll use a woesel to fail a check on purpose,

sorry twitch. misjudged that one huh,

[rigelmejo]

'lazy' study activities

Yes, this is an extension of the big monster 'study plan' post I am working on. The big study plan post will link more tools and articles to use, this is more like a short suggestion of study activities you could try.

(Scroll to the bottom to see the SUMMARY)

If you already watch cdramas, continue to do so. Download Google Translate app on your phone (and Pleco, and any other translation app you like). Watch cdramas that have hard chinese subtitles on the videos - many youtube cdramas already are like this (you see chinese hanzi subs on the videos). Keep watching with english subtitles on too. Every 3-5 minutes, look up a word or phrase you're curious about. Google Translate allows you to type in words or phrases with pinyin, so if you see 小心 or 你放心 or 他死了 in the cdrama, you can type what you hear 'xiaoxin' or 'nifangxin' or 'tasile' to get the translation. If you don't hear the pronunciation clearly, or don't know pinyin letters-pronunciation well, then you can also do writing input and write in the hanzi you see on the hard chinese subtitles. I'm left handed and didn't know the stroke order as a beginner, my handwriting is usually incomprehensible to writing recognition software, and google translate still usually figured out which hanzi I was writing. So yeah, just watch what you'd normally watch and look up a word/phrase every 3-5 minutes as curious. This activity will ADD up. In a few months you might know a lot of words. If you are a beginner, maybe start with this activity and just keep doing it for a while. Eventually you'll start to pick up dozens of words, maybe even a few hundred. You'll probably eventually get curious about what grammar you're looking at, how to parse the sentences, how to remember hanzi better, and you can use that curiosity as motivation to push you to do some of the more 'intensive' study activities like learning about hanzi and grammar.

Not the laziest activity, because it does require reading an education material: but all you have to do is read it. You don't need to memorize, or study intensely, just read leisurely through it once. Read this dong-chinese pinyin guide, when you have decided you're a bit annoyed you can't figure out the pinyin to type the words you're trying to look up in cdramas. Or read it when you're eager to try typing with a chinese phone keyboard so you can type in hanzi instead of using writing-input, since typing the correct hanzi will make looking up new words easier. (To type hanzi you just type the pinyin, then pick from the hanzi suggested). Reading through this will take as little as 15 minutes, to as long as several days if you're just reading 1 section of it a day in 3-5 minutes. If you enjoy re-reading and reviewing, you might spend a few hours total on this pinyin guide. But if you're lazy? Just read through once, and know you can always come reference it again later if you're confused and want to clarify something. If you plan to learn zhuyin, you can check out the zhuyin guide at the top-right tab of the linked page.

Also not the laziest activity on here, as it will require reading educational material for 20 minutes to 2 hours depending on your reading speed and if you split it into different days and if you personally enjoy reviewing or not. Again, just read through these once when you have a few free minutes to spare. If you're a beginner, you'll appreciate the basic information about hanzi and how they work.

Part 1: Chinese characters in a nutshell

Part 2: Basic characters and character components

Part 3: Compound characters

Part 4: Learning and remembering compound characters

Part 5: Making sense of Chinese words

Part 6: Learning and remembering compound words

If you are a beginner and don't know much about tones, you may also want to spend 20 minutes to 2 hours on some days/weeks you have free on these informational things on tones:

Four Tones Explanation (great explanation video)

Tone Combination Practice (with some useful notes in it)

When Do Chinese Tones Change (good explanation, helpful 3rd tone explanation)

Accent Lab Mandarin Tone Pairs (I recommend this tool for listening practice, and later in your study to check on increasing your listening skills)

And finally, 2 textbook explanations of tones that I've found useful here and here.

Learning new words: if you find the pace of learning slow from just shows, are getting eager to learn more words FASTER so you can understand more? There's a few options.

There's SRS apps like Anki (or Pleco app's flashcard area), and if you enjoy flashcards or can focus on flashcards better than me, then if you do SRS apps 15-30 minutes a day the studying WILL add up. I cannot focus on such apps though, and once my focus burns out it takes me 1 hour to study 5 words... when for most people, they take 5 minutes to study 20 words or more in these apps.

If you're like me and can't focus long term on doing something like flashcards. Option 1: you can still use an SRS app like anki. Just cram 'new words/sentences' ONLY for a few days or weeks (so when you can get through as many words as other people you try to get through as many words as you can in 30 minutes to 2 hours), and when you start to feel the focus fade then switch to only review cards (and only New review cards until you've reviewed everything once). Quit reviewing when the focus is totally gone. You may finish reviewing everything, or you may not. Doesn't really matter. The initial 'new words/sentence' cards were to get an initial exposure of this means X, just like watching shows gives you that initial exposure the first time you look up an unknown word. You will 'review' these words more by seeing them in cdramas and other things, especially when you're still a beginner who needs to learn a few thousand common words. Option 2: same activity, but use a word list (or word list with sentence examples) online or printed on paper. Read through the list once over a matter of days until focus fades, then try to read through the list a second time (review) until focus is lost.

Option 3: Audio flashcards my beloved. If you REALLY do not want to look at flashcards for 15-30 minutes a day, or like me you REALLY can't focus at all on flashcards sometimes (because if 5 minutes take an hour to study like for me it's not very time effective ToT), audio lessons and audio flashcards will be your friend as a beginner. If efficiency is not your highest priority, I suggest you go to the Hoopla or Libby library apps, and looking up 'chinese lessons' or 'learn chinese' and try out some of the audiobooks and audio courses. Also go on Spotify and look up 'learn chinese' and try out some of the podcasts (I used to listen to Coffee Break Chinese), look up lessons on youtube (and things like "chinese sentences english translation"). ANY lesson that speaks chinese sentences, then speaks the english translation? Perfect, you can use it. Anything that tells you the chinese, then the english translation, is making sure you understand the chinese being used enough to start learning it. If you want to be particularly efficient with your time, you'll want to prioritize listening to audio that has MANY new chinese words per lesson. I listened to the chinese spoonfed anki audio files, chinese/english sentence audio, with new words or grammar in every sentence, but also a lot of words re-used in new sentences so i'd get some 'review' of words I'd heard before even if I only listened to new audio files until I finished. Those audio files have ~7000 sentences and probably a bit less words but still thousands. Immersive Languages (library audio lessons you can use) and Chinesepod101 would probably also have fairly information dense lessons.

Why are audio lessons and audio flashcards lazy? Well, particularly when it's just english/chinese sentence audio, you can listen to it while doing your regular daily schedule. Fit 30 minutes or even hours of listening a day, into when you're driving, commuting, walking, cleaning, cooking, grinding in video games, exercising, doing busy work you can listen to something in the background during. I tested this by doing it myself, and even if you are not paying full attention and just in-out of listening in the background, you will learn new words. So listening in the background while you play video games you would anyway? Easier, versus trying to focus on flashcards (very hard for me lol)? As far as 'intentional study' of educational materials, listening to audio lessons and audio flashcards is the easiest to do while continuing your regular daily schedule (aka not needing to carve out extra study time). The main drawback is it is very listening focused, so if you aren't working on reading skills with cdrama subtitles, graded readers, or webnovels eventually, then your reading skills will fall behind.

As an extension to the 'listening is easy to add to a daily schedule' idea: if you are an upper beginner, you can listen to learner podcasts entirely in chinese or graded reader audiobooks. If you're an intermediate learner, you can listen to audiobooks of webnovels you've read, or listen to audio dramas of stuff you've read subtitles for before, or if it's comprehensible enough for you then just listen to new audiobooks and audio dramas. You can listen to cdramas you've watched before playing in the background, or condensed audio (audio of shows with the silence cut out). Not only that, but when it comes to stuff like this, where you know SOME words but not all words? Or where you can read the words, but can't understand them when listening? Re-listen to the audio a LOT. I'm talking 10-20 times, or at least 5 times. Play chapter 1 of an audiobook on loop in the background while you clean your room, or while you level grind in a video game, or while you mull through doing a spreadsheet or lifting boxes at work (if you can work fine while listening to audio), or while you commute. You will, genuinely, notice your comprehension improving the more you re-listen even if you only paid half attention and didn't follow the plot the first few times. It is one of the easiest study activities to do, once you're at the point you can listen to audio materials. Just keep re-listening until you're bored and want to pick another, or until you feel you've understood as much as you can in that audio file (although I bet you if you've listened 5 times and think 'that's all I'll understand,' if you let yourself listen 10 times you'll be surprised how much MORE you end up understanding by then).

If you're getting ansty (as a beginner) about not understanding the grammar of the sentences you see in cdrama. Use that as motivation to spend 5 minutes to 30 minutes a day (or if you enjoy reading just read for 4 hours one day and be done) to read through some chinese grammar guides. You can either look up "basic chinese grammar" and read a few articles, or find a chinese grammar guide and just work your way through reading it. I personally suggest that, if you're bored by it or unable to focus: either JUST read the grammar point TITLES and then read more into the topics you've been seeing in cdramas that you want to learn more about. Or you just read HSK 1-4 grammar points, since they're the basics. Or you skip to the 'grammar point example' and read the examples to get a visual of what's going on. Or only look up specific grammar points as you watch cdramas, if something seems confusing.

I personally felt... it was easier in the long run, for me, to just read a whole grammar guide as a beginner. Did I understand everything? NOPE. I didn't understand like 2/3 at all. But skimming through an entire grammar guide made me aware of all the ways to expect past tense: 去 过 过了 了 以前 etc, ways to expect the future and ability and desire 会 要, how to ask yes/no questions 吗 and suggestions 吧, 有 没有 i have/dont have and how have can be used to express past tense things, 不 don't/not, how 的 地 can make descriptive phrases (地 is like english -ly) (and how in chinese a sentence clause-的 usually goes in FRONT instead of in the middle like in english), how 得 is both 'must' and also has several grammatical functions to look out for (that I didn't get used to until I read a lot to be honest), and 着 has grammatical uses too (the first of which was it seemed similar to the english verb ending -ing to me). These were basic things, and a lot of their more particular aspects went over my head.

But knowing roughly how to pick out 'that's a verb' and 'that's probably a descriptive' and 'that's a clause' and 'that's negative' and 'that's past tense' or 'that's present or future tense' helped me start guessing the overall main idea of sentences and paragraphs WAY sooner than it otherwise would have took me. If I'd only looked up 1 grammar point occassionally... it could've taken years to recognize these basics. Instead it took a month of reading a grammar guide, then several months of seeing that grammar in cdramas and webnovels just to fully recognize what I saw. I did still look up a particular grammar point when confused, but usually I already was vaguely familiar with the grammar point to look it up (like seeing 把 in the sentence and knowing THAT is what i should look up because it's confusing me). So yeah: feel free to do it the way you prefer, as we all will have different preferences and things that work better for us. But for me, it was worth just reading 4 hours of a grammar guide in 15ish minute chunks over the course of a month.

Unfortunately the grammar guide summary i read (chinese-grammar.org) no longer exists. So I will link some options I've found, but if you find more concise and simpler grammar guides please share them! Introduction to Basic Chinese Grammar. AllSetLearning Chinese Grammar Wiki (way too long to read easily in my opinion but I used this to look up specific grammar points later in learning a Lot), Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar: A Student's Guide to Correct Structures and Common Errors (this one is a print book but the only modern book I bought for grammar), and Wikipedia's Chinese Grammar Page (which is the grammar guide I'm currently reading through to consider as a resource - i think as far as summarized it may be one of the shorter options).

Whenever you feel ready to learn hanzi? Honestly the sky is the limit on options. If you like SRS apps like anki, Skritter is an app I've seen recommended for hanzi, I used some "chinese hanzi with mnemonics" anki decks (while I could focus lol). I personally found the easiest way for me to start was to just read through this book (which is for free as an ebook in many libraries/library apps, and can be found in free download book sites):Learning Chinese Characters: (HSK Levels 1-3) A Revolutionary New Way to Learn the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters; Includes All Characters for the AP & HSK 1-3 Exams. I liked this book because it made up a story to help me remember meaning, pronunciation, and tone. Along with providing example words. It's only 800 hanzi, and all I did to study it was read a few pages every couple days until I finished it - it took me around 3 months to finish the book. I didn't review (though you can re-read and review if you enjoy that).

But the mnemonics really helped form that 'initial recognition' memory and so when I started reading graded readers (once I'd studied 300 hanzi in the book), the graded readers helped 'review' those new hanzi and I learned them fast. For the 1000 hanzi I learned on my own after this book, I utilized the mnemonic story strategy that this book taught, and it was fairly doable to just keep picking up hanzi by looking them up when reading, coming up with a mnemonic story in my head, then moving on. As I kept seeing hanzi again, I'd eventually remember them. (And they say it takes 12-20 times of seeing a word to remember it, so at worst that's how much I was looking up new words... sometimes only 1-2 times though).

I would suggest that if you don't use SRS apps like anki or Skritter for hanzi, use some tool with mnemonics like a hanzi book with mnemonic stories (like the one I linked or a few others that exist). And when you look up new words in cdramas, and later graded readers and webnovels, please listen to the word's pronunciation a few times. So you're getting a bit of initial recognition of the hanzi's components/visual AND the word's pronunciation. If it takes 20 times or less to learn new words, then you'll want to get that much reading AND listening exposure.

When you have some basic grammar knowledge (or if you're really tolerant of ambiguity), keep watching cdramas as you have been. But try to pause the show every 3-5 minutes and read a chinese subtitle sentence. You can use the english subtitles to try and parse the chinese word meanings, or look up keywords using your translation app, whatever you want. Since a LOT of cdramas have chinese subs, and you watch with english subs, you can utilize these dual subtitles to start practicing reading skills and practicing guessing new words from context (in this case the context is the scene, the chinese words you already know, and the english translation). Later in your studies, when you stop using english subtitles sometimes, this will have been good practice of getting used to trying to read chinese. This pausing every 3-5 minutes to try and understand a chinese sentence should not take much time, maybe adding 5-10 minutes of watch time to a cdrama episode (depending on how long you pause). So it should be fairly easy to work into your schedule.

So yeah. The big summary of all this is:

If you want to make progress at a pace most people are going to find not too slow, I suggest 1-2 hours on average of doing stuff with chinese a day. (Or more hours a day on average if you want to get through the beginner phase faster). It'll take thousands of hours to learn chinese. Your pace will be extremely slow if you do less than 1 hour with chinese a day on average.

If you already watch cdramas, then keep doing that and just start looking up words (and eventually trying to figure out some sentences) once every 3-5 minutes as curious.

Spend 5 minutes a day reading articles on chinese writing system, and pinyin, and basic grammar, for a few months. You don't need to memorize or review, just get a basic initial exposure.

Approach other educational materials that way: if and when you start more 'intensively' studying, you can just get an initial exposure to the ideas (like a hanzi book, a grammar guide, reading word or sentence lists if you like to do that). You don't need to memorize or review, you don't need to understand everything. Just get an initial impression. (If you enjoy memorizing or studying though, go wild lol)

Audio lessons and audio flashcard study materials will require no time to fit into your schedule, you can do those while you do daily activities that you can listen to audio while doing. As an intermediate learner, these can also be used the way extensive reading is used - to pick up more vocabulary, improve grammar understanding, improve comprehension speed.

New words take (lets rough estimate) 20 times of seeing to remember. So you'll be looking up new words up to that many times when watching cdramas, or later when reading, and that's okay. It'll take a while to fully solidify this new information and you can just keep watching cdramas and doing things in chinese, and the information will eventually be learned. Especially as a beginner: you'll run into the few thousand most common words CONSTANTLY, you will eventually learn them as you keep looking words up and doing stuff in chinese. You do not need to do any special scheduled review (like SRS anki cards, skritter, pleco flashcards) unless you personally enjoy doing it, or want to speed up your progress and are okay with carving 15-30 minutes of time specifically for doing that.

The process of transitioning to graded readers, cdramas with no english subs, and webnovels is it's own beast - which I can cover if you want (and will in the bigger post's step 3). But the short of it is: if you keep doing activities until you've learned around 1000 words, you should be able to start reading easy graded readers and gradually increasing their unique word count until you're reading graded readers with 1000+ unique words. (And you can start graded readers knowing only 200 words if you want! Mandarin Companion has books for beginners if like me you'd like to practice reading ASAP). At that point, you should be able to transition to easy webnovels (using Pleco Reader/Clipobard Reader, Mandarinspot.com annotation, Readibu app, or highlighting and right clicking and using google translate in a webpage) and to watching cdramas you've seen before or with simple plots in chinese only. How many words you look up, or if you look up zero, is all fine: as long as you grasp the main idea of the plot. If you look words up, and can grasp at least the main idea? Then you can watch/read as long as you look words up (and you'll learn the other detail words from context) If you can grasp the main idea without looking any words up? Then you can watch/read without looking words up (and learn new words from context). The first few months (or even year) of transitioning to webnovels and cdramas with no english subs will feel hard, even if you know all/most of the words. It's just part of adjusting to actually comprehending all the things you've studied. I suggest following Heavenly Path's Reading Guide as soon as you're ready to start trying to read - first graded reading material, then webnovels once you've learned around 1000 words.