#and in chinese its still only like maybe 20 or less novels if you pick the more normal size 300k word webnovels

[rigelmejo]

I will say if you're learning chinese to read novels, it's a win win in some ways. To improve? You gotta read. What do you want to do? Read. Is there adequate interesting reading material just a literal glance in any direction? Oh wow you bet. You can't even fathom how many good novels await you in whatever genres you're looking for, many of which will be free and accessible online, with audio books too!

[catie-does-things]

Patterns in Given Names in the World of Avatar

Or, Naming Your Avatar OC’s: Beyond Baby Name Lists

Naming an original character in any fantasy setting can be a tricky business. Do you use a real name? Do you make one up? Either way, it has to sound like it fits into the established world - but you don’t want it to sound too similar to the names of canon characters, either. In this post, I will offer an analysis of canon names of major and minor characters in Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, looking for discernible patterns in the names of each of the fictional cultures of that world, and offer some suggestions based on my own experience for how to choose or create names for original characters in that world.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with using a “baby name list” for inspiration or even taking a real name from one of the cultures the show is based on and using it. But since the fictional cultures of the show are not complete carbon copies of real cultures, just picking a name from a list of Inuit or Japanese names won’t always give you one that actually fits in with the Avatar world. And maybe you’ve seen enough Water Tribe OC’s named Nanook (I’m guilty of this one myself) and want to get a little more creative. In that case, welcome to the advanced OC naming class.

And yes, there will be color coded spreadsheets.

Methods and Goals

To get a feel for what sort of names will sound like they fit into the world of Avatar, we of course have to look at the names of canon characters. For our purposes, I chose to exclude characters who only appear in spin-off material such as the comics or Kyoshi novels, and only look at the given names of characters from the two shows, Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. I have sorted the characters by nation, as well as into cultural subdivisions where applicable. LoK characters from the United Republic of Nations have their own category, since in most cases we do not technically know the specific cultural origin of those characters’ names - though based on the patterns below and other context clues, we can make a reasonable guess for many of them. Characters whose names appear to be nicknames or pseudonyms (such as Longshot and Lightning Bolt Zolt) have also been left out. 

The aim of this analysis is to look for phonetic and other patterns in the names of each cultural group within the world of Avatar. We will be looking at the names as spelled using the Latin alphabet, since this is how most fan fiction is written, and how the character names are given in official material, but keep in mind that within the world of the show, all nations use the Han Chinese writing system, so names or syllables spelled differently in the Latin alphabet might be represented by the same character in-universe, or vice versa.

Finally, my guidelines and suggestions for how to choose or create OC names are just that: guidelines and suggestions. These are not rules. It’s your OC, you do what you want.

Without further ado, let’s start looking at some names.

The Water Tribes.

We don’t have quite the sample size for Water Tribe characters that we’ll see for some of the other nations, but 28 names is still plenty to look at. Notably, we have far more male (18) than female (10) names, a pattern we will see repeated without exception. Draw your own conclusions.

Water Tribe names appear to mostly be two or three syllables long, with most of the one syllable names being from the Foggy Swamp Tribe. Hahn from the Northern Water Tribe is the only other one syllable name. Two syllable names are the most common with 19 names, which is about two-thirds of the total. Three syllable names account for 5 out of the total 28, or less than one fifth - still, this makes them more common than names of the same length in any other nation, and more common than one syllable names in the Water Tribes, especially if you exclude the Foggy Swamp. If you’re looking to use an authentic Inuit or other Arctic indigenous name for your Water Tribe OC, I would be wary of names longer than three syllables, though, as we have none of these in canon.

Consistent with Inuit names, we do have a lot of /k/ and /g/ sounds. The letters K and Q are pronounced the same in Water Tribe names, though in Inuit they represent different sounds. 18 out of the 28 names have at least one of these sounds, with /k/ being far more common than /g/ (17 vs. 2 names). Of course, having the letter K in your Water Tribe OC’s name is by no means necessary, and especially if you are creating a lot of Water Tribe characters, you probably want some variation.

The digraphic consonant sounds /ch/, /sh/, and /th/ are almost totally absent, with the exception of one name from the Foggy Swamp, Tho. The /r/ sound is also never found at the beginning of a name, and the /j/, /l/, /w/, and /f/ sounds are totally absent. The /v/ sound is absent from all given names, but notably appears in the surname Varrick not included above.

Regarding gender differences, both male and female names can end in -a, but this is much more common for female names, with 3 male names compared to 8 female names having this ending. Notably, this accounts for all but two of the female names, and all of the female names end in a vowel. Consonant endings appear to be exclusively masculine, with final /k/ sounds being common, whether spelled with K or Q (8 out of 18 male names), though masculine names can also end in vowel sounds.

There do not appear to be major differences between the Northern and Southern Water Tribe names, however the three names we have from the Foggy Swamp Tribe are definitely distinct - all one syllable, and all open syllables ending in vowels. These sound more like Earth Kingdom names, as we’ll see, which makes sense given the location of the Foggy Swamp.

To my knowledge, only handful of the Water Tribe names are authentic Inuit names, and they are all characters from LoK: Desna, Yakone, Noatak, Unalaq, and Tonraq, or 5 out of the 28 total names. Yue is an authentic name, but a Chinese one. The main Water Tribe characters such as Katara, Sokka, and Korra all have invented names. So yes, you can pick from an Inuit baby names list (and Nanook does fit the patterns we see above), but you are by no means limited to this.

The Earth Kingdom

Since the Earth Kingdom is the largest of the nations, it makes sense that we have the most names to look at here, with 79 names total, including 56 male names and 23 female names. I’ve included Jet with a question mark, because he may be using a pseudonym like the rest of the Freedom Fighters do, but his name is also plausible as the one his parents gave him. Macmu-Ling, the name of the haiku master in Ba Sing Se, may also be a surname, but this is unclear given the limited information on the character.

One syllable names are much more common in the Earth Kingdom, accounting for 30 out of 56 male names and 10 out of 23 female names. This is roughly half of all Earth Kingdom names, or 40 out of 79. Two syllable names account for 34 out of the 79, or about 43%, with three syllable names being rare overall, just 5 names or 6%. Overall, Earth Kingdom names tend to be shorter, which is consistent with a basis in Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese names.

Unlike with Water Tribe names, there do not appear to be specific sounds that stand out as distinctively Earth Kingdom. Notably, nearly all names begin with consonants, with only 6 names beginning with a vowel, and always A or O. All of the consonant sounds found in English are represented in at least one name. The /ch/, /sh/, and /th/ digraphic sounds are all present, though not abundantly common. The Earth Kingdom being large and diverse, this greater diversity in names also makes sense.

There is evidence of unisex names in the Earth Kingdom. Wu is used by both a male and female character (Prince Wu and Aunt Wu), and the name Song which is listed as female above we will see again as the name of a male earthbender in Republic City. Other names could also be unisex, but as most are only used by one character, we have no way to know. The only noticeable gendered pattern seems to be that several female characters have English names, which I separated into the fifth column above. This seems to be exclusive or near-exclusive to Earth Kingdom women. Jet could also be interpreted as an English name, but as previously mentioned, this is possibly a pseudonym anyway.

The few named characters we have from Kyoshi Island all have authentic Japanese names, or at least names taken from the Japanese language - oyaji is an affectionate term meaning “old man” or “father”. Kyoshi is distinct from the rest of the Earth Kingdom in many other ways, including a history of isolationism which Japan also has. As for the sandbenders, we only have two names, but Ghashiun stands out as rather distinct in its spelling. Visually, the sandbenders resemble the Tuareg people of the Sahara region, so that might be the direction you want to go if you’re looking for authentic names to use for your sandbender OC’s.

The curious name Macmu-Ling is based on the surname of the writer for the episode she appeared in, Lauren MacMullan.

Fire Nation

We have 13 female names and 33 male names, for a total of 46 known Fire Nation names. 

Two syllable names are most common, with 20 male and 6 female names, accounting for 26 out of the total 46, which is more than half. 15 names have one syllable, which is about one third of the total. Only 5 names have three syllables, or just one tenth, and once again there are no names longer than that. 

The letter Z stands out as appearing in 8 names, while it’s much more rare in the other nations - though notably the Z in Zhao is pronounced differently than in the other names. Also worth noting is that all the names with Z other than Zhao - that is, all the names where Z is pronounced as it would be in English - are names of members of the royal family, with the exception of Kuzon. The digraphic sounds /ch/ and /sh/ are both present, but /th/ is not. Other absent sounds include /v/ and /w/.

The Fire Nation gives us our only example of gendered variants on the same name with Azulon and Azula. This implies that the -a ending is generally feminine, though we only have two female names that use it. Ilah ends with the same sound, albeit spelled with a silent H. There is also one masculine name, Yon Rha, that ends in -a, though with a different pronunciation (/ah/ vs. /uh/). The -on ending may also be masculine or generally masculine, but again, only two names use it. Female names are also more likely to end in the /ee/ sound, whether spelled -i or -ee, with 6 of the 13 female names ending this way. Only two male names end with this sound, and one of them, Li, is unisex. 

In terms of basis in real world cultures, the Fire Nation often gets heavily identified with Japan in fanon, because they are an island nation with a history of imperialism, but what we see in canon is much more of a blend of Asian cultures, like the other nations. Some names, like Izumi and Roku are Japanese in origin, but some are also Chinese or Chinese-based such as Chan and Lu Ten. And as with the Water Tribes, the main characters like Zuko, Azula, Iroh, and Ozai, tend to have invented names. (Zuko especially would be odd as a Japanese name, since the -ko suffix in Japanese is feminine.) The name Ursa, curiously, is Latin - the feminine form of the word for “bear”. So while you certainly can use Japanese names for your Fire Nation OC’s, as with Inuit names in the Water Tribe, you’re not limited to that by any means. In fact, based on what we see in canon, I would say that if you’re creating several Fire Nation OC’s, you should have about an even mix of Japanese, Chinese, and invented names.

Air Nomads

With only 13 names, of which 9 are male and 4 are female, this is the smallest sample we have for any of the nations - understandably, since the Air Nomads are all but extinct for most of both shows. We’re even technically assuming that all of Tenzin’s children have Air Nomad names, but this is probably a safe assumption.

Two syllable names are still most common, with 9 of the 13, or about three fourths of the total. There are three names with three syllables, or a little less than one fourth. Aang has the only one syllable name.

With so few names, it’s hard to draw firm conclusions about phonetic patterns. The -a ending is seen on one name for each gender, as is the -i ending, and the -o ending appears on two male names and one female name. The -u ending only appears on one male name, but given the small sample size this doesn’t necessarily indicate a female Air Nomad name couldn’t have the same ending.

We do have clear and distinct real world basis for several Air Nomad names. Tenzin and Gyatso are both taken from the religious name of the current Dalai Lama. Rohan is an Indian name, and Laghima is a Hindu term for the spiritual power of becoming weightless. (Coincidentally, Rohan is also a French surname, but it was presumably the Indian name that the show meant to reference.) Pasang is a Nepali name, though a female one as far as I can tell, whereas it is used for a male Air Nomad. Tibetan, Nepalese, and Sanskrit names would thus all be good places to look for inspiration for your Air Nomad OC’s - though again, don’t feel limited to that. Chinese inspired names would also fit in, and Aang, like all the main characters, has an invented name.

United Republic of Nations

This group of character names, all from The Legend of Korra obviously, has to be considered differently. While we can make educated guesses as to the fictional ethnicity of most of these names, the fact is that many of these characters may be of mixed heritage and we can’t say for sure what the origins of their names are. In the chart below, I have color coded the names according to my best guess for nation of origin, rather than by gender. Names left in white, in my opinion, could be either Earth Kingdom or Fire Nation, and nothing about those characters gives us further clues.

With 31 names, we do have a decent sample size. Presumably Mako is a Fire Nation name and Bolin is Earth Kingdom, and based on the sound they do seem to fit in with those nations respectively. Raiko has a question mark because it is unclear if this is a given name or surname, but it does seem to follow the Zuko and Mako pattern and thus be most likely Fire Nation in origin. We also have the name Yasuko, for a character who is supposed to be of Fire Nation descent, using the -ko suffix on a feminine name.

Ginger and Buttercup I have designated as most likely Earth Kingdom because they are English names, and as we previously saw, only Earth Kingdom women seem to have names of this variety. Pema is presumably of at least partial Earth Kingdom descent based on her green eyes - this is also a real Bhutanese name. Characters like Lu, Gang, Daw, and Chung are all shown wearing green, and have one syllable names of the kind which are most common in the Earth Kingdom.

Hasook has a very distinctively Water Tribe name, and is of course a waterbender. Tahno and Ming-Hua are both waterbenders as well, though their names are less distinctively Water Tribe. These could simply be less typical names from one of the two polar tribes, or they may have Foggy Swamp Tribe heritage. (I believe this was a popular headcanon for Tahno, at least.) The possibility also exists that they have mixed heritage and may have Earth Kingdom or even Fire Nation names in spite of being waterbenders.

Conclusion

Like everything else in the world of Avatar, the names of the characters are inspired by and based on many real world cultures, primarily Asian, but no one fictional nation in the Avatar world corresponds exactly to a real world culture. When we look for or create names for original characters in this world, we want to respect the real world basis of these fictional cultures, but simply picking a Chinese, Japanese, or Inuit name from a list may not always jive with what we see in canon, in addition to running the risk of being a bit stereotypical.

With the canon patterns outlined above, fan fiction writers and fan artists should feel free to expand their search for names to other Asian, Arctic, or North African cultures, such as Thai, Burmese, Nepalese, Yupik, Aleut, or Berber names. Baby name lists can be helpful, but are often dubiously reliable, especially for non-Western cultures. Personally, when I want to give an OC an authentic name, I prefer to use Wikipedia to find real people from the culture or cultures I’m drawing on. I’ve joked about my own tendency to pick names of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean saints for my fan fiction, but searching for Wikipedia lists or categories of artists, philosophers, or scientists from a given culture can also be useful.

Wherever one chooses to look, name lists are best treated as a starting place - a name from a given real culture won’t necessarily fit into a given Avatar culture, and a name from a certain Avatar culture does not have to come from any particular real world culture. Fans should also feel free to invent names of their own, as the creators of Avatar did. Of the 20 major OC’s in my story Fate Deferred, half of them have real names or variations on real names, and the other half are invented.

And if you want to have a female Earth Kingdom OC named something like Jasmine or Crystal - these are also perfectly in line with canon.

[nazih-fares]

While the Dynasty Warriors license had not changed since Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires back in 2014, it was finally time for the team over at Omega Force to shake things up, after years of critics pointing out a clear rehash of assets and monotony in the franchise. With Dynasty Warriors 9, the plan was to bring freshness but also major changes in the usual mechanics and environments, going from restricted linear arenas to now an open-world Musou adventure with sidequests and different story branches. After hours played on Xbox One X and PC (thanks to Mazen Abdallah’s input), we can finally give you our verdict, and sadly it’s not as impressive as we would like it to be.

While the license Dynasty Warriors is known for its battle arenas lacking any sort of freedom, this new opus decided to give players the choice. While it might be seem absurd to mix a Musou with open world gameplay mechanics, yet Dynasty Warrior 9 is great at this fusion. There’s been some serious hard work from the team at Omega Force to give players a sense of freedom on the game’s large map, which myself and Mazen only unveiled less than 20% of it throughout our combined 25 hours of gameplay. But don’t expect anything along the line of the recent Assassin’s Creed Origins or other similar “kings” of open world adventures, as Dynasty Warrior 9’s environments are not really varied. I could list down the whole asset bank to maybe a rough 50-60 items, with simple pine forests and 220–280 AD styled Chinese cities and towns, but the small variations between them gives an overall decent looking game. It’s not sadly textures or design elements worthy of a next generation console, so don’t expect anything mind-blowing on that front, with the exception of the playable characters being well modeled and rendered (even if some of their animations can be awkward).

The first worry though about this lack these low resolution textures, crude assets and 3D elements makes this huge map feel terribly empty and lacking any sort of life. To resolve this, the developers have flooded the map with an insane amount of tasks and quests that allow you to explore the area without getting bored. This will help a lot while you are traveling to your main story quest, and end up getting distracted by a group of raider waiting for a beating, or an allies calling for help. Thankfully, your journey will not always done on foot, which helps break the monotony of the map design, as the game introduces horses as a companion to all characters, summoned – like most other games – with just a whistle. But other than using it for transportation, you can also “train” your horse thanks to a level system that climbs up with the time spent on its back. These stats will affect skills, as well as combat like boost its impact on enemies, and so on.

My biggest concern though for Dynasty Warriors 9 is that its ambition for grandeur is not met by its technical capabilities. Regardless of the rather crude textures, and lack of variety in terms of assets and visuals, the game is pretty much a chaotic battle for the engine to keep up with a steady framerate. As an Xbox One X owner, I was expecting a rather steady performance, instead it seems the console if barely reaching a 22fps when in combat, even after changing the options to the action mode (which prioritize faster framerate stabilization) instead of movie mode (more focused on resolution). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not obsessively into technical specs and resolutions like most of my other colleagues, but not even reaching 30fps on a powerful console is unacceptable, because it’s all down to engine optimization. You’ll end up having to deal with screen tearing galores, and even a weird input lag, but the latter could be my eyes playing tricks on me due to the intense framerate drop.

So what about the PC version? It should be better, right? To begin with, we should probably point out that Japanese game studios often have trouble adjusting to PC, and Dynasty Warriors 9 is unfortunately no exception. The menus are confusing, and there’s no proper guidance for keyboard controls. Mouse movement doesn’t feel smooth at all, and it seems like the button mapping was an afterthought. In terms of performance, things are okay overall. Mazen didn’t face that many serious issues in performance through some of the main sequences. However, the framerates take noticeable dives when things get too busy, and it is as well struggling to hit the 20fps mark in some of the battles. Even on our review system, which has pretty solid hardware, the game chugged through the more action-heavy sequences. Moreover, there were several graphical glitches like textures not loading properly or assets coming in wonky. On the whole the game isn’t great on the PC, but it’s not one of the trainwrecks we’ve seen from other studios.

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Story wise, Dynasty Warriors 9’s premise is pretty much the same as the franchise previous major titles (remakes and spin-off included), based on the historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (the battle between the Wei, Shu and Wu states). In this title, you are given control one of the five dynasties that the game offers you, led by their champion, which once picked will give you an opportunity to see that same clan’s story into the this feudal war that happened from 220-280 AED. When we talk about champions though, don’t expect a handful, as we are talking about 90 playable characters in total, which are unlocked gradually throughout the main campaign mode.

Of course, like previous games, each character has its own advantages, weaknesses and unique skills, which will push you to find one that best fits your action game fighting style. While most of the characters in Dynasty Warriors 9 are easily able to decimate the enemy ranks without any difficulty, your preference of which one to pick will be based on what kind of officer or captain against you, or if a mission has you hunt wild animals that are usually more agile. In addition to the basic hack and slash attacks, each officer has a unique special that can be used when his (or her) bar is filled, as well as three trigger attacks that are used to either stun enemies , launch enemies into the air to flow a combo or knock down enemies to the ground (each with its own cooldown time).

Nevertheless, Dynasty Warriors 9’s combat still remains the same when compared to previous games. You are pretty much leading the charge like the mighty clan hero you are, and fight large wave of enemies, until you find an their own officer. Most of these “minions” do not give you much resistance, and unless you come across an opponent with a much higher level, you are pretty much a warlord. And here’s the fun part: if you find and eliminate the officer, then the entire platoon crumbles down, and you won’t bother with those minions. If you do feel like those fights are difficult, then you can of course make use of the leveling system for your character, but I found it a tedious game mechanic. Indeed, during your adventure, it will also be necessary to update your equipment and for that it is necessary to recover weapon schematics (parchments), and collect enough materials to craft them. Whether you want to make weapons, accessories and objects of all kinds, you can either buy them at specific merchants in town, or craft them yourself, but the grind is real on that front.

Dynasty Warriors 9 was reviewed using an Xbox One and PC digital download code of the game provided by Tecmo Koei. The PC version was tested on a machine running Windows 10, with an 8GB NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1070 fitted on a 4th Generation Intel i7 4790 3.6Ghz CPU and topped with 16GB of RAM. The game is also available on PlayStation 4 in digital and retail releases. We don’t discuss review scores with publishers or developers prior to the review being published

Dynasty Warriors 9 might have managed to reboot a franchise that has been criticized for so long to not take enough risks, but gets hurt by its unmatched technical upgrade and repetitive gameplay. While the Dynasty Warriors license had not changed since Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires back in 2014, it was finally time for the team over at Omega Force to shake things up, after years of critics pointing out a clear rehash of assets and monotony in the franchise.

[rigelmejo]

Some September 1st Updates

the READING SPEED difference of a novel at my level! I read the first chapter of 撒野 yesterday and this author is at exactly my reading level right now. I hit 0-2 new words each pleco page, which is usually the sweet spot to either guess the word or if I look it up I can pretty quickly adapt to recognizing it in context. Its also the sweet spot where if I only rely on guessing for new word meanings, on a second pass through I can fairly well guess the meaning quickly. 

It was a 32 page chapter in pleco and I read it in 20 minutes. Compared to the 20 pleco page per chapter pingxie fic i just finished (like 124k characters! WOW I read and FINISHED that much!), which was taking 30-40 minutes per chapter (mainly because of number of new vocabulary per chapter being a bit higher). If I’d wanted to speed read saye I could have, I’d have missed some small details but I could have tried if I wanted.

Then I did a second pass later in the day with the audiobook just following along with the text. Realized 1. I knew most words in the audiobook and did not follow as well as i thought - but those first listen throughs without having seen the chapter I did manage to figure out the main character just broke up, just travelled somewhere, ran into a girl and somehow the girls brother showed and the two guys interacted a little and someone was being somewhat helpful, then the main guy met his father trying to ‘pick him up.’ Which is a true but very rough summary of what happens in the first chapter. By reading I could confirm the words I thought were names AS names, figured out WHY the girl was interacting with the main guy and that there were actually two girls in chapter 1, and figure out who helped who and who was the girl’s brother. Also somehow before I looked at the chapter text I never caught that the audiobook mentions a motorcycle despite me knowing that word and it SOUNDING like mota-che/motorche! it sounds like the word and i knew it and didn’t hear it! Then later following the audiobook with the text I realized another issue I had, is I’m not used to listening to soft voices with such faint pronunciations of the final sounds. I’m much more used to deeper crisper pronunciations and being able to rely clearly on initials and finals AS much as tones to recognize the words, whereas this particular audiobook i needed to mainly rely on tones and initials to figure out what word was what - that probably threw me off a bit. It’s probably good for me to get practice listening to such a different voice to what I’m used to. I have definitely learned the deeper the voice, the more I have a far easier time figuring out what’s being said. Also standard accent more like beijing but without a huge amount of ‘er’s just some, and taiwan accent are the easiest for me to hear when i’m not pa

For anyone curious, here is the audiobook for SaYe I’m listening to: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2w27tfjeeaySbMK272NpXwUtsBc-e3YN

Also here’s a chinese audiobook youtube I found: https://www.youtube.com/c/%E6%9C%89%E5%A3%B0%E5%B0%8F%E8%AF%B4%E5%90%AC%E4%B9%A6%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8Cyoushengxiaoshuo/playlists

Which includes The King’s Avatar: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTJaWZoVPdT1ZhIQIKxVci7fVEHr-oX6k

And ErHa: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsxEOGKlBMaFa6CS6Hf5ndy6qTtUL0Au_

Anyway, its a great book right now for reading practice. It’s very much around my level. I will probably stick with this author for a little while and solidify what I know/my base reading level. 

-

IN OTHER NEWS:

I am apparently living proof listening-reading, heavy emphasis on re-listening a TON in the background as you work or type or walk/drive whatever, works for learning new words. 

I re-listened to guardian chapter 1 audiobook at least 20-30 times by now, just a tremendous amount. Chapters 1-10 I’ve listened to at least 5 times by now random chapters at random days, and some probably also 20 times. 

I have listened to these chapters enough, that I can officially follow so much that I know nearly every freaking word I hear, I know it immediately on hearing in at least 3 different audiobooks, and the few ‘less familiar’ words I recognize a second after hearing (like hearing ‘audacious’ or ‘glum’ in english it just takes me a second to re-remember), and the very few still forgotten words/specific details I learn From those words I can actually pick up from the context of listening.

 I hear ‘powei’ and somehow forgot it AGAIN? Oh it means ‘rather’ in this context. ‘anli’ well i always hear ‘anlishuo’ as in ‘people say/generally speaking’ so ‘anli’ in this context must mean ‘generally/generally speaking.’ chuanghu? can’t remember it because i was just typing this JUST now and only hearing a few words from the audiobook in the background - well in context its obviously window, but out of context my brain said window and i just couldn’t remember if it was window or curtain but felt curtain had something more complex than ‘hu’ as the second half - just looked it up and my guess was right, even with no context which i’d have had if i’d been listening better and it had been clear it’s window, it still made me think ‘window’ immediately just hearing the sound. ‘xiang yi ge ren’ sounds like ‘looks like a person’ which is the next phrase i just randomly heard. ‘hua le yao ming’ shouted for their life/in awful terror? or that would be ‘huo’, so maybe ‘streaking toward him to take his life’? would make sense in context of a horror scene - i just looked it up and 划了要命 would be the second one. even IF i heard the wrong line, both of those are pretty close to a good guess in context and hua is the only unknown because without context i can’t place if it was hua or huo. i still confuse the words wu and wo for hold etc, but in context i can tell which one it is (wo is hold a hand, hold a face, etc). 

I’m genuinely at a point where I can just completely follow the plot through at least the first 20 chapters from listening. And for most scenes, follow every detail too including stuff like guo changcheng spending half a year not working at home after he graduated, being so afraid of the phone, da qing being fawning to shen wei when they meet and rubbing against his leg, the specific conversation details when da qing runs across zhao yunlan’s car in chapter 2, what zhao yunlan’s room exactly looks like, etc. Its super cool to be able to follow the audiobook so well I can follow the story and details even when I don’t have time to read! It’s so fun! And it was not very hard!

It took 40 minutes of upfront study where you set time aside to focus: 20 minutes to have a program read the chapter aloud while you either see unknown word definitions pop up (like in Pleco) or look them up with some click dictionary as you listen. 20 minutes to go through and listen to the audiobook as you follow along with the text. Then after that, just play the audiobook chapters you’ve done this with whenever you want, either paying attention like when going to bed soon or walking, or in the background like when cleaning or doing busy work or driving. Since background listening can be done easily whenever all you have to do is remember to click play when you want something to listen to. 

I’m honestly blown away by how much 3 months of studying mainly like this (which is quite fun and only requires me to carve out a small amount of actual study focused time) has improved my listening skills. I can now also listen to the 2ha audiobook okay and follow along (provided its a chapter I’ve read before so I have at least some prior context to help me out) - at least so far as that’s what I’m listening to right now. Basically, I can tell Guardian has both upped my vocabulary significantly and also improved my automatic recognition of many words I half-knew and learned since. 

I recently found a new Guardian audiobook read by a deep voice and its lovely (and utilizes music and echo for effects, its lovely to listen to) I hope the poster keeps updating: https://fm.qq.com/show/rd002ED4aN0mYz2L__

I’ve been listening to it lately.

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Also! Directions for using Pleco Android for screen reader:

1. To get any page bookmarked online: 

Open a page in your mobile web browser you want to read. Click the menu, click share, click Pleco Reader (or ‘more’ or ‘...’ then Pleco Reader).

Go to Clipboard Reader. Now when you click text, dictate text megaphone will be an option.

*Since Clipboard Reader is free, you can do this to read in Pleco and have things spoken aloud with no money spent. (Though I find the Reader tool worth the money and add ons).

2. To have any text ‘dictated aloud’:

Go to Pleco’s menu, Settings, Audio, click ‘use TTS if no recording,’ then for Sentence Audio section area System TTS Setting click Speech Services by Google (you can also experiment by clicking other options I am just stating what worked for me, it didn’t work at first I had to make that my default TTS in my Accessibility-Talkback Settings menu on my main phone first and restart my phone before all this). 

Then click the area right below to mess with speed and sound of the TTS voice. 

(Note, to test if TTS is working you can go to any dictionary entry sentence, click the speaker next to the sentence and see if it plays audio. If it does not, you will get an error message and directions on what to change in your phone settings. That is what initially happened to me: I had to go to phone Settings, Accessibility, Talkback, TTS Engine, TTS Engine voice and settings. Pleco recommended I choose Speech Services by Google, and uninstall then reinstall the Chinese voice. Then restart the phone. That worked for me. An additional note: I have Talkback setting on ‘on’ and just have it in my toolbar to use if desired but am not actively using it. If you turn Talkback setting ‘off’ in the actual Settings area of Accessibility, I am not sure if it will affect Pleco’s ability to dictate). 

3. How to put it together: 

Now go to Clipboard Reader and read the page from the internet you wanted or text you pasted, or go to Document Reader and open the document you wish to read. 

Click a word as a place to start. Now you should see both the loudspeaker (for pronouncing the single word) and the Megaphone next to it to start dictating all text. (If your phone is weird like me, you may need to press the megaphone a couple times before the audio works).

If you wish to change dictation reading speed, simply hold down the megaphone and select the speed desired. 

Now that I’ve figured this out I really want to take pictures of my print book, make a pdf, and listen to all the changes.

(Now I just have to fix my weird dictionary in Idiom app and I’m all set on the new phone!)

---

All I’ve been doing the past august study wise is just reading pingxie fic and finishing, and listening to audiobooks. It’s been a busy time for me ToT

I do think it proved you can be lazy and still make some improvements though: 

1. Reading in Pleco (or click-dictionary tool of your choice): pick something and read a chapter a day (that’s what I did, obviously the easier this is the less time you’ll need, but aim for around 30 minutes a day and reading material closer to your level if you don’t want to read too long)

2. Listening-Reading Method something above your reading level that you enjoy. Should take 40 minutes a couple times a week to several times a week to hours a week, depending on how intense you want to get with it and how much you’re going to alternate/include the reading portion. I did like 1-2 chapters a week so I was only spending 40 minutes to 1.5 hours a week doing this, or 3 hours one week no time another week. This is definitely something where you can do 6-12 hours one month then coast on it for another month just repeating older material’s audio/re-reading sections (which is what I did with guardian, doing 22 chapters then switching to just listening to audio a lot). 

Once you’ve done a little L-R steps 2 and 3 (in either order, whatever works for you - and doing step 1 if you want more context prior to steps 2 and 3), then just make time during your days to play the audiobook chapters you’ve studied. You don’t need to be focusing every single time (although focusing on actually trying to follow the audio the first time you listen without text to aid you will probably speed up your comprehension a lot by giving you a lot of basic-context to help you comprehend more later). Aim to listen whenever you’ve got down time! Or time where you’d play music or some background youtube video or podcast - walks, exercise, drives, when cleaning, when browsing the web goofing off, when working if you have times when you’d listen to music with lyrics or a podcast in the background without issues, times when you don’t need to focus 100% on listening just putting it on to hear in the background). 

That’s all I’ve done for study since May. It takes me about 30 minutes 5 days a week, plus 1-2 hours listening-reading actively a week. So 2.5 hours plus 2 = 4 hours of active study a week. Sometimes more like 8-10 if I got really into reading something or Listening-reading to several chapters. Then after that (very easy to fit into my life 4-10 hours per week of study) I just play the audiobook whenever I have downtime at work (that’s usually 0.5-4 hours where I just let it play because I forget its on while working on spreadsheets, updates, emails, etc, or play the audiobook while messing around on the internet in my free time at home, sometimes I put on music instead), while walking so 15-30 minutes maybe 3 days a week, while driving far so maybe 20 minutes - 2 hours per week. maybe lets say 2 hours*4 days a week (I don’t remember to listen every day) so 8 hours random listening+1.5 hours walking+1 hour driving per week. That’s 11.5 hours listening in the background or paying attention plus lets say 4 hours of active study a week. So 15.5 ‘study’ hours for chinese per week - an average overall of ~2.21 hours of chinese ‘study’ per day. This isn’t counting when I get into weibo and goof off, get into some chinese show with no english subs and just start watching it (I watched 16 episodes of Humans cdrama in August which is ~10.66 hours for a total of at least (15.5*4 weeks = 62 hours + 10.66 hours -> ~72.66 hours spent ‘with chinese’ in August at minimum. 4 weeks*7 days = 28, so over around 28 days or most of august I did 72.66 total hours/28 days -> or ~2.595 hours of chinese per day as an average. So... my guess that I spend at least 1-2 hours on chinese per day as the average was a decent guess. Looks like I’m usually 2 hours to 2.5 hours daily as an overall average. It’s not that hard to get in that much without a ton of time in the day once you get some listening skills built up ToT Deciding to build up my listening skills has been one of the funnest goals in chinese so far.

Notes on Listening Reading Actively - it also doubles as increasing your exposure to listening to your target language, and the more hours the better even if its passive in the background, just more hours adding up toward your mind getting a better ability to parse the sounds of the language is going to help your overall listening comprehension in general. So even if you don’t pay attention much and can’t follow the whole plot and only catch certain scenes, you will be improving at least comprehension of: hearing words you know, hearing colocations and common phrases and recognizing more automatically which will help with speaking/writing indirectly and reading recognition of those things, overall ability to hear things correctly in different combinations and getting used to the common combinations. 

You will be surprised how much more you can pick up of plot and details the 3rd listen compared to the first, the 5th listen, the 10th listen. It’s wild. Like... I’m listening to the 2ha audiobook and even having never read it in chinese, just knowing basic context, the 2nd read through I caught so much more of the plot throughout just because I had forewarning of when scenes change a lot, what audio plays during some parts I recognized in previous listens, and so I have more focus for figuring out the new details I missed. Whereas the first listen, I didn’t always know WHAT the scene context was until I heard a familiar line or description I remembered from the english version of the scene, but on a second listen I now have a better guess at the scene the lines are probably taking place in before and after those lines I recognized in the first listen. And this continues etc each time you re-listen to something. (So yes, that initial context of knowing what you’re listening to with a previous read of its translation or target language transcript will definitely speed up comprehension pick up - but if you just wanna test what your basic listening comprehension to new content is then it works fine just going into new audio with no prior context its just more difficult at first lol until you build an idea of the context from listening).

The original Listening-Reading Method person did like 40+ hours a week, 8 hours most days, no wonder they made fast progress! They often included reading in some form (hence the name) and later translation, so they also were constantly working on listening AND some reading skills AND eventually often some speaking/writing skills. Doing it my way results in mostly listening comprehension of stuff you could already read to a degree, more automaticity in recognition, and for picking up new vocabulary both in listening and reading. I do extra reading on the side with other stuff to get more reading practice in an isolated way (since I’m trying to push my reading speed up above speaking speed). I always try to do it the way the creator originally intended, but I am not able to focus on things for more than 20 minutes at a time, 40 to a couple hours if I take a break every 20 minutes. So doing it 8 hours just doesn’t work out. 

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I’m fairly happy!

I am on plan for my main goals that started this style study plan: 

1. Improving my reading level to get to start being able to extensively read actual danmei novels - we got there! I am at a reading level appropriate for SaYe at 98% comprehension when I checked, and at a bit above 95% comprehension for Guardian! I’m now continuing with that goal while adding on increasing reading Speed in general.

2. Improving listening skills so I have better automatic recognition of partly-known words from reading (working super well so far - I can tell because ability to watch cdramas in only chinese has improved noticeably and gotten much easier), and so I can start following the main plot and key details of audiobooks of things I’ve read before (working great for guardian, starting to work with other audiobooks provided I listen to the chapters a few times or several times if its brand new material I have no context for, however reading level matters and while things I have prior familiarity with are going very well - brand new materials are still quite challenging in that they require multiple listens for the full plot and several listens before I start picking up most non-plot-critical details). 

[rigelmejo]

Updates??? Maybe?? July 2, 2022

My Japanese is like the last post more or less. I tried watching Sailor Moon in Japanese. Since I wanted to try more stuff in only Japanese, no English to help me out. I could follow the overall main idea, some real simple slice of life lines, and sailor moon is thankfully so visual in its storytelling its really easy to follow even if you barely know the words. I've been watching Ranma 1/2 in only Japanese too, but Ranma I already know the plot and characters. I'd say my Japanese level is like... almost where my chinese was 8 months into studying? Ahich for me was like: can start following the Overall Main Idea of shows without subs but most details are a massive struggle unless I look up stuff (but ill pick it up eventually probably), can follow manga without looking stuff up but again it's mainly overall main idea only and details are hard (but i can get some details with word lookup), can start baby step wading into reading actual novels but aside from a line here and there and maybe a vague overall idea of some paragraph main ideas I really need a dictionary lookup to figure out the overall main idea For Sure (and even with word lookup the details are still a struggle).

Audio is perhaps the odd one out... I have been listening to Final Fantasy X in Japanese, and since I have prior context from playing in English and knowing the plot/characters, nearly constantly I know what lines I'm listening to even when I don't know the words and I'm not getting visuals (only listening to audio). I'm honestly surprised I follow the audio of ffx as well as I do. I think particularly for me Listening Reading Method with Japanese text and audio would probably help me a TON... but i don't have the focus or time. If I do ever try an L R Experiment with Japanese I'll let you know. With playing Ryu ga Gotoku Ishin, I also found myself mainly relying on audio when I heard it (over Japanese subs) just because I can listen easier than I can read fast when it comes to Japanese. My audio listening skills are more like where chinese was after 1.5-2 years. So I would say my decision to focus on listening in study a lot with Japanese was a good decision for listening skills.

I am definitely mostly doing a hands off approach with Japanese study these past few months and for the near future - listening to glossika Japanese is the only "structured" study I'm doing and to be honest I consider it comprehensible input repeated exposure rather than the more intensive kind of study grinding. All my other "study" is just: play a game in Japanese, watch something in Japanese, listening to something in Japanese. I've been occasionally reading in Japanese, and during that I do some word lookup which is about the most studying I'm doing (but it's really not much more than maybe 20 words I've looked up this past june).

I am very much trying the approach of "extensive exposure of somewhat comprehensible material (but like only main idea comprehended) and maybe your level will improve". Like the article on Reddit I mentioned of the person who watched 1000 hours of Japanese and got their listening from N5 to N2. I don't know if my results would be as drastic - especially given I'm not clocking 1000 hours for a long while lol - but I'm also a higher starting level than thar person. I could already play video games in japanese that I'd played in English before, I could already read manga for the main idea, so my initial Japanese before attempting to keep learning just by "exposure" was probably higher than that person's. Also, again... I just do not study often so I'm not going to get nearly that amount of hours.

Eventually? I'd like to do the following things with Japanese. Maybe I will get to come back and check off what I've done!

Play Kingdom Hearts 2 entirely in japanese

Play Final Fantasy 6 in Japanese (I own it now!!)

Play Nier Automata in Japanese

Play Yakuza Ishin in japanese

Play any of my old games in japanese (Mario world is probably gonna be easy but it'd still be a lil accomplisment!)

Finish one of the lets plays I'm watching in Japanese (there's a new channel I really like, but I'd also love to find an LP of Devil Summoner Raidou)

Finish Koisenu Futari novel in japanese

Finish reading Any manga volume in Japanese (it would be a cool little accomplishment! And I'm surprised I haven't fucking done this yet...)

Finish reading any novel in Japanese (gonna be funny as hell to me if it's Parasite Eve the first Japanese novel I bought, or Guardian japanese translation which I've already read 2 chapters of)

Do listening reading method Mejo Light Edition. Which would be listening to a Japanese audio drama episode of mdzs or the audio cd for Nier Replicant and just watch with eng subs then again with Japanese subs. Should be easy and only take 2 hours but I just cannot focus ToT

Do listening reading method with Alice in Wonderland (I've already done 1.5 chapters but then I can't focus)

Finish listening to Final Fantasy X condensed audio since apparently it's easy, and it's fun to hear the differences in what they say

Watch a show season in japanese

Whenever I can focus on textbooks, I have two books for learning to read Japanese. I really want to cram ans JUST READ THROUGH THEM. I feel like my reading skills would get SUCH a technical boost, my Kanji pronunciations would improve, and my grammar would get a nice refresher and reinforcing. I think it would push me up significantly in my reading level, and overall japanese level, if I'd just sit down and focus. (But knowing me I may not end up reading these textbooks until I've already read a whole japanese novel).

So yeah. We will see how my japanese does.

In other updates!!! Chinese!!

My reading level in chinese? Quite decent. I'm lazy. That's what it all amounts to. ToT I am officially at a perfectly fine reading level to start just CHUGGING through a lot of the physical novels I own and digital webnovel pages I have opened in my tabs. Chapters take me 20-30 min (4000 characters) which to be honest is probably roughly my English reading speed when I'm sinking in. So it's all just a matter of time at this point, making time to read. I have no more excuses to put off reading these novels except lack of time. I could definitely read Saye now, Guardian now, dmbj now. I honestly predict somehow I'm going to read my can ci pin chinese volumes before I actually read the translation. That's the state I'm in.

I've also been reading manhua, and again it's just TIME in my way. To be fair, time is also holding me back on reading all the novels I'm mid reading in English. Generally just readings been hard. Partly why Japanese gets so much focus lately is I CAN game right now and the yakuza games are having me listen to Japanese nonstop, remind me to listen to other Japanese stuff I've been going through. So yeah.

Chinese reading level? I'm really happy with it right now! It's not perfect but it reminds me of being maybe 9-10. I was an "advanced reader." It reminds me of being like 10 and picking up a huge James Michener novel or Stephen King novel - i could follow the plot fine and appreciate some nuance but definitely wasn't catching All nuance and some really cool literary stuff was going over my head and some details were foggy because I didn't have the vocabulary to grasp them clearly but had a good guess of the rough idea. That's where I'm at when I read stuff "at the level i aim for" which I guess is like 95% comprehension level as far as words per page I know. Guardian and dmbj are about that reading level.

That decent reading level ALSO means I'm probably at the point now where extensive exposure to audiobooks may reap improvements in listening and overall chinese. But I'm just... so lazy. And the instant loss of some comprehension versus my reading level is always a hit to enjoyablility. But I do think now or soon, more extensive listening should be done because I could make genuine improvement JUST doing that. I was watching Hikaru No Go cdrama no subs and I can follow it really well, so I am definitely using chinese subs as a crutch to a degree.

If my japanese level, which is maybe upper beginner or lower intermediate, is good enough to learn from doing extensively for the most part? Then my chinese DEFINITELY is and I'm just lazy when it comes to that challenge lol. Where japanese is more of a mental drain and challenge TO focus and try to learn new things through exposure, my chinese levels okay enough I'm pretty much guaranteed to always follow the main idea and half the details fine. So it's a lot less challenging to just figure out a few new details/words each time I do it. But again... that laziness lol

For chinese sometime soon I'd like to:

Finish reading my poyun manhua volume at home

Rewatch hikaru no go chinese drama adaptation no subs

READ GUARDIAN PLEASE TOT

finish the pingxie fic I'm 1/3 through rereading

Listen to and finish listening to one of the dang audiobooks I'm listening to

Finish reading any of my manhua volumes at home

Read the new dmbj village novel when I get it in mail

Finish reading a volume of ANY chinese novel.

[rigelmejo]

I’ve talked about listening reading method before. And i’m bringing it up again lol! for 2 reasons - first, i found a very nice practical article on it today (skip to the LAST section to just click this ToT), and second because i’m finally in the Mood to l-r Guardian again so i’m gonna see how many chapters i can do today.

A quick summary - what is the listening reading method?

It’s primary goal: acquire vocabulary and grammar over time, also improve listening comprehension. 

You may also improve reading comprehension to an extent, but not necessarily - reading comprehension is highly dependent on how much you read the text in your target language (like if you have a parallel text and look at the target language often), if you do step 2 AGAIN after step 3, etc. Since using the text IN the target language is optional, your reading comprehension improvement is also optional.

*I personally think the activities that help reading comprehension most (that are adjacent to the activities in l-r method) are: doing step 2 AFTER step 3, or simply reading the target language text after either step 1 or step 3 (so reading the target language text after you’ve just seen the english text and have context). I often read a translation, then go and read the chinese version a few hours after, and my ability to pick up new words/follow along is MUCH easier than if i’d just read the chinese with no context. It should be noted either of these activities can be done on their own, so again its more ‘listening reading method’ adjacent rather than actually part of the method. The method is primarily listening comprehension.

What you do:

3 steps, and all of them are optional except for step 3. I do however recommend steps 1 and 2 if you have never read the novel you use before. Or if you’re new to studying the language and aren’t used to the sound of it/word boundaries yet. You will need: a novel translated into a language you understand, that same novel in your target language, audiobook in the target language. The novel can be a parallel text if you’re lucky enough to find a combined text.  

Notes: you will have a much easier time if the audiobook MATCHES the text! Especially matches the paragraphs (no paragraphs omitted in the audiobook) and ends chapters in the same places the text ends chapters. LOTS of cnovels have audiobooks which will omit paragraphs, or end audio ‘chapters’ in random places... this requires you to focus a lot harder on keeping the audio and text aligned. Its still useable, but you will feel way less exhausted if you can just find audio that reasonably matches the text (at LEAST that matches each paragraph without cutting anything... you can mark when it ends yourself if the chapter ends aren’t the same, but suddenly missing paragraphs sucks).

Step 1: (optional) read the novel in a language you understand (for me that’s english). This step is so you have context/familiarity. If you use a novel you already know/love, skip this. This can be skipped period, but if its a new novel to you then you may find step 3 more difficult.

Step 2: (optional) listen to the target language audio while following along with the target language text. Your goal is primarily to get familiar with the sounds of the language, and word boundaries. Once you are comfortable with following along to this speed of speaking, and recognizing word and phrase boundaries, you can stop doing this step. At this step learning new words is not necessary - although if you’re an intermediate learner you MAY pick up some new words and if that happens feel free to KEEP doing this step as long as its helpful. (Alternatively - you can continue doing this step, put it after step 3 at that point, and use it to match words you recently learned the SOUND of in step 3 and then match them to the spelling/hanzi/kana etc with the help of the target language text).

 Step 3: (mandatory) listen to the target language audio while following along with the translation in a language you fully understand. So basically, listening to the novel target language audiobook with a translated transcript. It is important at this step to focus ON the audio. You are attempting to comprehend the audio. You look at the english (or whatever language you comprehend) text to KEEP your place in the audio. You look at the text to lookup any unknown words/phrases etc that you hear. You are not reading the english text with the audio in the background. You need to pay attention TO the audio. You are using the english text to fill in the gaps of your understanding - to look up meanings in real time, and hopefully hear new words+see their meanings constantly enough that you start picking up new words. Your english text is to ensure you can look up any part of a sentence you don’t understand, that you can follow along with the meaning of the audiobook as you listen. Over time, you will pick up more and more. 

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You can continue to do this for hundreds of hours. Get through a novel completely - you may wish to do the same novel again 2-3 times, until there’s no more that you are picking up from it. Or you might chose to move onto another novel. There’s no major drawback i can see to jumping between novels either - if you’d like to just do segments of multiple. However, since authors usually use their own preferred vocabulary, you will most likely have MORE vocabulary/phrase repetition if you stick with one author for a few dozen hours - and the repetition will help you really learn it. With basic vocabulary, any text will likely give you enough repetition to learn them. But if you want to learn genre specific words, or author specific words, or just words used less often... sticking to one novel for a WHILE will likely give you more repetition to pick them up. (Just like intensively or extensively reading ONE novel all the way through will help you pick up a lot more author specific words, versus reading only a few chapters before moving onto a new author).

Once you can listen to the audiobook without the text, and understand it and follow along well, you may want to move onto another novel. If you want to test yourself - pick another novel of the same difficulty or slightly easier, listen to that audiobook on its own, and if you can understand it fine without any text to look up the unknown parts, then you’ve reached a ‘natural listening’ stage. The creator of this method says this usually took them a few novels before they’d get to this point. I haven’t lol so i’ll let you know if i do. I’m still at the ‘can do step 3 basically as long as it keeps benefiting me.’ 

So at the minimum, the process is - be familiar with the text already (step 1 if you need it), be familiar with the sounds of the language/listening to it spoken (step 2 if you need it), then listen to the target language audiobook while following along with a translation in a language you fully understand. Focusing on the audio and attempting to understand as much as possible, using the text as reference to help you. As you follow along, you can use that translation to learn new words/phrases, get an understanding of the grammar you hear, and continue picking things up until eventually you can understand the audiobook on its own. 

*It should be noted, the original creator of this method would do L-R for 6-10 hours a day, and would do a novel for 50-100 hours. They would intensively study. They aimed to use longer novels as that gave them more study material/study hours (if you’re learning chinese we have ample long novels to pick). So expect noticeable progress in 20 hours, 50 hours, etc. Not in 2. Study in general is like this anyway - we don’t see noticeable language learning progress doing anything in like 2 hours pretty much. But its just something to keep in mind - even if you do L-R a novel intensively and finish one within a couple weeks or a month, you should still expect that it will take a lot of hours. Look at how long the audiobook is, and then know if you do step 1 and 2 it will take 2 or 3 times as long as that audiobook is. 

Guardian is 106 chapters (before the extras), with roughly 20 minute audio files per chapter of audiobook - so it will take 2120 minutes, or 35.33 hours to do step 3 (assuming I don’t lose my spot in the text). Step 2 will also take 35.33 hours in a best case scenario. Step 1 will probably take me 17 hours on a BEST case scenario if I read at my fastest, which I might not. So to finish L-R Guardian it will take me 87.66 hours... or 52.33 hours if i just completely skip step 2 (since i already can hear word boundaries/have some basic listening comprehension). So... Listening Reading method is time consuming. A benefit might be - you get to do study hours spent reading/experiencing a cool audiobook, and getting to engage with the original novel and translation. If you were going to do that in your free time in some way anyway, then using it to study can be fun. And unlike trying to get 50 hours of another study method in, if you are a serious reader/you can keep your attention focused? You could probably get these 50 hours done within couple weeks or a month - just like how when you get interested in a novel you can read it in a few days/weeks. Which is definitely a sweet thing if you can get focused on L-R that much... definitely more hours spent studying per month compared to when i intensively read (i spend maybe 12 hours intensively reading a month when i’m reading a lot).

The person who initially did Listening Reading Method would do 100-200 hours, would go through novels 2-3 times then move onto another, and would do it intensively in the span of weeks and a few months. They made very fast improvements - but hours spent wise, it makes a lot of sense. Its a ‘fast’ way to learn a lot, in the sense you can do it intensively in a short period of days/weeks. But the hours spent is still gonna be a LOT. 

And you can also... just be lazy. I’m lazy. ToT You can also just do L-R as desired. I maybe do it once or twice a week. Or maybe 4 chapters every couple weeks lol. I certainly don’t do it intensively over a consistent period. (That said, i think you will probably pick up more things, more Quickly, if you study daily with this method using the same novel - since repetition helps you remember things and pick them up). I’ve done maybe 12 hours of listening reading overall, using a few different novels (so no significant chunk of any of them). I already noticed immediate benefit from doing it. If you’re a mid-beginner+, and already know words through reading? Simply doing the L-R activity helps with listening comprehension skills immediately. While I pick up new words/phrases, its definitely the slower thing I notice. The quickest thing I notice improvement in, is how much BETTER I know all the words I ‘kind of’ knew before from reading alone. Now I have much better instant listening recognition of words, have much better instinctive idea of how ‘phrases’ should sound in listening when people actually speak - the way they flow, how to immediately recognize them. That’s improved my overall listening comprehension to audiobooks, shows, people speaking. Also its improved my reading comprehension - I can now zoom through reading phrases because I recognize them as full chunks, I can now zoom ‘internally sound out what i’m reading’ faster and that causes me to stumble less when I’m reading to myself. All these benefits i noticed as early as like 6 hours into L-R. I also do notice myself picking up a few new words, but I imagine that will happen more once I am done ‘fully’ picking up words I already half knew. I also, again, think if I L-R more regularly, I would notice myself picking up completely new things at a faster rate (because they’d quickly also become ‘partly learned from that initial exposure’ then reinforced over and over). Anyway my point is - if you already have SOME comprehension of the language you’re studying, L-R can within a short amount of time help you improve your listening comprehension of things you already ‘know’ or ‘partly know.’ While picking up new stuff will also happen, I do think that will take longer (and I think beginners are most likely to notice rapid ‘completely new stuff’ pick up since they don’t have material ‘half learned’ bouncing around like I do lol).

This is the original Listening Reading Method article which is long and so, I understand if you just skim it lol: http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/!%20L-R%20the%20most%20important%20passages.htm

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Like I said, you can do a lot of variations on it lol. Doing step 2 alone and TRYING to learn word meanings could be very useful if you’re already an intermediate learner and just need to learn Spellings of words you know by sound, or you can understand the meaning of words in context (so you don’t need another language translation to know the meaning of a word). Doing step 2 After step 3 i think is pretty beneficial if you WANT to also work on reading comprehension for the new words/things you learn. (Or just reading the text in the target language, after doing step 3 since you will have the context/meaning fresh in your mind).

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Finally, this is the article I read on using the Listening Reading Method for languages very unfamiliar to you. I find a lot of its explanations very to the point and clear: http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/!L-R/lr_for_grasshoppers.html

[rigelmejo]

this is gonna be just a mash of things this article made me think about - “why chinese is so damn hard”

In it, they wrote that:  At the end of three years of learning Chinese, I hadn't yet read a single complete novel.

Ok so. To be fair to them, one of the books they tried reading for pleasure (as in without a dictionary) was The Dream of the Red Chamber after 6 years of study. Which is like reading Shakespeare - its literary, its older, its fair if that is difficult especially for pleasure. (As in english speaking countries, we’ve been in school 9+ years before we’re asked to read Shakespeare and other classical type literary works).  

But back to focusing on the “end of three years” thing. 

When I started learning chinese, I was basically motivated by a person who wrote an article about how they looked at a little grammar, some radicals explanations, then brute forced 2000 common words memrise decks, then started reading with a click dictionary for pleasure. And it worked for them! And so, being me and very curious to ‘test’ if things work: I wanted to try it too. I did more prep work, more extra hanzi work than that article mentioned. And I don’t think it felt pleasurable with a click dictionary (I used pleco) for a while - but it was doable with a click-dictionary at that point so I do think that person who wrote the article was pretty honest about the progress they’d made. For me, and I think them if I remember correctly, that was around 8 months to start reading with a click dictionary. 

I read another article back in the middle of this, by Timo (who made Timo’s All in One Chinese anki deck), where he said he’d learned enough to pass HSK 4 in somewhere between 6 months to a year (I can’t remember exactly how long but it was a year or less). I think I covered all the HSK 4 words in memrise by 10 months, and probably felt comfortable with most of them around 14 months? And Now its been almost 2 years and if I were to take an HSK test that’s probably the one that I would pass with some study (I imagine I could try an HSK 5 one with some prep beforehand maybe?). HSK 4 is what I “aimed for” since I’d also read articles around that time of people saying that’s about when simple webnovels got “doable with a click dictionary” and when learning words FROM what you read started helping reading percent comprehension more than HSK. Which is a statement I agree with - I learned vocabulary mainly from reading after that point, and as a result it has definitely improved my reading comprehension and vocabulary (like it made Xiao Wang Zi pretty readable without dictionary etc, Zhen Hun is now readable without a dictionary, Daomubiji is), but these words I’ve picked up only matched maybe 50-70% with HSK 5-6 words (which is why I’d need to prep if I wanted to take an HSK 5 test probably).

So. I do think: if you WANT to read, if your GOAL is to read chinese novels? That is doable in 3 years. Certainly doable in 6. Especially if you are willing to study, and to read a LOT. 

General opinions I’ve found surrounding the topic of reading in Chinese include: reading through several books (10,000 pages) will help reading speed/ease, the more you read the easier (and faster) it gets. The more words you know, the easier it gets (WORDS not hanzi, and words generally being 5,000-15,000 for ease-feeling depending on your own tolerance for ambiguity). So basically: yes it will be super slow going at first, YES the speed will improve, yes you don’t need to dread not being able to pick up a book until X years into studying. I’ve seen people who started reading after 8 months (the guy who used a click dictionary who inspired me), or people that started after 1-3 years (me at around 1 year, a lot of people around HSK 4-6, a lot of people once they’ve learned 2k hanzi or 2k-5k words etc). 

I personally noticed a page used to take me 30 minutes... then 20... then 15... then 5... now a bit under 5 minutes (and ‘easier’ books less time). So reading speed will eventually get better. Mine still has some improvements that need to be reached eventually lol. I can say at about 1500 hanzi reading and picking up hanzi IN reading (provided you have an audiobook or click-dictionary with audio to hear the hanzi sound) seemed to start working pretty well. So I do think 2000 hanzi is actually a fair estimate of ‘reading will get doable without a dictionary by then.’ I may be around 2000 hanzi known now, and most of the time the hanzi I see are either brand new words (which I SHOULD learn) or part of descriptions/similar words to things I know and I can guess (and with audio also learn them). Hanzi have gotten easier to guess now, to remember, to make connections with.

My point is just that if you want to read - read early, read often, you do not need to be afraid it’s impossible. 

There are people who got into reading way faster than me, people who did much slower. And also tolerance of ambiguity is a big deal - I do think chinese requires more tolerance of ambiguity when making the transition to reading native content (versus learner materials and graded readers) since there’s unknown hanzi you won’t be able to avoid. I’ve got a pretty high tolerance, but yeah there might be ‘slogging’ for a while depending on where your tolerance level is. If you can comprehend the ‘overall main idea’ of paragraphs, sentences? You can understand it enough to learn from it (though how ‘draining’ it will feel will depend on difficulty of the reading and your own tolerance for ambiguity). I saw one translator estimate 3-4 years to read webnovels for pleasure (so no dictionary necessary) and I think that’s a pretty fair estimate (if you’re studying regularly, trying to practice reading with graded readers and click-dictionaries). I’m at almost 2 years and some webnovels I can read for pleasure without a dictionary, many feel better with one but somewhat doable without one, and some I slog through even with a dictionary. I think 3-4 years is a pretty good estimate if you’re studying regularly. 

My other main thought is just... oh man. Reading that someone did not complete their first chinese novel in 3 years MAKES me want to finish a chinese novel before August (that’s my 2 year mark -3-)! I mean technically I finished Xiao Wangzi and a Xiao Mao book but those are both for children and quite short. But yeah nothing motivates me like a challenge to see if something is doable or not...

Somewhat related to this, but I got a new version of Zhen Hun recently (the traditional character version because the covers are SO freaking lovely). And it seems to match up to the webnovel chapters?? So unlike my simplified copy, this one doesn’t have extra scenes and changed scenes and added details in each chapter. I only skimmed (and its chapters are broken up differently than the webnovel which is pretty normal) so I’m not sure if my traditional version has the extras or Shen San extra (my simplified copy does). It does not have the Kunlun prologue my simplified copy has. But, since this traditional copy matches up to the webnovel pretty close (just a few wording changes like next/then/after etc), I could read it very easy! It’s my first time reading traditional chinese in longer novel form since MoDu or The MDZS, so its cool seeing my progress from 6 months in to now. 

[rigelmejo]

march 3/15/2021

im trying to read through tae kim’s grammar guide right now because i’m officially further in the nukemarine LLJ  memrise decks (there’s tae kim grammar guide sections in there) than i am in actually reading the grammar guide. And obviously these example sentences in the memrise deck would teach me more if i CLEARLY understood why they’re like how they are. which i... need to read the grammar guide section to understand lol.

my goal rn with japanese is? to get further in the nukemarine LLJ decks than i did last time. I’ve already mildly accomplished that (have done officially MORE of the tae kim section than before, have NOT redone the 190 common words i did last time i did this though). there are about 400 more cards in this tae kim section (LLJ 4) and then 1000ish cards in the common word section (LLJ 5). I would love to get them done. 

it would be sweet if i could get them done before April 22?/24? whenever Nier Replicant comes out because then I could play that baby in english and japanese! Then Nier Automata! ToT The Entire thing that kicked me back into wanting to study japanese was my old love for certain video games and desperately wanting to know what their stories/characters are like before translation/localization. So it would be cool if I could play them a little ;-; or at least check out lets plays. 

(which, checking out the kh2 lets play has been going pretty well so far... also that part where namine says “we aren’t meant to exist” and roxas says “how could you say such a thing? even if it were true” he says in japanese like “thats brutal/harsh to say. even if its true.” ...great to know that line is equally raw and heartbreaking in japanese lol. KH2′s localization did real good on like equal vibe to original just like ‘less nuanced’ if that makes sense. also thanks to the chinese hanzi i know now watching the KH2 lets play means i can figure out a lot of noun’s writing even though i don’t catch the pronunciation... also i’m catching a lot of words that mean like ‘beautiful/good’ as in like ‘great move’ and ‘dang’ lol.)

i had to stop myself from redoing the chinese flashcards i’ve done in the past! because i get ‘into a zone’ lol. And i really don’t need to waste time redoing those 2000 cards. i also needed to stop myself from doing the hsk 5-6 cards. because realistically? i know half of them, i should just set a lot to ‘ignore’ on the computer but im too lazy, and i’m learning a lot of vocab from reading right now. i don’t need hsk words to pass any test. The words i’m learning right now in reading are a lot more applicable to the actual shows i watch/things i listen to/things i read. its more useful to me to keep reading. and also to not sidetrack my japanese lol. i have read... 39 chapters this month... this month is only half over! hanshe is truly motivating ToT it also helps the story CONSTANTLY ends on cliffhangers so i keep clicking next chapter. who knows, maybe hanshe will help me kick up my reading speed. it already shaved off 10 minutes per 20 pages - now my 20 pages are down to 30 minutes to read, which is better than a few months ago. hanshe has 155 chapters so i HOPE it speeds up my reading lol.

hanshe is increasing my vocab though, its definitely noticeable over time. and hanshe has really good repetition of vocab which helps with learning and later the payoff means i never have to look up the word in future once its learned while it remains useful to me and i keep being reminded of it. after i get bored of hanshe OR i finish it, whichever comes first, its either back to a priest novel or into another pingxie fanfic written by hanshe’s author. The author did one fanfic that’s only 33 chapters so that would be NICE to do after this one lol ToT

summary of what’s turned out to be my studying methods this month:

Japanese:

reading through grammar guides (the one yue-muffin made and tae kim’s). so just grammar explanation reading.

doing nukemarine LLJ decks (in the ACTUAL order they are in the deck to completion - last time i did like 3 per time and never finished any lol. this is bolded because it’s the primary activity i’m prioritizing). so SRS flashcards. it’s working well right now because i can just put this activity in anytime i have downtime, like when i pause shows (since we know me i gotta take a break from a show every 20 minutes lol). i am bafflingly in a flashcard mood and i’m trying to take advantage of it while i got it. 

*when i feel like it: watching kh2 lets play. so some immersion where i look up words. (and when Nier Replicant remaster releases next month I’m likely to at least a tiny bit try to play it in japanese ToT lol we’ll see)

so grammar reading, srs flashcards covering some grammar/listening/reading/vocab, and some optional immersion.

(a note: i gave up on the japaneseaudiolessons for now because i got bored. its a great resource! i just don’t feel like it right now. and from an efficiency perspective, nukemarine LLJ decks cover vocab, grammar, audio, reading - so I don’t need another resource for that right now).

Chinese:

reading through hanshe. so immersion reading, intensive reading looking up unknown words. (unknown words are happening less so its getting less ‘intense’ lol)

listening to Chinese Spoonfed Audio. so listening to audio flashcards. for building up listening comprehension/repetition to pick up some more common words. (i’ve been doing this during daily walks making it much easier for me to consistently do, doing it mainly to supplement the Reading Heavy study i’m doing, i can drop this and pick it up later if i want since its mostly easy background listening)

*I am slowly rereading the grammar guide on www.chinese-grammar.com for explicit grammar clarification. but this is not a high priority, since I sort of implicitly understand a lot of this and i’m not working on fixing production mistakes yet. i just... miss knowing wtf is going on in the grammar lol.

*when i feel like it: Listening Reading The Glass Maiden/Love and Redemption Novel. I’ve done 2-3 hours of it this past week, but i don’t know when or if I’ll just stop. Thankfully l-r is beneficial somewhat even if i switch up books later. i WANT to L-R you have no idea (to Silent Reading and Guardian REALLY badly lol). But its so time intensive, and requires a lot of focus, and i have to really plan to do it for an hour at a time usually. I am so bad at doing stuff for that long consistently. I was in the mood earlier this week! ToT 

*when i feel like it: watching chinese shows raw. I was super in the mood this month because Word of Honor came out, and Killer and Healer came out, and Rattan came out, and I didn’t want to wait for subs. As a result I watched a LOT of raw episodes this month. However, english subs have caught up and since I’m lazy I’m inclined to just watch the subs - especially since youku ITSELF just put english subs on their most-ahead viewing schedule version of the eps on youku vip. so guess who’s buying youuku vip today? -3-)/ That said... even if I stop for a while, if Rattan subs move too slow I’ll probably watch those raw. And as SOON as 2ha’s drama Immortality drops I am highly likely to watch the raws for that since I likely won’t be able to wait. Watching shows is pretty highly dependent on how much I want to watch something and if subs take a while lol. 

so reading, and listening. and a little listening-reading method too. mainly just working on reading, listening, vocab acquisition. chinese is going good - for a few months now i’ve just had the plan ‘read often while looking up unknown words, and add some listening study activity when i have time.’ It’s simple, and its been working well.  later on down the road i’ll need some explicit grammar clarification again, but this is bare bones enough of a study plan at the moment. i’m clearly picking up words and phrases and hanzi at a reasonable pace. its not the Fastest obviously, but it is causing improvement over time and since i’m enjoying it i see no reason to change it up.

ending things

...who knows WHY i am so well focused this month with so much energy... tbh... i track how many chapters i read a month/audio i listen to/show episodes i watch etc, and this month is like as much as 3 other of my usual months combined. also my japanese has been basically ‘dabbling only’ prior to this month.

 although... maybe in part its how i’ve gotten better at reading hanshe? Reading being easier certainly motivates me TO read more. And watching shows was MUCH easier this month (still not ‘easy’ but following the main plot is) which definitely makes me Want to watch more. Also i am... unbelievably motivated by a challenge. I think i got it in my head that i ‘really want to do more of Nukemarine’s LLJ courses and see how much i understand after them’ and now... i really want them DONE. so maybe the current things motivating me will hold out for a while. 

(On the listening-reading front meanwhile, that activity takes SO much concentration its hard to do if i’m tired, BUT i have so many TRANSLATED novels i want to read recently and honestly its fun hearing the chinese narration and audiobook actors so like... i very much Want to do l-r so i can hear them as i read the translation... immovable object of me tired versus how much i’m interested in them lol ToT).

also thank u thank u @a-whump-muffin for sending me those lets plays because honestly it got me so excited again and its so cool to see them!!! <3 <3 and its so much easier to watch them versus committing to playing a whole game myself just yet ToT 

[rigelmejo]

January Goals Update and Notes

Chapters I studied with Listening-Reading Method: Notes lol:

i do not control wtf motivates me. perhaps it literally just is i have to get really attached to a book.

anyway, february is here. i am thinking i may just start listen-reading to Guardian this month. I know I’ve been debating whether to finish Tian Ya Ke first before I started guardian, or do both at the same time. I am leaning toward starting Guardian, sooner rather than later. Even though it’s still me ‘not finishing one thing before starting the next.’

In the end, any studying is better than no studying. And I haven’t been motivated to read chinese lately. However, I have been motivated to read english - and listening-reading will be 1/3 english reading which may help push me to keep progressing. And the 1/3 chinese reading portion is more passive, since I follow along with the audio, so I can have a break from the dictionary for a while. Also... why did I initially start learning Chinese? To read Guardian. To read it in chinese, and english translation. If I’m thinking about my most prioritized goals, this task is more directly in line with what I want to accomplish than finishing reading Tian Ya Ke. Although, both ARE related. 

Also, I think anything I learn from listening-reading to Guardian, will improve my reading/listening skills when moving onto any other priest novel. So it won’t be a detriment, it will only make going back to Tian Ya Ke easier afterward - since I will know more words, and recognize them in listening better (and ideally, pick up some words visually in reading better). So I think... if I do get motivated to start listening-reading to Guardian this month, then I’m just going to start doing it.

A note about Tian Ya Ke and difficulty: I am still noticing improvement. I am getting to the point where 1 page has a handful of unknown words at most, usually only 1-3 getting in the way of me easily following the plot. I am noticing I’m getting better at guessing what an unknown word is supposed to mean, guessing what the idioms that seem vaguely familiar mean (and remembering at least some of the words in them). Reading Tian Ya Ke has gotten much closer to reading Han She in terms of ease. I think I’m running into a similar number of unknown words now. I haven’t measured yet if the chapters are taking me under 30 minutes to read yet. Mainly because lately I can’t get myself to read more than 5-10 pages in short bursts at a time. So I’m not sure if reading speed has improved. But I can say that my reading recognition for Tian Ya Ke is currently better than my listening comprehension. I’ve been scanning the pages I read lately pretty fast as I read, guessing most words fine, and then just double checking their pronunciation/definition by clicking them for audio afterwards. Its currently the checking for precise sound/meaning that’s slowing down my reading of Tian Ya Ke. If I were reading it extensively, only looking up words for crucial meaning clarification, I would probably be reading it decently faster. 

On a general goals note: I am still for some reason managing to focus easily on reading english books, which is not that usual for me (usually I can read 20-40 pages in a book, then can’t read more than 10 pages an hour or slower and eventually drop the book). So I’m going to keep taking advantage of this ability to focus while I’ve got the chance. It’s been really nice to finally start getting through more of my books. Right now about half are mental health related books (which I’ve been meaning to read for ages), and fiction (mostly historical romances as I’m trying to find an author that Clicks well with me lol). I’ve read 5 so far, with 2 non-fiction books in progress and 1 fiction in progress. That is a LOT in one month for me, each book being 200-500 pages. Lets say 350 pages average, I’ve read over 1750 pages so far this year in January. Yes, that might only be the same as 2 ‘big’ books... but in my defense, non-fiction is soooo much harder to focus on (like i said, i get about 10-20 pages read in an hour of non-fiction even now that i’m focusing -o- ), and I just have not managed to read anything considerable in a while. So... while I still have long term language goals, I’m not going to be upset if they end up getting sidelined again this month. Reading more is something I’m enjoying getting back into, and I truly have so many books to finally read... so I’m glad I’m doing it now. 

Things accomplished in January:

Chinese novel chapters read in January: 8 (I’m on Tian Ya Ke chapter 27, page 10. I’m around 33% through the novel. I read around half as many chapters this past month compared to December... and honestly like 4 of these chapters I remember reading one Saturday that I managed to focus. I just wasn’t in the mood to intensively read very much in December).

Chapters I studied with Listening-Reading Method: 2 (Wow that’s not much... both were Tian Ya Ke chapters. Doing both intensive reading AND listening-reading to a single chapter really burns me out. Again, I just wasn’t in a reading mood, so I mostly skipped l-r to speed up how long chapters took to read).

Japanese Audio listened to: 14 (I was listening through Quicksleur - which is pimsleur but with the silences cut out, there are 3 sections, 30 audio files in each section. I completed 14 audio files in section 1. I’ve been listening to Quicksleur to try and refresh the japanese I used to know. Is it working? Yeah, I’m remembering a fair bit of what I used to know. I definitely think re-reading Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide or Japanese in 30 Hours would help reaffirm the grammar I used to know - but I haven’t been motivated to read grammar books. I was listening to quicksleur while playing video games, and that worked well as a low effort way to include listening. I will probably just keep listening to quicksleur, then change my audio to japanese and see what vocab I can refresh. Then maybe in a few months, once quicksleur is completed, I may move into using Japanese Audio Lessons and my actual grammar books. At the moment, realistically, I have 0 time for my grammar books. And I want to focus on audio primarily anyway for now - I do NOT want my kanji/spelling knowledge of japanese to affect my chinese reading skills right now. And I know, having tried, that for me they definitely do affect each other - I’ll see kanji and the pinyin pronunciation will jump in my head, or I’ll know a word in japanese and see it in a chinese novel and have to remind myself its a new word there. This mix up happened a lot when I first started studying Chinese - as I’d just come off of studying Japanese for 2.5 years. Which was very weird, it made learning chinese words harder, but the more chinese i learned the easier manga got to Read for a while. Anyway now that I’m refreshing my japanese, even Without seeing kanji on purpose - when I see them in my chinese reading i’m re-remembering the japanese pronunciation and word that hanzi also goes to. Which is already a bit awkward. So I don’t really want to add kanji included study on purpose for a while. I’ll just keep trying this audio focus for now... with the added benefit its easy to include, and doesn’t have to compete for my energy level I have to make myself read. I am well aware I’ll need to go to my long term, more well rounded, japanese study plan later on. But for now this is fine).

Chinese Spoonfed Audio: 0 

Manhua chapters read: 0

Chinese shows watched: 1 (Watched anti fraud league ep 1 in chinese, and again I think some small videos and partial eps of other shows. I haven’t watched many shows period this past month though, so I’m not surprised this is low. 

Personal goals met:

Personal books read: 5 (3 non-fiction , 2 fiction novels, 2 non-fiction in progress, 1 fiction in progress. This is really where my energy has been happy to focus on this past January. The non-fiction I’m particularly happy with as its a lot of mental health books I’ve been meaning to read for ages, and some of them I really think have helped me to cope with my panic attacks better. Lately my panic attacks have been less overwhelming, to a degree I think because my inner thoughts during them are having an easier time getting back to self-soothing patterns so I can calm down, and I’m more willing to openly express I’m feeling so bad which I think is helping me process the emotions faster, which helps them end sooner. I read a few as mentioned, although I literally cannot recommend complex ptsd by pete walker if the subject material is relevant to you. That book definitely helped the most, and the books he recommended within it are what I’m reading through now. The book was compassionate, informative, very supportive and encouraging of the recovery journey and its steps, and had a ton of very helpful exercises that can be put to practical use).  

Continued to get my stomach to not hurt, also got it to work better without medicine. Avoiding very processed carbs - mainly white breads like biscuits, pizza, pie crust, cinamon rolls that come in those cans - has kept my bloating down and the pain down. Eating apples again every day with coffee/tea is helping, both with not needing my medicine, and with foods not hurting me/not bloating me so much. So I guess I have to keep eating apples every single day -o-. I ate pizza several times this past month (with my lactose medicine) and I only bloated a little, it did not hurt, which was GREAT. Eating biscuits from a can still hurt though - happily the bloating only happened a little, but the pain sucks, and definitely is caused by those kinds of carbs specifically. Other then minimizing dairy and that specific carb type, my stomach’s been tolerating other carbs pretty well. I’ve kept my daily bloating low even with some foods that ‘could hurt’ per day, to 1-2 lbs. Which is great. The worst I’ve bloated this month was by 4 lbs (biscuits), which hurt a bit but thankfully subsided after a day, and that is a big improvement over the 7-10 lb bloating I’d get in a single day from one ‘less tolerated’ food choice. I’m very happy I haven’t had to take my medicine daily, hopefully I’m on the way to getting my stomach as happy as it was this summer. 

Goals for February: 

Listen-Read Method Guardian, until I’ve gotten through the entire novel. I will probably start this in February, not sure yet if it will be postponed. This, and goal 2, are the main priorities for chinese and I don’t mind which one happens as long as I do some of either of these goals.

Continue reading Tian Ya Ke. Work on reading through my first complete novel in chinese. This goal has not changed, though I predict it may be postponed as I’m not sure how much time I will dedicate to it in February.

Optional. Audios. Keep listening to Japanese Quicksleur when there’s down time (like playing games), and Chinese Spoonfed audio if I feel like it. 

Personal. Keep reading while I’ve got the motivation to. I am really enjoying getting through all these books I’ve wanted to read for so long. 

So same chinese goals as last month - and I imagine these goals will remain the same into the spring and possibly as summer starts. For japanese, just continuing to progress to refresh my memory is all I am planning at the moment. 

And a note to myself: it is shocking how motivating making a little line item in my notes saying “Personal books read:” managed to be. I added that to my to-do list in the middle of January, and since then have read a TON. So just as it motivates me to read chinese chapters, it looks like that particular motivator can work for more things.

[rigelmejo]

random notes about drawbacks/positives of mia:

My biggest incompatibility with the massive immersion approach (and in general a lot of good modern study methods) is I hate flashcards. It’s not that I dislike them as a concept - I am just super bad at concentrating on them. I am NOT good at doing the following: focusing on small bits of information, studying for short periods but Regularly, Reviewing Regularly, and sometimes I just genuinely can’t retain small concentrated reading sentences to the point it takes me 10 MINUTES a flashcard in order to understand/study it. As you can imagine, that last part is NOT efficient, and ends up making flashcards even slower for me as a study method then they’re ever meant to be. I can’t control when I’m unable to figure out/concentrate on small bits of information, so some months flashcards work as intended for me (I can review 10-20 in 10 minutes), but other months suddenly 10 flashcards takes me an hour. So I am not good at sticking to flashcards consistently - once the hard months hit, I don’t keep up with reviews, because they suddenly take way more time then they ‘should.’ However, when I can focus I try to make up the difference - and do 20-100 cards a day while I have the ability to do flashcards at a regular pace. On the upside, I’m proof you can do the SRS flashcard reviews, in a very chaotic way, and still get benefits. How I’ve done flashcards: cram 300-1000 in a couple weeks to a month, including whatever reviews I need. 2nd month - review if I can still focus, and do a few new cards (like 5-15 a day at most). By the time I can’t focus, most words are relatively-known and I only would need to review them once a week or every few weeks - if I COULD focus on reviews. However, I only actually review once a month or less at this point - and I’ll only review 20ish cards usually in that rare instance, unless I have a good day. I will not usually review the majority of those cards until my next burst of can-focus-on-flashcards usually in 2-3 more months. I have done all my flashcards THIS INCONSISTENTLY, and I’ve still retained a lot of what I studied. What I think helps: immersing in other content when you can’t do flashcards, so that you’re often still being exposed to words you studied (so they’re easier to not forget even though you stopped doing flashcards). So yeah... inconsistent flashcards, and some immersion exposure, and I was able to keep some of the gains SRS flashcards generally provide people. I can’t do flashcards consistently, and I usually have to do them in big-chunks then abandon them, but they do help me boost up how much I know when I DO use them.

More regarding my incompatibility with mia. The big thing is: I’m just not a flashcard person, not a consistent person. I have to vary what I’m doing regularly, or I burn out/struggle to focus. When I was in school, I would do the following to study: take notes/focus intently when being taught, then read the textbook/materials if I needed more help. Before tests, or to ‘review’ I would reread my notes from beginning to end of what I needed to remember. This would refresh my memory. If I still forgot/did not understand anything, I’d pinpoint that info in the book/ask my teacher/go online etc and try to just focus most of my ‘harder’ studying on those parts I was struggling with. Usually just taking notes/focusing, then reviewing everything in bulk right before I needed it (so maybe once every few weeks), was enough. When I couldn’t take notes, I would instead skim through book chapter summaries, and rewatch lecture videos if there was a digital copy - focusing most on the videos when info I forgot/sounded like key information was mentioned. Basically - notes, summaries, short cheat sheets, were all my friends. For tests like math and physics, I would read my notes AND make mini-sheets of all key formulas and how to do them/what I needed for them (usually I already had a sheet I just kept adding to over time/rereading). I could not use flashcards back then - I couldn’t focus, not consistently, not the way they’re meant to be used. It took me too long to even make them to warrant them being useful to me (I take SO long to make flashcards, its also a focus issues - also why when I do SRS flashcards I usually just grab some premade deck cause it keeps me MOVING and actually STUDYING instead of getting frozen in a task). 

This has always been my go-to study method. When I started chinese, this is how I learned 400 characters/basic words.  I bought a reference book with mnemonics, and would make myself read through it (as if it were notes I took). Occasionally I’d flip through old pages again, just to see if I still recognized old stuff, but mostly I just kept moving forward. So like - flip back every couple weeks to skim old pages, but read forward every day. I got through half the book before I burned out (because... reference books with their short entries of information? a lot like flashcards in structure, except thankfully I don’t regularly review afterwards like I would with flashcards).  It still took me 10-20 minutes for 10 entries in the book, but unlike flashcards it was a one-time task. When I got done, I had learned them pretty well - and I didn’t do anything to review them. They were just reviewed with immersion naturally, and eventually when I started studying common words these characters came up again (so if I forgot any, I relearned them easier then). This approach is roughly how I learned all words not in my premade-flashcard decks. I’ll read a chinese book - just start reading through it, looking up words I want to learn. I don’t review them, I don’t look them up again. Sometimes, maybe once a month, I’ll reread an old chapter to see what progress I’ve made - and then lookup unknown words then, as review since I didn’t remember them the first time. It sucks in a way... that SRS flashcard style study methods just.... do not work consistently for me. They are still beneficial, because in short month bursts I can quickly learn 500-1000 things with SRS (which is faster than some classes introduce words). But overall I have to rely on other study methods. Which for me feel inconsistent in progress since I can’t measure it as easy lol!  Even with no SRS, doing ‘bursts’ of this read-intensively note-like materials, then very occasionally skim old material again, does seem to work out okay for me. Back when I learned to read french, I did no flashcards. I looked up a common words list (and used my class vocabulary lists). I read through them once. Before tests (if for class), or every few weeks, I re-read/skimmed the word lists. By 3-4 months I learned the first 500 words. Then, since french has a lot of ‘similar’ sort of words, I just sort of dived into reading and then picked up words mostly that way - just checking a word list every month or so to review known words and make sure I didn’t have some big gap of missing vocabulary. 

So I guess: for me the biggest positive in mia is the suggestion to immerse often, frequently, and with a variety of materials. So that you practice different skills, learn a variety of things - and so you can move to something you like, if you get bored/unable to focus on one specific type of material. With mia you can read novels for a month, then get sick of reading and just watch shows/listen to podcasts when you walk, then if you’re burnt out from that you can just browse social media and check out fanfics/manhua/friends posts in the language for a few days or weeks before picking up longer materials again. The point is just to find ways to immerse, and do it. Simple advice. SUPER simple advice. But incredibly useful - every single time I add more immersion, I notice a boost in my comprehension. I notice actual improvement over time. I can’t pinpoint ‘why’ it happens, so unfortunately I’m not sure which complementary study methods or ways of immersing are helping me precisely with improvement in which skills. But I can tell that I am improving. I would 100% agree that immersing more is worth trying, at any language learning stage, as much as you want to. I immersed in the first months in both french and chinese, and I did much better than with japanese (where I did not immerse for 2 years and so my level stayed A1 beginner for like 2 years...). My French last time it was tested was around B1, which is fine since I just wanted to read and guess where my skills are closer to A2 and dragging it down? (Yes. Yes of course its speaking ability, of course). My chinese as far as I can pinpoint it is around HSK 4, as far as material I can easily read/listen to, as far as the practice tests I can take online. (Which, again, I’d self evaluate and say my comprehension is at HSK 4 or higher - I definitely can rely on good ability to guess meanings with hanzi and my comfort following grammar easily to boost comprehension a bit higher, but my speaking/writing is lower and I definitely only feel totally comfortable discussing topics that are manageable at HSK 3 - and my production grammar-wise is understandable but SO full of ‘this is the wrong way, use this instead’ which I’m working on...). So like... I got much farther in a year with each language I immersed in - even with the limited immersion I do actually do! So more immersion - better.  While I’m on the topic of immersion: if you like reading, read often and early. I am better off for telling myself “its not hard to read” and just diving in the deep end. Was it hard? ahahaha yes. ;w; But, I realize if I’d put off reading until say HSK 4 or HSK 5 knowledge in chinese, reading would be EVEN HARDER because I’d be so much worse at quickly reading through grammar/gathering context clues. Reading is a mix of actual reading skill, and vocab. I built up a lot of the actual reading skill by starting to try to read super early. So now my main struggle is generally just lack of vocabulary - and since I understand all surrounding grammar very well, its easier for me to roughly-guess at unknown words function and still follow the gist of what’s going on. Reading early also means, for words and hanzi I DO already know, I learned to recognize the many contexts/phrases they show up in and the various words they combine into earlier. So again, when I’m looking at a new text the hardest words are new vocab made of ALL unknown hanzi - if I know one hanzi in the word, it’s something I can often approximately guess the meaning of especially when I understand the entire rest of the sentence. If a new word is spelled with all known hanzi, I can look it up once or twice and generally remember it very fast - since its connected to what I already know. If I had waited to read until I’d learned more vocab, I would have less of a reading skill foundation to rely on right now. And based on what I’ve read of at least some people’s experiences on chinese-forums.com, many readers will go through a STEEP uncomfortable period when starting to read chinese. Something vocab does not totally mitigate. I think it just takes many hours, of the reading skills getting less and less hard, and then eventually things get more comfortable. There is also the issue of ‘comprehensible’ reading material - depending on your tolerance for ambiguity, chinese can be painfully incomprehensible for a long time. Generally people feel comfortable once they comprehend 98% of a material. But in chinese, even once you learn thousands of vocab, depending on your reading skills and abilities to ‘guess from context clues’, you will not be at 98% yet. Even if you can guess from context clues, that isn’t solid comprehension its still ambiguously understood material. So to get used to reading chinese as a learner, you have to start getting used to how it feels to read stuff only 80% comprehensible. Only 90% comprehensible. And if you get good and learn a lot of vocab and grammar and understand it better when you see it - 95%. Which is still not the range of ‘comfort’ yet. The quicker you learn to not be stressed by the ambiguity, the less painful reading becomes. And the more tolerable it is, the more you can read, and the quicker you can learn more, and the quicker you’ll REACH 95% to 98% comprehensibility. But if its so painful you refuse to keep reading, to keep using reading to push comprehensibility up... it is going to be a long way until you hit 98%... Graded readers are great, and give you stepping stones to transition this experience. Graded readers are MADE to be 98% comprehensible at different learning levels, so they will FEEL comfortable. And if they do feel uncomfortable (because you don’t have high enough comprehension), then they will at least drag your comprehension up - and still be more tolerable than the alternative of even LESS comprehensible native speaker chinese language materials. Basically though... find a way to force yourself through the harder ‘intolerable’ early parts. It happens whether you know 500 words or 2000. So you’ll have to do it eventually. I get demotivated if I’ve ‘studied a lot and still understand nothing’ so my foolish self dived off the deep end at 500 words, then at 1000, then at 1500, then at 2000. Cause I kept trying to read, being frustrated at its difficulty and stopping after a few weeks, then trying again once I’d learned more! But wow did that early trying pay off. Now that I DO know more words, if nothing else the comparison of how NICE it feels to read now in comparison to in the past, motivates me a ton. If I just started reading recently, and all I knew was it felt ‘this hard’ then I might want to give up. But like... when I started, and knew 500 words, my graded readers were PAINFUL. Genuinely intimidating. Once I pushed through one? They felt easy as pie, and graded readers at that vocab-level felt so easy they got boring. Now I find graded HSK 4 material and usually read through it super fast or don’t even bother. So I can 1. read more comfortably. And 2. because I’ve BUILT up a higher tolerance to ‘ambiguity discomfort’ I can allow myself to read harder materials if I do want to - because I can still TELL it feels easier than it used to. 

Finally, about MIA the study method as a concept. So... either because the site is long and people don’t like to finish reading, or maybe the writer is not good at summaries - but people often get confused about how to do it. Particular detail questions about how to do ‘this specific suggested activity’ make sense. But there’s a lot of people who ask “do I just turn on the language shows, and?? How do I learn?” Which, fair enough. So, as I understand it, here’s a summary: You want to learn a language. Find yourself a grammar guide - a free website, a book, whatever. Read the summary/guide, or skim it, whatever gives you a ‘preview’ of the language’s structure and what you’ll be getting used to over time. You will use this guide to reference later in the future, whenever grammar in stuff you see confuses you. You can use multiple guides later to reference. Right now, just zoom through a guide and get a general sense of the language you’re abut to learn. You can also wait to do this step until later, whenever you want. The sooner you do it, the sooner grammar will be less mysterious to you. Find yourself a pronunciation guide. Go through it, you don’t have to be a perfectionist about ANYTHING you do before or after this. Just go through, listen to it all, try to notice how its different from your own language. Notice if there’s any major differences like tones, sounds or patterns your own language doesn’t have. You don’t need to memorize, you’re just becoming aware that these aspects exists and are different. Again, this is to get you used to the language you’re about to dive into. This should probably be done early on. Look up some info about the writing system, if it is different from your own language’s. You will probably find some explanation introductory articles for beginners. If there’s any explanations about how it works, or why it’s like it is, read through it. This will help you understand the system better. You don’t need to memorize - although you may want to save a couple hundred common words, or a copy of all the letters, or a copy of a couple hundred common characters, or a copy of the radicals that combine to make characters. Read over this copied info a few times every once in a while, as you’ll see these things a TON once you start immersing.  You find yourself a premade deck of SRS flashcards (use Memrise app, Anki program/website, some alternative) of common words in that language - ideally in sentences, but single-words work if that’s all you can find. Ideally with audio - but again, whatever you can find. You may also find an SRS deck of characters (like Heisig Remember the Kanji)/writing system specific info, if you want, to go through that deck early on to help you more with recognizing the writing system as you encounter it.  Whatever decks you get, you will study those for 10-30 minutes a day. You can start doing this from day 1. (Or be like me and be inconsistent about it - just try to keep progressing forward and learning new material, even if you don’t always study. For me it was better always to move onto new stuff, instead of review, if I only had time to do one out of the two things.) Find yourself stuff to immerse with - shows, stories, audios, comics, social media, whatever. You will try to immerse every day, and try to immerse as much as you enjoy. Do this from day 1. When immersing: use either the language you are studying’s subtitles or else none at all. When watching/listening - look up words as desired, mainly though focus on context and trying to understand as much of the gist of what’s going on as you can. Over time you will pick things up. For reading - look up words as desired, and in the beginning you may look up a TON of words because you need to look up at least enough to follow the Bare Minimum Gist of What The Main Plot is. You NEED to understand at least basic context, with whatever your immersion material is, in order to learn new words from context. So: you might start with reading simple graded readers. You might use shows/books/audio of things you’ve already experienced in english, so the context is clearer to you. You might read summaries in english ahead of time. If you need more context in order to use immersion to learn any new things - then go ahead and give yourself more context. Immersion will feel difficult at first, the joy is watching you start to just ‘naturally’ pick up more. Audio immersion - for some of this, you do not need to attempt to ‘understand the gist of the plot’, you can just use it to attempt to pick out all the specific words in the language, the language’s rhythm, and get used to the language. If you’re only using an audio to learn the sounds of a language, you can probably use it as ‘background sound’ while doing other daily things, since it won’t require as constant focus as it would if you were trying to catch every single word you knew as you listened. There you go. You’re all set. Do this for a year and see where your progress is at. Quit doing this if you aren’t seeing some improvements, since if that’s the case a different study method may be better for you. Don’t do this method if you don’t like it - whatever gets you to study, is the right methods for you. No point doing something that doesn’t work for you. Eventually, as you make progress, you will decide on goals and notice mistakes/shortcomings in your skills. When that happens, add additional study materials/tasks as needed to focus specifically on those things as desired. For example - if you notice your pronunciation sucks, you may start using audio-focused flashcards, or go through a pronunciation guide again more carefully-thoroughly this time. Or - you realize your writing is bad, so you go through a grammar guide again and do the exercises, and get language partners and write to them regularly so that you get corrections. Eventually, you finish a common word flashcard deck - find a new deck, or make one, with new words you want to learn or need to based on your goals. The massive immersion approach is a basic plan of immerse-while-paying-attention+study new words/review words regularly, it doesn’t include every single thing you might do or want to do. 

Anyway, mm. tldr: massive immersion approach suggests doing immersion of all kinds, from day 1. I couldn’t agree more, every time I add more immersion when studying a language it helps so significantly and over time. however, mia also has half of it’s study method based on SRS flashcards - if you are not a flashcard person like me, my alternative study ‘method’ above works. It’s not perfect, its probably not as effective. But it works if you can’t focus on SRS flashcards reliably. Finally, I summarize mia a little. 

[rigelmejo]

Reading Chinese is a bit of an odd up down roller coaster experience sometimes and I Know it’s because as a learner like. The process is like this: you don’t know things and are confused and feel completely drowning, you notice some things you didn’t understand and it feels like a slog but you have an idea of what to do, you are less confused and excited and it feels easier

Then it repeats. You realize there’s still stuff you don’t understand (now that the euphoria of recognizing the previous stuff has been worn down by this New Draining Confusion). You try to figure out what some of the things you don’t understand are - it feels like a slog as you realize HOW MUCH you didn’t know and need to figure out. You manage to figure some of it out - reading feels bizarrely easy again and a breeze compared to what you just went through now. The things you didn’t recognize/recognized/figured out are now almost intuitely easy to follow.

Then it happens AGAIN lol.

—

Obviously each new cycle of it is a good thing. Since it means you’ve learned new things. And even when you do hit the “draining confusion” it means at least you’re now understanding enough stuff “below that level” that you can even notice and focus on this new level of stuff being confusing to you. And the slog of learning after, is you able to work on learning stuff you couldn’t learn previously because you weren’t even noticing it before, etc. So it’s all a good thing.

But wow does it feel confusing from a learners perspective lol. You feel like you’ve reached some nice level of comprehension that feels good - then because you still have more to learn, you hit the next “never mind this is CONFUSING” stage and it feels like you’ve made NO gains. Even though you have.

—

Yes this is about 那些风化雪月 lol. So I started that novel, as you know, at the start of November. For whatever reason, each page was a slog and I struggled to get through the half I did finish - and I definitely only followed the gist and Some details fuzzily. Even though I was using a dictionary, it was still SO confusing and draining to me.

So. I stopped that novel for now. And I went back to 寒舍 the other day. Now, last time I read 寒舍 last month it was a slog but an enjoyable one because it was interesting. If I say 那些风化雪月 was an 8/10 (easy vocabulary but a decent amount to lookup, hard writing style for me to follow, hard for me to care about plot) for hard for me to push through, then 寒舍 is a 7/10 (harder vocabulary when I started and Tons of new words, but more interesting and easier writing style for me to read once I got used to its long sentences).

Which, as a comparison, Priest novels would be an 8-9/10 (enjoyable plot, writing style I can follow, but so drowning in vocab I cannot read unless I know a rough context of the plot already). And a Priest novel I have never read in a bit-modern setting would probably be a 9-10/10.

My point is, 寒舍 was quite hard for me to read last month. I just really enjoyed the plot, so I was able to stay motivated as I pushed through each chapter. As another comparison - when I started 寒舍， the novel 他们的故事 would be a 5/10 in difficulty (some unknown words, but with a dictionary completely readable quickly, engaging plot, easy writing style to follow). If I’d already read the chapter, then a 2/10 difficulty (just slightly harder than a graded reader).

Well I went back to 寒舍 the other day. It is now a 5/10 difficulty wise. Which I am blown away by. There are still new words, but at a pace now where theoretically I could guess from context and follow the plot without a dictionary (like 他们的故事). Previous chapters I’ve already read are now around a 4/10 difficulty (a lot of unknown words I’ve looked up before I still haven’t quite learned yet, but I picked up enough the chapters are now much easier to skim and follow for main plot without a dictionary). So 寒舍 is MUCH easier than the last time I read it! I am blown away frankly because now the chapters are taking probably 20 minutes now (they took 30-45 minutes to read before). I’m able to read a lot more without needing the dictionary.

So I suppose my point is... while I felt I was slogging unpleasantly through 那些风化雪月 and struggling to just follow the plot, maybe somehow it did help my reading skills improve still. Because going back to 寒舍 it is clear I’ve made some reading comprehension progress. This story is way easier than it was last time, noticeably. And not just because it “feels” easier in comparison to the slog I just went through. Even in comparison to last time I was reading 寒舍, I can now read through a few paragraphs at a time without looking up a word - whereas before it WAS at least one word a sentence if not more.

I went back to 他们的故事 last night just to see where that is at too - and it’s difficulty is now easily a 3-4/10 in difficulty. I see a few unknown words, but it’s only a bit harder then a graded reader, and I could likely follow most details and the full general plot without a dictionary. So like... I guess thank you 那些风化雪月??? I suffered through you but like?? Clearly me pushing through the confusion must’ve helped me pick up some kind of words or sentence parsing skills I needed...

Also, as a test, I tried to read the first chapter of a novel I was looking at reading eventually: 魔尊要抱抱. I figured this would be good because 1 I think it looks cool and 2 it has a manhua so if it’s too hard to read (like 破云 is) then I can go to the manhua to read and have more pictures for context.

Well I started chapter 1 of 魔尊要抱抱and knew almost every word. Around the level of a graded reader to 他们的故事 as far as how easy it was to read. I literally only looked up one word every several paragraphs, and I don’t think I saw any Hanzi I couldn’t at Least guess the pinyin correctly for. I was sort of floored it was that approachable as reading material. But I suppose... not too surprised? It gives me the feel of both svsss (which is a bit challenging for me to read vocab wise but doable) and ttwtadsl (which is pretty good level for me to read with a dictionary comfortably). So the fact it falls somewhere on the more comprehensible end for me isn’t too surprising. Anyway I am. Quite excited!! I didn’t expect it to be this managable to read!

I am currently in the “everything feels easier to read stage” of learning and wow is it a joy and refreshing and so comforting feeling. ToT also I am happy that. I guess whatever random stuff I’ve been doing these past months, I am noticeably managing to expand my vocab and Hanzi recognition. So I’m glad the random reading has been accomplishing that progress. (And I think the listening reading method variations I’ve done has been helping with upping my listening comprehension steadily, although slower). So wooh! For now I will just keep coasting by on reading stuff, and listening-reading, and see how far it gets me in a couple months.

[rigelmejo]

If you happen to learn like me (I guess try it out, see if it helps), then I cannot emphasize this enough: read.

Read early. Read immediately. Read when you know 10-50 words in the language, even that early. 

It will motivate you to learn more words - then read as you learn more words. And get you used to a few things immediately: you’ll see grammar immediately, often, and if you read a grammar guide then all those grammar points will be constantly reinforced as you read and see them again. And 2: you’ll be training the skill OF reading from the very beginning.

There’s multiple parts to reading. One part, is having the actual knowledge necessary to read something - do you even know the words in the text (or have the ability to look them up), do you even recognize the grammar enough to identify what it’s function is meant to be (or at least enough to look it up)? This is one part. 

The other part is how you parse through that information. How used you are to seeing the grammar - so that you can recognize what you’ve previously studied, so that you’re used to how it works and can read through it without pausing to think about it. So that you can recognize when words are being used as nouns or adjectives or verbs, recognize proper nouns, recognize what are key points versus details. Whether you need a dictionary for some words/a grammar reference, or you already ‘know’ enough to read without reference - the ability to process what you read will still be weak if you have not practiced it. But if you’ve been practicing it, then like everything else, it gradually gets better. 

When you do both parts at the same time - then when your knowledge of grammar/words is weak, you can rely on your ability to ‘process’ to help make the text easier to figure out. If your ability to process something is low (maybe its difficult), you can rely on your knowledge of grammar/words to help you figure out the text. If you work on both, then you can have them both supporting each other as you improve reading. 

---

In theory, maybe you could ‘only’ practice the processing, and rely on word/grammar lookups constantly until it got easier - a difficult road though, probably. Likewise, many people wait until they know X amount of words before trying to read - and as a result they have zero practice ‘processing’ this language reading material, and sentences they know every word for still don’t make sense and feel difficult. Doing both is difficult at first - just like doing one alone would be. But if they’re done together, then they also improve together, and so the middle stages of reading skill feel much easier than they might otherwise. 

If you know 2000 words but have no idea how to process text, even graded readers are going to feel painful at first. If you’ve been making yourself practice processing text, even back when you only knew 500 words? Then by the time you get to 2000, processing is also at a relative intermediate stage. And the biggest difficulty is generally just lack of vocabulary - which is easy to lookup with a dictionary. Whereas, you can’t ‘look up’ anything to improve processing skill. You can lookup knowledge you lack. But the only way to improve processing skill, is TO read, and to keep practicing reading. 

I remember how difficult reading used to be. It’s still not ‘easy’ like french is easy yet, but its happily following the same trajectory reading french (or I imagine even english when I was young) did. I rememeber the first few months, grammar absolutely anihilated me. Even though I’d ‘studied’ it recently. I sort of knew all these grammar points in theory, I just had no idea how to process them in practice. I could look up words all I wanted, to fill in my gaps in knowledge. But I couldn’t improve my processing except by reading. And just over time... grammar got so much easier. It just clicked, a few points making sense at a time. Then those points getting easier for me to recognize faster, then those points getting intuitively understood. Etc, as it happened with more.

Likewise - I could learn words, but it was hard to process all the ways they were used, until I practiced processing them more. Even if I looked words up, even in sentences with grammar I could process, some words just did not make sense to me in their context. Then just over time, more and more made sense. I used to be very confused by ‘weile’ and ‘zhexie/zhege/zheshi’ as some basic examples. Or later words like ‘kanqilai’ and ‘qilai’ and ‘yihou’ ‘yiqian’ ‘dao’ etc. Eventually they made more sense, and then more did in more context, etc. All just from reading practice. I couldn’t read a definition to get these words to make more sense, I just had to read more.

I’m still noticing these areas of processing getting better over time. But I do remember, back when I tried reading 3 paragraphs of the MoDaoZuShi intro in like month 5? I looked up all the words, recognized the grammar, and understood nothing. Then in like month 8? I read the prologue with no dictionary and guessed at the unknown words, and knew enough to understand the gist and most of the details. Mostly, because those things I knew before just ‘processed’ better in month 8.

over time, subtitles got easier to ‘process’ so now I don’t have to pause them as often to figure out what they mean (parse through the sentence for meaning).

Now most novels don’t hit me with any sentence that I can’t at least figure out with a dictionary. I’m still stumbling over some things, but now since I can process overall a lot of things better - I have more surrounding understanding to help me figure out the more confusing parts. Like right now, I’m really struggling with PRECISELY how ‘yu’ and ‘you’ get used. As in ‘yu’ by/with/at/for, ‘you’ - by/done by etc. I roughly understand these words - I know their definitions, and I can roughly guess their meaning in sentences and follow the plot. But because they do mean slightly different things in various contexts, I clearly just need to see them more and more in examples before they’ll ‘click’ and be easier to process too. I have to say though... its way easier to focus on these words/grammar points, since I have so much surrounding understanding. If I had just waited for X words learned before starting reading? Then I’d be learning ALL the processing skills from point 0. That would be... discouraging.

In a way, I already waited to long to start reading as much as I sort of WISH I had. I read about once every 2 weeks, until month 8. It was only in month 8, that I started reading roughly a few times a week - and reading full chapters per sitting, instead of just several paragraphs. As a result, it WAS brutal at first. Because my processing skills were clearly lower than my vocab. I tried graded readers, and even though I knew all the words, they were a struggle to read. So, as my typical silly self, I picked a webnovel instead - with even MORE unknown words, even Harder. I read 15 chapters of it. Which was hard... but clearly helped. Then I went back to the graded readers, and they were a breeze - so I’d clearly built up some processing skills.

After that, I again brutally myself, decided to try reading a harder print novel I owned. That was... again, brutal. Then I went back to the webnovel? And the webnovel was notably easier! Again, those processing skills had built up some more, and I’d probably picked up some more vocabulary as well. 

And its basically been repeating since then - a much quicker rate of progress, where it seems a significant amount easier every 2 months or so. I feel like I’m at like - the reading level I had in 4th grade in english? I was in one of those accelerated reading programs, so we’d read some middle-school level books by looking up like 20 words before each chapter and then having to read X amount a week. A bit challenging, definitely compared to whatever the 4th grade reading level was supposed to be (I remember liking Catwings and Bunnicula a lot which I think was my 4th grade level, and I feel like chinese graded readers I’ve been picking up feel like Bunnicula in difficulty). But also, back when I was that young sometimes I’d pick up my dad’s big huge Mitchner novels like ALASKA or his Sherlock books, and I’d read a few pages - they’d be super difficult to understand, a little painful, so I’d only read a few pages. But I’d usually understand the gist. And I’d pick up some of my moms books on Aliens and supernatural stuff, and mostly read the captions on the pictures, maybe a paragraph or two. I feel like my chinese reading level is around this right now. I can pick up adult novels and it hurts, but I can follow whats going on without a dictionary roughly. And with a dictionary, decently. I can pick up ‘teen’ level books and follow them easier, but need a dictionary for total understanding of all details. And I can pick up graded readers and they’re basically extended reading, if they’re at a low enough level (like HSK 4 vocabulary wise, to maybe 2000 words - after 2k words, I run into more and more I need a dictionary for if I want to follow details). 

---

anyway yeah. I remember in french I started reading at 50 words, then 100, then 500, and just kept reading. And it just ‘magically’ got easier. And I sort of did that with chinese, and am so glad I did. I wish i’d done it even more. I’m doing it more now. 

It felt so good last night, to be able to just binge a few chapters of a fanfic in chinese, without feeling drained. It felt so good to be at the reading level where I can look up words I need to fast enough to not slow me down enough that I lose interest. 

don’t wait until you’ve ‘prepared’ enough. don’t wait years. i waited years in japanese to read, and it was the biggest thing holding me back. i didn’t wait in chinese, and in part reading MOTIVATED me to study what i needed FASTER. It certainly helped my processing skills. And when processing skills are higher, reading overall is just less painful. A dictionary can lessen the pain of not knowing enough vocabulary. But only reading practice can lessen the pain of processing skills being weak. And - if you start to read later, it’s fine. Its okay if it seems ridiculously difficult at first, that will pass. Its just you working on the processing skills, and as those develop reading will go up to feeling mostly only as difficult as the vocabulary.

[rigelmejo]

8/19/20 progress

I already knew this I supposed... but further confirmation that

It’s easier to immerse in a new material, if you look up keywords for the first episode or chapter. (Those first chapters are when a lot of the genre specific and story specific words pop up, so if you catch the keywords then it will be easier to follow all main-plot information in the following material).

immersing more DOES improve comprehension the more you do it.

I am watching Xin Xiao Shi Yi Lang (The Shaw Eleven Lang). I first tried to watch it in December, then in general I tried to watch shows in only-chinese more in January-May. In those months, shows got consecutively a little bit easier to follow without looking words up - although mostly, each new genre the difficulty spiked again a bit. So difficulty was like: 10, 8, 7, 8, 6, 8, 6, 4, 7, 5, etc... where 10 is most difficult to follow. I do notice that overall, regardless of genre differences/show differences spiking difficulty back up, I am getting overall better at some things. 

My reading speed, ability to catch words quickly that I’ve studied, ability to read through grammar easier, ability to read through *some grammar at a quicker speed, ability to look away from the screen more and still follow the plot (so listen comprehension is better, reading speed to catch up to when I look away is improved). Overall, just the comfort level of the activity - it doesn’t feel nearly as draining to immerse in only-chinese, it doesn’t feel like I need to use a translator to look up key words if I don’t want to. As in I feel I can at least minimally follow a plot even if I skip looking up words that catch my attention. I notice overall that I have more ability to figure out at least SOME words from context alone in bigger sentences - so not just verbs. And a super noticeable skill that has improved: my ability to notice name/place/proper noun introductions is WAY IMPROVED. For the whole year of learning Chinese, I really struggled immensely with recognizing when words were a name of something instead of a noun/adjective/verb to figure out. The only time I could tell was if someone said ‘zhe she’ or ‘mingzi’ or ‘jiao’ or ‘jieshao’ first to clue me in that it was about to be a proper name, or for people hearing ‘xiaojie, gongzi, shifu, shidi, shijie, shixiong, xiong, xiansheng, laoshi’ and eventually catching on that it’s a name. But places and named objects like swords or specialized tools like shovel types or named reports completely escaped me. 

I remember that the first time I watched Xin Xiao Shi Yi Lang, I could only follow the fact “there’s a sword they want, they know each other, and a princess (?) is running away from her fiance (?) who wants the fancy sword her family owns that everyone seems to want.” Which... to be honest, I do think that’s the minimum gist of the plot, so I did pretty well for my no-lookup guess of what was going on back in December. But this time when I watched, I looked up a lot of words more for double checking my correct comprehension or specifying details, not because I needed it to follow the plot. And for names, I just caught them: We’ve got Xiao Shi Yi Lang, Lian Chengbi, SiNiang, Shen Kunbi (the princess, I’m not sure I caught the second part right unless I can see it’s characters on screen), Xiao gongzi (the evil small woman who also looks like Lian Chengbi sometimes?), Jiao Zhu (Lord Jiao, the snake clan’s leader), the empress (? or queen, Shen family, I can’t quite catch if the first part of her name is a title or her name). The 4 great masters that Yi Lang, SiNiang, and Xiao gongzi just annihilated from importance... I caught the servant of Shen’s name too, the girl who begged Lian-xiong to take her with him to find her princess, but they haven’t said it enough for me to remember it. 

I also catch that they’re mentioning the named place of the region often (Jiang something), the Shen clan area, and the sword does have a name (which I recognize the characters of but can’t remember the pronunciation of). I caught that Xiao gongzi is from a clan/kind of people too, the Heaven-something. All of this is a ton more specific detail-wise than I was ever able to catch back in December. Some of this is because I know new words, some is because I can read/comprehend faster so I have the TIME to catch other low-hanging-fruit details I should understand, some is because I’ve gotten much better at recognizing proper names versus nouns/adjectives/verbs. I’m really happy about the proper noun stuff... it was probably the HARDEST thing for me to distinguish in written chinese, whereas any other grammar issue was a bit perplexing but noticeable to me if I could just get extra time to read through it. I think again I probably have Tamen de Gushi novel to thank for this... it’s writing style used first person so it was easy to follow, but many other characters were always name-mentioned without usual introduction scenes, and yet others were left unnamed and so I had to get used to ‘that person’ and ‘aunt and uncle’ and ‘the gang of friends’ and get better at recognizing vague characters being talked about too. 

I think a lot of these comprehension improvements in the last 8 months were partially just WATCHING more chinese-only stuff, and also doing 2000 word cards and reading in some short bursts (I’d read 15 chapters of Tamen de Gushi, a few chapters of Priest novels, and Mandarin Companion Sherlock). 

In addition, I notice a decent increase lately from maybe May-August. I think what I added recently, that’s been helping - listening to chinese audio, and flashcards with sentences. 

For Chinese audio I have 2 main sources - audiobooks/audiodramas where I just play them whenever I want either for background noise or to listen to and try to follow the plot, and an audio of Spoonfed Chinese sentences with english then chinese sentences so its very comprehensible audio ‘flashcards’ i can just play in 30 minute chunks in the background for ‘review’ or ‘exposure’ to i+1 sentences. This audio addition to study has been super easy to add, I just try to play it more. I think the audiodramas/books are helping me solidify the words I DO know, get more familiar with what ‘sounds right,’ increase my listening speed comprehension, and help set ‘phrases’ stick better in my head. The audio 30 minute ‘flashcard’ loops are like audio reinforcement of the sentences in anki I’m doing, and they give me more audio-only review and exposure compared to anki - helping me work on listening comprehension, and on hearing easy new i+1 sentences I can always comprehend and learn a little new stuff from each day. I really love big audio files of ‘flashcards’ and I discovered the study idea back when I studied japanese (the website japaneseaudiolessons.com was basically entirely based on this concept of teaching/study, and also to a degree I think Michael Thomas and Pimsleur are just paid versions of this method). 

They let you be introduced to new things to learn in a very easy to understand way building on what you already know, and review in a way where the flashcards remind you of the translation in case you needed it. Its very low effort, but it really reinforces what you’ve learned and helps you pick up new stuff. (And it’s higher effort if you also try to repeat it and practice speaking). However, audio flashcard files I think work BETTER if you try to pay attention - at least if you hear any new sentences. That way you actively TRY to figure out what you expect the answer to be before you hear it, and note what the actual answer was so you remember this new word/grammar. Whereas reviews with this audio, you can pay attention a bit less actively, since its only going to be important to focus if you CAN’T automatically guess what the right answer is - in which case, listen more to that piece of audio. But if you’re replaying it over and over, even if you only actively pay attention some of the time, you’ll pay attention enough to pick up new info, and passively listen to things you comprehend already enough to review them. So overall, its definitely lower effort than listening to audiobooks/audiodramas and trying to purposely follow the plot. (Although I think passively listening to audiobooks/audiodramas is the easiest task, I don’t think it efficiently teaches you more as quickly as listening to audio-flashcard loops since in audiobooks/dramas you comprehend less). 

Chinese flashcards with sentences in anki - right now all my anki flashcard decks use sentences mostly. The Spoonfed Chinese deck is helping with words IN context and WHAT contexts to correctly use different words. This is helping strengthen the foundation of words I know. Likewise, my HSK deck in anki also has sentences and explains individual character meanings, so that’s also reinforcing it. I’m mostly using these decks for exposure/recognition, so I’m not working on trying to correctly speak/produce such sentences very much (just occasionally). So they aren’t helping a ton at improving my speaking/production grammar. But they are helping me a lot with comprehending better, and with remembering the proper tones in words I know, and the proper words to use for different situations (especially with near synonyms). I think these cards are making my reading speed comprehension in chinese better (just like reading more in chinese was helping).

I have also been reading more - without a dictionary when possible, because I’m lazy. I haven’t been reading as much as I want, but I do feel what I’m doing is challenging myself. (I guess I just wish I challenged myself more ToT). I read chapter 1 of MoDu with no dictionary twice - the second time was much easier, somehow. I read part of chapter 1 of Guardian, part of chapter 1 of Tian Ya Ke. I read a little bit of Tamen de Gushi with no dictionary, I read a Mandarin Companion book. I notice that in general reading is helping me recognize phrases like how authors tend to word descriptions of body movements or appearance, or descriptions of emotional displays (like he rubbed his neck, put his hand in his pocket, face grew pale, eyes glanced away, mouth curled upward in a slight smile, etc). Those descriptions are getting much easier to recognize and read quickly. Also, I notice with more difficult novels, I’m getting better at roughly guessing unknown words with unknown characters - the hard part is getting myself to focus on paragraphs where I see a lot of unknown characters, because my eyes would prefer to just skim over them all. I have to make myself actually look, find the words I do know and grammar I recognize, then actually look at the unknown characters for clues of if they’re part of a 2-part version of a word I know the other character in, if they’re characters I can guess roughly the meaning of, if I can guess their sound or not, and what their word type is grammar wise if that will help me - is it a name, title, verb, adjective, noun. 

Usually I can skip adjectives without losing the main idea of the plot, but I still slow down and try to figure out the adjective if it keeps popping up - it means the author relies on it a lot. Names automatically get easier once I realize they’re just names to recognize. And unknown characters part of 2 character words, if i CAN guess a meaning from context, are generally the most important for me to pick up. Because they usually contribute to plot or details, and they’re words I actually can keep relying on later on in the writing if I figure them out. As usual... dialogue is my strong suit, and the easiest part to follow. Action descriptions of things going on are the second easiest. Then finally, long descriptions of places/people/economy/looks/situation/group etc are still my weakest point since those parts are noun and adjective heavy, usually with less already-known general words I can lean on to help me.

---

I am really pleased about my show comprehension improvements though. I’m thinking, as long as I look up the words in new shows for the first couple episodes, I should be able to get into new genres/new shows without them feeling draining anymore. 

I’m going to keep working on my flashcards until they’re in the 2000s, to match up with my original old single-word 2000 cards. Then maybe focus more on reading. I’d like to get more comfortable reading novels (even though lol I know that’s probably THE HARDEST of my comprehension goals).

Also surprisingly I’ve been really picky about my tones lately, so I’m spending probably 1/3 of my study time overall just on focusing on tones - tone training, pinyin pronunciation basics again, listening carefully. I noticed my active vocabulary has decreased a little these past couple months... but I suspect that’s mostly because I’ve NOTICED where I was incorrectly using the wrong word for a situation, so now my mind isn’t auto-supplying a word to use unless I’m relatively sure its supposed to be used for that situation. So in the long term it’ll probably be a good thing. Likewise, words are auto-showing-up in my mind less to use if the tones are less solid. 

I’ve been using the Hanzi flashcard deck on and off again (anki version). I’m contemplating adding my own pronunciation mnemonics to them, so they’ll be more thorough.

Other notes:

- nothing seems to make those words like ‘turan’ ‘suiran’ ‘jinran’ ‘shihou’ ‘zhiqian’ ‘ranhou’ ‘ziran’ really seem to stick for me except reading/listening more. They’re all ‘explanation’ words usually used in telling stories or descriptions, and since they’re not directly anything you could ‘draw/visualize’ then for me I find I just need to be exposed to enough examples of them being used.

- similarly, the way authors/storytellers say descriptions of people moving hands/eyes/heads/looks really is something to just... get used to. All the words are simple, its just getting used to seeing them in those combinations.

- i still have no idea if ‘repetitive listening’ of 50-100 times helps a LOT lol. But i do think listening MORE in general, definitely helps to a degree. Especially once you’ve got 1000-2000 words you’re vaguely familiar with. That means there’s a lot of words you’ll eventually Recognize when listening, even if you can’t comprehend full sentences. 

- immersing in content you’re already familiar of the context of, is always easier. whether its because you read it/watched it in english before, or because you looked up keywords/summaries for the first couple episodes before diving in. That said, I prefer to also do some immersion where i go in knowing absolutely nothing (so if i need to, i’ll look up keywords while watching). Because i like to see exactly how much i can understand when i had nothing to rely on going into it. That said, that’s more for gauging progress. For actually PICKING UP NEW WORDS from a show or audio, I think having context ahead of time improves the ability to pick up new words. 

- if you’re learning a language that happens to make audiodramas about stuff you like??? I 100% recommend checking them out! Chinese has been a treasure trove for me, because if I like a book or show, then there’s a corresponding book/show, and there’s usually also an audiodrama, and usually also fanmade dialogue-containing music video edit videos and AU edit videos, and regular music videos, and osts.... and you can find ONE story you like and have like 200+ hours of material to sink into. If I like one story (lets say MoDaoZuShi by MXTX) then I can watch a drama, read a novel (in chinese and english, in traditional or simplified characters), listen to an audiodrama, listen to ost, find a ton of music video edits with dialogues, find fanfic in multiple languages, watch donghua if I wanted animation instead of live action. And also check out any of the author’s other works. Same thing with getting into something by Priest - I can watch Guardian, listen to fanmade audiobooks, find music video edits with dialogue, listen to the ost, read the novel in traditional or simplified or english. And several other priest novels ALSO have audiodramas along with all this other stuff. A person can easily find a visual show, an audio drama/book, a text only novel, and a picture-text manhua all about some story they like. So they’ve got this very easy to find ‘study material’ to immerse in a variety of different ways. Whether they ‘need’ practice in each area, or are just more comfortable with say ‘audio’ or ‘manhua’ instead of reading novels, they can still find stuff to enjoy. When I studied french I always found reading material I liked, but I should have been looking harder for other materials in other areas, like I am in chinese. Likewise, in japanese I could often find visual shows or manga i wanted to check out, but I had trouble finding audio-only I was interested in... I could have been looking for a broader variety of materials than I did at the time.

[rigelmejo]

Things I can confirm with my personal learning experience are possible:

1. Yes learning up to HSK 4 materials within a year is possible. I think as long as some effort is put into ensuring that material is part of what you study, it can be worked through within a year. I read one persons claim that they learned up to HSK 4 with their self-made flashcard study materials in 8 months. I can believe that... it took me roughly 10-11 months to learn up to that amount of HSK 4 material. If I’d been studying primarily FOR HSK levels, I probably could have covered that material in 8 months. So I do think the goal of getting from no knowledge to HSK 4 in a year is achievable and not necessarily an extreme goal.

2. Yes achieving that can take as little as 1 to a couple hours a day of study on average. Some days I studied 15 minutes, some a few hours, some I didn’t study. I probably averaged around 1-2 hours a day of ‘Chinese adjacent studying.’ By that I mean: some study was grammar reading, sometimes flashcards, sometimes intensively reading some Chinese novel, sometimes studying Hanzi reference books, sometimes extensively trying to read, sometimes trying to chat in chinese with people or browse on Chinese social media, sometimes reading a manhua page or two, sometimes trying to watch a show with no English sub, sometimes watching a show with dual English-chinese subtitles and just consciously stopping to note to myself some new words I wanted to know (usually by pausing and rereading Just the chinese subs to try to understand the line, looking up the chinese words I wanted to know in Pleco and saving them). I am only now... finally.... also incorporating listening to audio only stuff more sometimes.

But basically - I just did a little of whatever, whenever, amongst the activities above. Most days I did Something, some days I spent more time than others. But I was by no means studying a ton. I probably studied as much as I exercise a day or less. Also a lot of my ‘study adjacent’ activities could easily just be part of my regular hobbies - using some of my reading time in a week for chinese, using some time I usually watch shows/YouTube for watching chinese shows, using some time I listen to music and dance to play chinese music and dance, etc. I use some down time when I’d goof off on social media to do flashcards (when I manage to do flashcards).

3. Things I think for me, based on my experiences, help me learn a language much more ‘easily’ than if I didn’t do them: reading a grammar guide super early on!!! (It’s brutal but it helps, just chugging through one quick! The overview helps!)

Learning the 1000 most common words ASAP!!! (It helps me so much and I put off doing this longer in chinese than I wish I would have in retrospect, comprehension went from ??? To me getting at LEAST the gist of nearly everything in chinese.)

Practicing trying to read ASAP and then regularly as in once every couple weeks (again it seems brutal, but helped my French tremendously, and likewise I think it really motivated my chinese study/helped me set goals/helped me improve faster).

Practicing trying to watch chinese shows in only chinese (also brutal at first, I didn’t do this until 5ish months in, but its been tremendously helpful for me and the more I did it the more it helped, so doing this regularly as in a few times a week helps a LOT).

Practicing listening ONLY regularly. (I didn’t start doing this until maybe 10 months in, but I have noticed it’s helping my inner ‘reading voice,’ my listening comprehension, and my feel for how to say things, a ton. I’ve looked into Repetitive Listening lately and I think it may benefit me to try that, regardless I can say listening-only practice is definitely helping my listening comprehension a LOT).

Studying the first 500ish Hanzi from a mnemonics source. (I used a book, and that starting point carried me all the way to where I am now - I probably need to do more of this soon, either with a book or Heisig mnemonic flashcards etc. With my books I literally originally used No flashcards for Hanzi I just read a mnemonic reference book - the Tuttle 800 characters one - about halfway through in chunks of 1/2 to 1 chapter a day. That’s it. And occasionally I’d flip through the book and read random Hanzi entries, and look thru it to highlight Hanzi I’d learned since the last time I’d opened the book. Probably the lowest effort way to do this, if u hate flashcards and can tolerate reading like me - however I was often watching chinese dramas with English and Chinese subs, so I was ‘seeing’ Hanzi I’d studied regularly in my shows, which probably helped me remember them.)

In summary: reading a grammar guide fast, learning high frequency Hanzi ASAP, learning the most common words, and immersing often Even in the earlier months when it was harder for me (with reading, shows with only chinese subs, shows with dual subs while looking up words I noticed, and with audio only like audiobooks/songs). I genuinely think reading from like months 2 onward while BRUTAL helped so much, just like it did with French. It helped a lot with comprehension and grammar ‘clicking’ in my mind, with learning wordsz Probably the Most importantly it motivated and helped me really measure my progress, and also helped me pinpoint my goals then set them regularly.

It’s kind of rough trying to read early on when your comprehension Might genuinely be at like 20%. But for me it really helps so much it’s worth doing. I did it on a whim for chinese study, because it’s basically the main way I studied and learned French. And wow am I glad I tried to apply it to chinese. I’m so glad I didn’t get so intimidated by the hanzi that I didn’t... try. I think me trying so early also made the difficulty curve always feel Rewardingly and Refreshingly easier constantly, even though it’s still difficult lol. But never as difficult as the time before, etc. Which is always a nice feeling.

—-—-

Yeah I read an article recently, by a man named Timo who made (a very nice) 3 part Anki deck for Chinese (I’m using his HSK deck since it has example sentences - and visual images of the sentence scenes - for every word, something my memrise decks lacked, but helps a ton with context and proper usage). His decks also included a grammar guide deck fbut another person made a version that displays better of that kind of deck which is what I’m using). Anyway, In his article he said he learned to HSK 4 in 8 months with his decks.

I’ve been mulling over if that’s reasonable, when I realized I also basically did that it just took me a couple more months since I didn’t even focus primarily on HSK level material coverage until I Was 8 months in already. In retrospect, I think it’s definitely a goal that’s attainable. It’s not so wildly difficult that only aspiring polyglots or intense studiers could manage. I think he studied like roughly an hour a day too, so likewise his study habits were pretty normal and not extreme time-wise.

—-

Now, this last bit is pure rough opinion based on what i think the levels match up to based on what I can comprehend versus what I could in French. So take everything below with a huge amount of salt. To be fair... I think HSK 4 really is a reasonable goal to aim for. I think it feels a lot like B1 level in French was - I can start to read most things for at least bare minimum gist of the main ideas, and some things in topics I’m familiar with (or with more common words/phrases) I can understand 90-100% of including all the specific details.

Basically, it gets me to where I can start picking up the meaning of at least some things in context, and the point where i can at least guess what a sentence is doing a Bit based on its grammar clues. like noticing the adjectives, verbs, tenses, nouns, and at least being able to guess if the unknown words could drastically affect the meaning of the sentence - example: I can tell if it’s a descriptor of location in a scene I could possibly Skip and still follow the plot, or an adjective I could guess means something similar to the previous more noun-heavy description, or if it’s a noun being interacted with/verb doing something I need to look up to follow the plot. HSK 4 also gets me to where I can start to follow most everyday basic convos, and some more specialized ones as long as they’re on topics I know some words for/or use common words. Examples: most shows for at least 50% of the dialogue, small talk, Internet comments, basically stuff surrounding context is usually related to. And i can talk about some of that comfortably (this is my weak spot, as it is in French, cause I need to practice more to expand my active vocabulary).

So, convos now can be followed and at least understood (and sometimes participated in) like when I was in maybe 1st or 2nd grade in English. I can engage with a lot of topics, Especially if most words used are common words, but once things get specialized I have a lot to either ‘learn/lookup’ or need to ask clarification about. Reading/watching is a bit easier then convos, since often the material provides enough context for me to ‘guess’ some of that specialized stuff’s meanings as it comes up.

But I say kind of comparable to B1 because... well for me french at this level was usable, but not ‘easy’ and not fully functional to the point I could say I can reasonably rely on it for any general needs/wants. I think B2 is more when you start being able to comfortably write/speak on most any topic at least to some general capacity, and can comprehend enough you feel comfortable following and catching main points and most general details (so not needing to look up 20% of what you hear/read for a decent chunk of certain clarification). And I do Not think HSK 4 (at least my own coverage of it) is able to do that B2 kind of stuff. I can do the ‘B1 kind of stuff’ with weak spots in production (just like in French, because I don’t practice those skills enough).

[rigelmejo]

March Progress Updates, and April Goals:

This hopefully will not get to long. Progress made in March.

Chinese progress:

Chinese novel chapters read in March: 64 (most are 寒舍, these chapters average at 10 pages on my phone compared to the usual 20, so also for size comparison’s sake this is equal to around 32 20-page chapters... still I think this is most chapters I’ve read in a month so far)

Chapters I studied with Listening-Reading Method: 4 (L-R to The Glass Maiden, Love and Redemption’s novel. I only did it as I felt like it though... and as usual the way audio didn’t line up to chapter endings made it hard, so next time I do L-R I’m still planning on Guardian or Silent Reading. That said, this amounted probably 2+ hours of audio. Currently on The Glass Maiden: chapter 5, Audio 12)

Chinese shows watched: 10. (At the beginning of this month I was watching Word of Honor and Killer and Healer raw, until english subs came out. I did well enough to follow the plot so yay I plan to take advantage of that next time I can’t wait for subs ToT but I still don’t catch nuance super well so the eng subs I still picked up new stuff... related to this I definitely think I could rewatch Guardian in chinese only now, if I wanted to pay attention to the chinese lines/wording, especially since that plot I know well already. A big part of why I’m missing some nuance is usually the first watch I’m trying to catch all the plot so some things go over my head, then if I rewatched a woh or kah episode I caught more little line details)

Chinese Spoonfed Audio listened to: 11 (I was in the habit of walking and listening to one file per day, but then I twisted my ankle lol ToT. I would love to just... finish these files. That said they make great chill practice/review)

Japanese progress:

Japanese Audio Lessons: 1 (I was trying to do something with this - very good resource - but ended up not focusing on it).

Japanese KH Let’s Play watched: 6 (so 30 minute to 1 hour lets play videos, where I listened and looked up words as desired in jisho.org. I also watched a few random things like Ratchet and Clank I found in japanese lol, but I’m only counting this cause its what I watched for a decent length of time and paid attention to)

Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide, lessons read: 10 (I’m almost done with part 1 which has 11 lessons - i think the guide has 3 main parts. I’m trying to read ahead of doing the Nukemarine deck’s tae kim relevant portions)

Nukemarine Memrise decks: finished LLJ 3 - Kanji, 289/318 finished in LLJ 4 Tae Kim part 1. (Ideally I would like to get done LLJ 4 part 2, LLJ 5 before I start trying to PLAY a video game in japanese again. LLJ 4 parts cover beginner grammar, and LLJ 5 is 1000 common words. Long scale ideally, I would like to finish Nukemarine’s first 8-10 decks, since I think that sets a good foundation and utilizes all the main parts of it - the rest is like more in depth intermediate/advanced niche stuff. From there I’d like to just go back to immersing, maybe read my 2 textbooks that focus on Japanese Reading eventually. The short term goal this month was to do the OLD stuff I’ve done in these decks years ago, and surpass it. Which I DID. As of this month I’ve gone farther in the Nukemarine decks than I did last time I studied japanese or tried to play japanese games/read manga. So good job mejo! ToT You are officially studying new material. I’m not... in the most flashcard mood ever, and not really in the mood to read Tae Kim very much... but doing those 2 things has been the most effective study this month so its what I ended up doing)

So yeah... made some decent progress this month. As usual I did not do what I expected to do. I REALLY really thought in February or March I’d finally Listen Reading Method go through Guardian but lol... still hasn’t happened. That said, I found files for all of Silent Reading’s audiobook and Guardian’s audiobook I already had (and because of how avenuex made it - the chapters LINE UP perfect with the text). So I am prepared to L-R a priest book I love whenever the motivation finally hits.

Reading has been going a lot better than I ever could have expected. And I did try a few pages of a few other novels - I still have many words to learn lol. The second I switched to a new novel my words I had to look up increased a LOT. That’s good in a way though, it means the next novel I go to will teach me a lot too. At the moment, I plan to kind of just stick to hanshe - and probably this author - for a while. At least as far as intensive reading where I look up each word. The ease of reading feels good and I’m not ready to give that up quite yet (I will be once I get invested in a new story tho probably lol). I have also been slowly extensively reading Guardian, and if I do pick books for extensive reading they’ll likely be priest ones for now. Just because I have english translations available to reference and read first, and I’m familiar with priest’s writing style, so its an extensive reading material I can pick up a lot of words from context when I read. This past month Guardian was the only novel I really extensively read a bit - and with the eng translation to help, it went well. 

I also checked HSK words this month, and my brain forgot 100-200 HSK 4 words, and like half of HSK 5. Its not an issue right now since I’m studying to read and watch shows, not to pass an HSK test. But its something I should keep in mind. I got tempted to go through HSK flashcards but... genuinely I need to separate my study activities if I intend to focus and make progress. When I’m doing flashcards for chinese AND japanese I just end up giving up and doing none. The only time study methods don’t seem to interact is when its immersion, since i don’t have to ‘progress’ through material I just have to choose to do ‘some random thing’. (So no lesson 1-10 etc that I must do in order, just any random video or chapter read counts).

So in light of that, my April Study Plan I would like to be mostly the same. Will it work out that way, who knows? But Ideally:

Chinese April Plan:

Read chinese chapters. (intensively - hanshe or X, extensively optional - Guardian probably)

Try to Listen Reading Method a bit (probably Guardian, or Silent Reading)

Optional - continue listening to Chinese Spoonfed Audio (would be nice to get into the 20s)

Optional - watch some shows in chinese (realistically I predict that if 2ha’s Immortality drops in April I will 100% be doing this if english subs aren’t immediately available, and doing as many eps as needed so this count could well be 10-20 eps lol by the end of April. but if english subs are then I probably will be too busy to bother watching anything with chinese subs only. this activity is highly dependent of if i will have a reason to)

Related - read through Guardian and/or Silent Reading in english (while this is not directly studying at ALL, the more of these I read the less I’ll avoid ‘L-R’ since the prep-work and time L-R takes will be shorter, also then it’ll be enjoyable refreshing instead of me trying to follow the plot for the first time... same with extensive reading, if i’ve read in english then the extensive reading is less mentally draining and less daunting and i tend to do it more... this past month my Guardian extensive reading was mainly just restrained by how much i’d read beforehand in english)

Yes, mainly big reading focus again, with optional activities where I might listen more. L-R would ideally work great alongside me reading, just because then I’d be practicing both listening skills and reading.

Japanese April Plan:

Continue reading Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide (would be nice to get through at least 10 more lessons)

Continue through Nukemarine LLJ decks (intense goal is to get through LLJ 4-part 1, LLJ 4-part 2, and LLJ 5... though I would be floored and happy if I just get a few hundred into LLJ 5...)

Optional - try to play some Nier in japanese at end of month (dream goal is I get through enough of Nukemarine by the end of April to play the game getting remastered IN japanese TOO but. That’s probably a pipe dream lol. I’m getting the remastered Nier at end of April and if its like Automata then it’ll come with both language options, and it would be very cool to have an english and a japanese save file...although the language is ??? since its like sci fi fantasy so if its hard i might not play it long... but just to have a foundation enough to even play it a little would be cool. I could always play KH2 if i feel like maybe i have hope lol)

Optional - watch more japanese lets plays (fun, easy, why not)

Bolded is what I really PLAN to do in April. But we will see lol.

[rigelmejo]

November Goals Update

oh wow so i checked my november goals and... wow did I barely follow my own plans lol ToT

i am sad to report that i hardly did anything on that list.

I think I did:

 roughly 4-6 chapters of Listening-Reading method.

read maybe 10 chapters in chinese this past month ;-; I also read a few pages of a few new novels (Peach Blossom debt, demon wants to hug, Sa Ye, Poyun)

did like 2-4 hours speaking practice with my putonghuaxuexi app

got into clozemaster again, did 559 sentences on the Fast Track (I’m currently in the 1000-2000 most common words region)

got onto tandem, texted in chinese a bit (but very basic convo and not much, so it wasn’t really improving)

watched a lot of chinese shows but it was with an eng sub so it doesn’t really count (I’d like to think it makes a tiny bit of difference tho, since I have been noticing better listening comprehension lately)

listened to like 2 audio files in the Chinese Spoonfed Audio files (so little...)

watched roughly 1 episode of a chinese show with only chinese subs (I SHOULD up this number honestly, because when i did the episode it was not draining and i was relaxed and sleepy so like i clearly Can do this task without mentally draining myself now... its just motivation...)

for the sake of my heart... i did write 3 little mini chinese stories, just for fun. they were not hard though or very challenging, and probably a hot mess though, so all this really means is maybe my active vocabulary is getting a touch bigger. i also had a few convos with myself in chinese just to see if i could word my thoughts in chinese - i guess upside with this is my rough chinese active vocabulary is getting closer to my french >o>

The only real positive I see here is... ToT I at least did some things, so my skills won’t slip too much! But this is not nearly as much as I’d hoped to do. I do not think I did much to actually Improve this past month...

So I think my November goals will move forward and also be my December goals... I will do a December goals update post later.

If I think I did anything decent this month is was: 

Reading - not nearly as much as I wanted, but it feels directly helpful Every time I try to read more, so I’m going to keep doing it. And I’m glad I read at least a bit this month.

Clozemaster - while it is an activity I just do maybe 10-20 minutes a day in minute long bursts, I am happy i’m doing it because i was ABLE TO DO IT CONSISTENTLY. it was easy enough to get myself to do, that when I got too busy to read, I could do this each day still. Its a compact way to at least pick up some new vocab and hanzi. It’s roughly similar to anki, but unlike anki, I can actually focus on Clozemaster (for now). So I’ll probably keep doing it. It’s easy to slot into down time like commercials or when I’m waiting for things. If nothing else, it helps keep me studying at least a little. Also you know me i LOVE the challenge of hearing what someone else did and trying to do it TOO to prove if it works. Someone said they did the Spanish Fast Track in Clozemaster, watched shows in Spanish, and that’s how they got to B1. So of course... I have to see if doing the Chinese Fast Track, and watching more shows in only Chinese, will boost up my own language ability lol. (This is also how I got myself to learn the 2000 most common words AND try to read initially - someone posted they used X common word decks, then jumped right into reading, and so I was like “if they can do it so can I” and I did it too ToT which was rough but did sort of work).

Incorporating more LISTENING. I did a few hours of Listening-Reading, and honestly I just need to in SOME WAY be increasing my listening practice! I’m thinking about just listening to audiobooks in the background again, or listening to condensed audio files of shows in the bg. Because like... although I think Listening-Reading is the FASTEST way so far I’ve used to boost my listening skills (and pick up some new words while doing it), doing any listening has clearly been helping a ton. I know that in the few months I HAVE been adding more listening activities, I’ve already seen major benefits. Its much easier for me now to hear words before I manage to read the eng or chinese subtitles - and to be able to hear ONLY audio and still be able to understand the sentence or phrase. I was watching Fearless Whisper in only chinese last night, and I’m not sure if they have a Shanghai accent but I could tell they were saying some words differently but it was still quite easy for me to pick out the words/phrases being said (again, faster then glancing at the chinese subtitles). In Go Ahead, which I’ve been watching with chinese eng dual subs, I can catch a lot of the dialogue (since its daily life) without needing to look at the subs. I’ve been having a much easier time hearing chinese songs and picking out the phrases and words I know and guessing at the song’s lyrics (and singing along’s been easier just since I can catch the sounds without needing the text lyrics as much). Just like... in general I am well aware this listening more has definitely helped the skill. And its so easy to improve too!! You just LISTEN MORE! (Although, Listening-Reading is quite mentally draining, but with that you’re also picking up new words so its worth the drain a bit). But like.. if you just read, then separately do listening practice, the listening skill seems to drag itself up to match what words you know in reading. So at this point ANY listening activity I do is helpful! The Chinese Spoonfed Audio is so useful! I just get so bored of ‘educational’ style materials I avoid doing it. (Which is why clozemaster is useful - I only have to see educational material for 1 minute at a time - but if i do too much of that I’d probably avoid it too). So like... I’ve been avoiding Listening this past month because I don’t want to listen to something boring, and I don’t want to do something as intense as Listening-Reading. So I think the lesson for me is just... do something involving listening. Its okay if its ‘less perfect’ because its just random audio like a audio book or audio drama - if it gets me TO listen to something, its helpful enough.