Well, the teaching period has ended, and I started my vacation on Wednesday. This means that I may have more time to dedicate to studying. The first part of my vacation will be dedicated to traveling, so studying may take a back seat. I intend to maintain my discipline of studying Anki everyday. Anki is a flashcard program that I am using to work on many areas of Chinese learning. Right now, I am focusing on pronounciation. I created an Anki pronounciation file that will likely take 11 months in total to complete. I have been working on it for over three months so far, so I have another eight months left. Although I am focusing on pronounciation, I am also working on other areas as well. I am in the process of listing all the information from a Chinese character textbook onto Anki. I practice my writing as well as my pronounciation, but I am not focusing as hard on the character writing right now, I spend between 20 - 30 minutes per day on character writing. I also work on files that were created on a now defunct website known as 'Smartfm'. They have been produced for Anki, but they have been adapted to suit the Anki format. I am not really focusing on these study tools as greatly as the others. I also have an Anki lesson that pertains to HSK preperation sentences, chinese characters, and a lesson that pertains specifically to food related vocabulary.
I also created a file that I use to learn words that I learned using Chinesepod and from my grammar textbook. This also takes a pretty good chunk of studying time. In all, I spend over an hour per day on Anki. In the short-term, I expect that that time will increase, then maybe in 6 months or so, decrease back to the level that I am at now.
A few weeks ago, I made the jump from Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate on Chinesepod. It was quite hard. I am still doing Intermediate lessons as well as I find that I can still learn new content. Despite daily Chinese studying, my score on the Chinesepod placement exam has not improved considerably. Perhaps in a few more months, I will find improvement on that exam.
So after three years of studying, my Chinese is still not that good. It is improving at a moderate pace over a considerable period, but I still have a long ways to go.I can understand simple conversations, and I do pretty well if I am talking to someone speaking the standard dialect, and speaking carefully. If they try to talk to me like they would a Chinese person, they easily blow me out of the water. Anyhow, thats all for now.
