No use in keeping track of time.

我会说中文好一点. 我一直学习中文天天都. Ok, I will switch to English. I wrote that I am able to speak Chinese better than I could before, and that I still study Chinese everyday. These things are true. Not much has changed since the last update, but I will discuss some of the stuff I have been doing lately. The Chinesepod work that I described in the last post is very similar to what I do now. Recently, I made some changes to what I do with Chinesepod. For example, I am now studying intermediate lessons. I must say that making the jump from Elementary to Intermediate is quite difficult. Perhaps, I am not truly ready for Intermediate, but I felt that I was not learning enough with the Elementary. I wanted more of a challenge, and I am getting it with the Intermediate. Before I was studying three lessons at a time, but because of the increased difficulty, I have dropped it to two, and increased the time that I work on lessons from 9 days to 10 days. This may not seem like a huge change, but it allows me to more keenly focus my study on the two lessons that I am working on instead of trying to do three. As a rule, I will learn between 10 - 15 new Chinese words with each Intermediate lesson. Because I focus on the lesson for 10 days, I really hammer down on pronunciation. Each 5 days, I add a new Intermediate lesson. I try to spend an hour on Chinesepod each day to solidify the work that I do on the podcast, but that can feel like a chore, and I don't do it as often as I should.

I have also signed up with a website called Smart.fm. It is really good, and it has been helpful with helping me learn to read Chinese characters. I am actually not too bad with reading hanzi, (thanks to the hours of studying I did using flashcards while living in the states), but I don't know how to say the chinese with the characters or write the pinyin. smart.fm is helping me with both of these. I recommend Smart.fm for anyone who is learning to learn a foreign language as a good free supplement to the resources they currently use.

I still am doing the writing practice that I described in the previous post. My mean average is 4 characters per day, and I hope to increase it to 5 by the end of June. It is a lofty goal, and I don't know if it is mathematically possible, but it is something to shoot for. The writing practice is helpful to me because it is helping me to understand why the characters mean what they do.