I’m 35 days into the 100 days of Mandarin challenge. Here is my introductory post. It is a blast, and I’m looking forward to doing a 50-day review in a fortnight.
This review is of one of the apps which has made the largest impact on my Mandarin learning thus far. It also has not been reviewed by many other people, so I hope that this review will help Mandarin learners decide whether this app is for them (or not, as the case may be!).
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Today is the day I start the 100 Days of Mandarin challenge! And I was psyched to be starting! If you’ve not heard of it before and are interested, here is a link to the introductory post.
Day one started quite well: I printed out a character list for the HSK 3 exam. The list has 300 characters on it, and I went through and underlined every character I could translate immediately from English into Mandarin. From there it all went… a little downhill: I only know 65 characters of the syllabus on sight. Which isn’t bad as I’ve only covered the first 80 characters so far.
But then I made a list of the English words and tried to write out those 65 characters in hanzi and got 18 right. Ouch! I don’t understand how my brain can recognise characters, or look at the English and know the pinyin but not remember how to write them. Guess I’m going to have to start drilling writing words out to get my brain into actively knowing them , instead of passively recognising them.
I began Operation Write More by copying out some sentences that used 以前 (before), 以后 (after) and 的时候 (temporal phrase to show when a moment happened) and then making up my own. I’m already feeling a little more confident with stroke order for some HSK 3 words like “鼻子”. There was a satisfying clunk in my brain when the grammar points made sense.
After some debate, I also shelled out on Chinese Zero to Hero (HSK 3). It’s getting to the stage where some of the grammar points are a little hard to fathom even after reading the textbook examples, and it looks as though ZtH has some decent and concise videos explaining them,
Later I’m going to draw up some more squared paper so I have enough for practicing writing more evenly sized characters. On regular lined paper some of them just end up looking like individual characters instead of components.
At the start of 2021 I mentioned that one of the challenges I’d like to take part in this year was the 100 Days of Mandarin challenge.
In case you’re not familiar with the “100 Days of X” challenge, the goal is to spend 100 days doing at least 1 hour of X (aka. the habit you want to acquire/ thing you want to spend some quality time on). You then tweet about your progress using the hashtag #100DaysofX, and then find 2 other people who are taking part in the same challenge, and go and encourage them to keep chipping away at their 100 Days goal.
So quite similar to blogging apart from the spending an hour a day on it part (this is a reflection on me, not on the many phenomenal bloggers I’ve stumbled across on the bloggersphere).
Last year I started learning Mandarin, fell a tiny bit in love with it, and decided to shoot for that infamously nebulous goal of “becoming fluent” in it. Whilst I was fairly applied with my studies last year and breezed through the HSK1 and HSK2 exams in 6 months, this year I’ve been studying in dribs and drabs and my progress is at an all-time low. My language learning Bullet Journal is a little painful to look at, if I’m honest.
In addition to the tweets, I’m also going to post on days 1 and 100, and also do a weekly wrap-up of how studying has gone for the week as a whole. I’m hoping that this will make for pleasant re-reading at the end of the 100 days. Or if not pleasant then perhaps motivational…
If you’re taking part in a challenge, any challenge and want some moral support, then pop a comment down below and I’ll cheer you on/ go to your blog and cheer you on there.
Good luck to you all, may you achieve your goals for the day!
Over the years I have built up a small collection of language learning resources that I have looked after and taken with me as I moved around the country. Now that I’ve settled down for good, I am going to try to do something I always mean to do but never get around to: I am going to use some of those resources to learn languages.
As this year is a bit of a strange one with a lot of free time ahead of me, I am going to aim to complete four language challenges. Click on the one that interests you most to jump down the page to it.
100 Days of Mandarin
In December of last year, I completed the HSK 1 and 2 coursebooks, and took both the HSK 1 and HSK 2 language exams. I even passed them, which came as a surprise as I’d spent years telling myself I’d never be able to learn Mandarin. (Yay!)
But those 300 characters I’ve learned barely get my language level up to A1. (Boo!)
So I am going to keep on increasing my knowledge of characters and grammar. By doing an hour of studying every day for 100 days, I’m hoping that I’ll have learned a couple of hundred more characters, and will be able to understand a few more snatches of speech when watching C-Dramas. Who knows, I might even be able to pass HSK 3 by the end of the year…
Introvert Language Challenge
I actually created this challenge for myself because, as mentioned above, I have a lot of language learning resources. The aim of the challenge isn’t actually to get to B2 or anything lofty like that. Instead I’ve created this challenge to give myself permission to dabble in learning different languages. If I’m feeling nostalgic for LangJam, I might even spend a weekend or two learning the “survival basics” of other languages.
This year I am aiming to complete two of the self-study language courses that I have at home. To make life easy for myself (and because I have wanted to learn some Norwegian since about 2010) I am going to start by working through the Teach Yourself Norwegian course. When I’ve finished it, I’ll work through another language course, as the mood takes me.
The Output Challenge
I lurk on Language Learners’ Forum being inspired by others’ progress, but have never actually made an account on there. So I’ve not officially signed up for the ambitious Output Challenge, which involves writing 50,000 words in your target language AND recording 50 hours of speech, but I am going to aim to complete this challenge.
Spanish is my stronger-weakest language: I used to be on frustrating B2/C1 cusp, but have not used it at all since leaving Spain in 2015 and have regressed back to B1 for all things production-related. I really want to de-rust my knowledge of Spanish this year. If this baptism by fire does not help then nothing will! I sense some very earnest and very terrible fiction is about to be written. Forgive me, world…
Tadoku
As one of my goals this year is to read more books written in languages that aren’t English, I thought why not make an event of it and join a Tadoku challenge! As of January, I’ve started participating in one in French, and am reading Mousseline la Sérieuse. Here’s hoping I’ll complete at least 1 book per challenge!
If you’re learning a language this year, or are even thinking of it, I’d love to hear about which language you’ve chosen!
Wild Night In 