Guess who fell off the log update wagon?
Though honestly for quite a while it would have been a boring series of reports of "well, keeping up on Anki and listening to FSIs in the car."
I did eventually finish the FSIs in the car, whee.
But back around May or so I decided to put a concerted effort into making sure I watched SOMETHING every day, and I've kept that up fairly well, going between Jia You Er Nv and Happy Chinese as time permits, sometimes both in one day.
That's been going well. I think I've mentioned before that JYEN has no English subtitles so I really have to concentrate to figure it out. About 25% of them are just confusing, about half I basically know what's going on, and about 25% I have a fairly good idea of everything. The one I watched yesterday was about some little girl who was sick of her piano lessons and I was able to keep up very well, that was a particularly good one for comprehension.
But the main change has been in my reading.
In June I finally resolved to finish up my last remaining level 1 Mandarin Companion Reader, the Secret Garden, which I did at a rate of a chapter per day. I noticed that my reading was still picking up speed, albeit slowly, but it was encouraging so I decided to make sure that I did some reading every day, and blocked out half an hour on my daily calendar for it. I started by plodding my way through a Chinese version of The Stand.
That was interesting. I slogged along at a page of about 1 page a day, occasionally a bit more, which took about 20 minutes. I didn't write down any new words or anything, but it was doable. And some days, since I've liked The Stand so much over the years, I was able to find the time and incentive to read for an hour or more (at separate times - a couple times I tried to do two pages in one sitting but halfway through the second page my brain would turn to mush so I stopped doing that).
Anyway I got to about page 35 or so and then I needed a book for a couple of hours in a location where I didn't want to be bumbling about with my two The Stand books - both the English and Chinese ones are bulky and it would have been a pain - so I grabbed this random thing I got a while back and had never really even read called
Tales & Traditions. And I was unaccountably
mesmerized. It was the first time I really read something and it was as pleasurable as reading in English. And most importantly I
understood it.
So The Stand went back on the shelf (for now) and I dove right back into the noob books. I've separated my piles of readers into 'already read' and 'haven't read' and I'm going through 'haven't read', and when they're done I'm going right back to the older ones, even the old easy easy stuff like the Chinese Breezes, because what's happening here is the grammar is finally gelling for me. I can finally read the easy stuff fast enough to see sentences as coherent units instead of having to go back each time after figuring out the characters and reconstruct the whole damn thing. I can also finally read it fast enough to read it with distractions, to read it when I have small chunks of time, and to read it just for the fun of it.
The advice is always to not try to read stuff that's too hard, and I can see how that is good advice but it is not only really difficult for impatient people to take that advice but it is also just plain tricky to gauge what is 'hard', especially in a character-based language. But I think I'm finally able to not only accept that advice for myself but embrace it with enthusiasm. It only took about forever.
