Nandemonai's log (Mandarin, German, Tadoku)

[Nandemonai]

After reading some of the graded readers I made a text version of my reading assistant tool. With it I've been able to read over a 100 pages of 無職転生's official translation into Chinese. At my current pace I should be able to finish the book by the end of the month.
While reading I've noticed a group of connector words that I need to study more intensively. For example: 雖然, 因此, 即使, 然而, 而且, 於是, 就算, 不過, 因為, 畢竟, etc... I kind of know what they mean but I haven't completely internalized the usage of these words yet.
I'm also generating Anki cards for words as I'm reading, but I haven't started studying those yet. I'm a couple of days away of wrapping up Spoonfed so I'm prioritizing that over mined words for now. From just the first 100 pages alone I seem to already have a bit over 900 mined words (most likely contains duplicates).

Haven't felt this much progress with Mandarin ever and I'm glad it's finally showing results after nearly a decade of studying.

[Nandemonai]

Finished the spoonfed chinese anki deck! Took roughly 3.5 years but I’m glad I’m finally done.

[Nandemonai]

It's been nearly a year since the last update so I figure it's about time to post an update.
In the beginning of the year I was reading semi regularly in Mandarin, albeit with assistance from tools. I learned quite a bit of new vocabulary and grammar from that.

After a couple months I got busy with life, rebuilding the Tadoku website, and I was also looking to buy an apartment here in Tokyo. Quite proud that I was able to get a mortgage all in Japanese without needing any English support. I learned a lot of real estate related vocabulary in Japanese this year!

In September things started to settle down and I began to put more time into Mandarin again. I've always been somewhat frustrated by my (lack of) listening ability in Mandarin. Seeing my brother (who is also studying Mandarin) use Mandarin in real life gave me motivation to work on listening and also pronunciation. So those are now prioritized for the next couple months.

I've basically started over from the beginning when it comes to pronunciation. Last time I learned about pronunciation and phonetics was in 2014, which is a long time ago. Many years of only reading and no listening/speaking meant that I forgot a lot of the sounds and even associated the wrong sounds to words. I've since re-learned all the sounds with Grace Mandarin Chinese's pronunciation training video playlist. I now have a better understanding of how to produce the sounds and the relationship between the different groups of sounds.
I'd like to dive into real native content with Mandarin but I'm finding it really difficult to watch stuff while not understanding much. I try to watch things on a daily basis but it's very limited (at least when I compare it to the amount of stuff I was consuming while learning Japanese).

In order to have sufficient daily listening practice I've decided to use a Japanese book series that provides sentences to shadow. The series is called 口を鍛える中国語作文 (初・中・上). I processed the audio from these books and turned them into an Anki deck. I'm doing audio only on the front and the Mandarin on the back. The sentences don't really contain many new words so it's purely for training listening (I also intend to retire cards after 4-6 weeks).

I'm now ~400 sentences into it and already seeing improvements in my ability to parse sentences without any reading aids. Doing about 20 new sentences a day, and at this rate I have content until the end of the year.
I'm hoping that by the end of year my listening will be good enough so I can watch simple shows and improve my listening naturally through those. At a later stage I might even incorporate shadowing into the mix.

That's how 2023 has been going so far. I'm kind of thinking of picking up German next year but that will depend on how Mandarin is going.

[Nandemonai]

Japanese

I haven't been actively studying the language anymore. For the most part just consuming media and living life in Japanese. I've nearly read/listened to 200 books in Japanese and will probably reach that in the next couple months. At the moment I'm reading a book about machine learning in Japanese (which is relevant for my job and personal interests).

Mandarin

I ended up burning out shortly after the last update. The pace of 20 sentences a day (from 口を鍛える中国語作文) too high to keep up with and I eventually stopped reviewing them. In the middle of December I got back into it, but this time I lowered it to just 5 sentences a day. This is a lower time commitment and easier to fit into my schedule.

I started using LingQ for Mandarin and am using the dialogues from the lessons to listen to on repeat in the background. I've been using the intermediate level content that's already freely available.
I'm mostly watching Shin Chan on YouTube for free-flow immersion. I'm starting to understand more but it still takes a lot of energy to stay focused.

I'll be keeping Mandarin on the backburner for now, just making sure I still interact with the language on a daily basis.

German

I've finally started German! I've been wanting to start this language for a long time already. I had bought the German Assimil course (Dutch base language) over a decade ago, but kept telling myself that I should focus on Mandarin first. It feels great to tackle a language which is much more transparent from the beginning.

I'm using the following as my main resources:

• Assimil
• Refold's DE1K deck
• LingQ
• YouTube videos (at the moment the Easy German channel)

For this language I've decided to not set any kind of goals at all. Just immerse myself in the language as much as feel like it and not worry at all about how fast I'm making progress. However, I am tracking my activities in German because I'd be interested to see later how I ended up using my time. I'm using Tadoku to track this, which is to dogfood the app into becoming more useful in that regard.

---

Overall my goal for all languages is not to worry too much or set ambitious goals. I just want to keep a consistent/active language learning routine.