Mandarin Language Log

[kealist]

2024-02-10

Daily work Anki
Defrancis deck
HSK deck
Spoonfed deck

Did some minor video watching. Today was New Years party. Definitely understood a lot more of what people were talking about. Said a few random things here and there, but didn't speak much


2024-02-11

Daily work Anki
Defrancis deck (did not complete)
HSK deck
Spoonfed deck

I added Lesson 24 of Beginning Chinese reader illustrative sentences into Anki, but the TTS conversion didn't work because I did some of the process in Excel and it copied a bunch of formatting junk that must have caused it to fail. Need to fix that. I didn't finish because I didn't want to review those sentences without audio

I got sick, but did read some narrative passages in BCR before sleeping.

[kealist]

2024-02-12

Daily work Anki
Defrancis deck (did not complete)
HSK deck
Spoonfed deck

Falling behind on Defrancis deck, but Ill catch up (today). I add Lesson 24 & 25 sentences to Defrancis. Formatting is still a bit annoying. Need to see if there is a way to remove html tags from fields in cards.

Listened to the rest of The Secret Garden, and the first half of The Monkeys Paw again (1.5 hours)

Listened to Twitch streamers in the background for a while. Not a lot of CI videos today

[kealist]

Well, I missed a bunch of days posting due to being sick & on work travel. I'm not going to split out individual days For the most part i at least did SOME anki each day. I got behind on Anki a bit over this past weekend. I did spend the 14 hours driving listening to the graded reader audiobooks, which with the repetition definitely understood much more of what was going on. I did two level 2 ones. Journey to the Center of the Earth felt like 2x faster than level 1, but Great Expectations while faster, was a bit easier to follow. First listen without prepping vocab or anything---I ended up not understand a large part of the first part of Journey. Also hard to not space out a lot when sick and driving.

2024-02-19

Caught up on Anki Reviews. I'm out of new cards in the Heisig deck, so I need to add some more lessons.

I spent some time reading older lessons in BCR, going through the narratives. I do want to spend more time actually reading, I think. also thinking about trying to choose a book and just to heavy dictionary lookup on it. Readibu looked like a good app for that, but doesn't support my phone right now. I'll see if I can find something. Hopefully tomorrow I will not be sick and spend some more time listening as I didn't get listening much in yesterday or today aside from anki.

[kealist]

2024-02-19

Completed the 3 anki deck reviews (14x3 = 42 new sentence cards a day) Takes a little over an hour through the day. Again the process I use, is to listen and not look at the cards at first and try to understand and if I don't , then look at it and judge how well I did. I'm still trying hard to work on listening skills first.

I added two more lessons of Beginning Chinese reader sentences to the DeFrancis deck so I can have new cards for a few days. My Azure free trial expired so I had to update things to get TTS to work again.

I've been looking at the Heavenly Path site and while I don't think I have much interest in manhua or whatever, I think I may try to find a book to push through with Pleco. I downloaded a few wuxia novels and popup dicionaried my way through a couple paragraphs. I'll see how this works. I may go down to a few children books first. Maybe look through these https://heavenlypath.notion.site/Webnovels-and-Books-for-Newcomers-0a69c76ffba348d7afd9a6339cc084ae?pvs=25

[kealist]

Well, my logging has kind of fallen off, which is probably expected. I have been generally pretty diligent with mandarin at least

had a family trip so things got lost for those 3 days. Anki gets out of hand and then....just it gets awful. Today I changed new cards from 14 to 4 and limited reviews to 50 until Anki decides to calm down again. SRS is pretty stupid that way. no room for getting behind. But progress update--I'm halfway through HSK3 lesson cards in the HSK decks. I assume once I catch back up I'll have the hsk3 words in rotation by the end of march if not mid march.

I have continued my audio book repetition of the 10-ish graded readers of at 1+ hour / day and I can now understand probably 95% of the Level 1 Mandarin companion audiobooks without too much processing time except in a few places with less frequently used words. I should start pushing on the three Level 2 books and start working on podcasts I guess. Been thinking of using a few episodes of Mandarin Corner or some episodes of 每天中文課 youtube videos at the intermediate level which have been challenging. I think the big deal was that even taking a few days off I noticed a big jump in my comprehension of the audiobooks


I'd really like to be somewhere in the hsk4 level of comprehension at least by the time we go to China in June, but may be a stretch. I know this trip will be much better still with understanding so much more

[kealist]

I got caught back up with Anki decks. I have been doing the three decks, the 4 new cards definitely makes things easier. A log of the sentence structure of the DeFrancis stuff is generally more complex than the other two decks, so I still approach that a little more reading focused than (cards like "This population table has the population only of provincial capitals, not of district capitals." or "A big industrialist has come from France ; he spoke to us on industry in France in the past twenty years."). Those types of things don't resonate with so it's hard to pick up from just listening, though they are slowing getting better.

I listened to the Level 2 Mandarin companion novels a couple times. Definitely getting better and understanding more, but need to listen a few more times. I really should put the time in to read the books to help with that, but I haven't had a chance yet.

I have been slowly going through the narratives and dialogs of Beginning Chinese Reader to reinforce that Anki deck and to start practicing reading. The book says the two volumes compose 120,000 characters of reading (composed of 1200 combinations of the 400 characters). Maybe I can commit to reading for like 30 minutes a day to try to get myself into the intermediate reader in a month or two.


I don't know. I am going through some lack of motivation feelings. I think I just want to make sure I am making some kind of progress. I should probably just try to set aside conversational practice time with in laws, wife, or do italki.

Song for today: 呂允【到底為什麼我會暈成這樣 Dizzy Me】

[leosmith]

I should probably just try to set aside conversational practice time with in laws, wife, or do italki.

Good call! Maybe you'll like this.

[kealist]

I should probably just try to set aside conversational practice time with in laws, wife, or do italki.

Good call! Maybe you'll like this.

Always like sodagreen. I tried to learn one of their songs like 10 years ago but didn't get that far because I was dumb. Crowd Lu (盧廣仲) & Deserts Zhang (張懸) I listened to a lot back then, though I didn't get to see anything other than some random concerts when I was in Taiwan for a month. I found that guy in the post on the Team Ear label after looking back into TW music again.

[kealist]

I don't have a lot to report. I have sort of kept up with Anki, though had a couple of stumbling days. In terms of my loose goal, I will not be getting through all HSK3 sentences by the end of the month, but should be close. I need to bump up that deck new cards / day to 10 or so (finishing sentences from lesson 15 of 20).

Last week I was off work with kids and that kind of disrupted my schedule of practice. I need to get back into getting more input. Also really want to spend more time in Beginning Chinese reader. I do want to spend more time "chunking" the sentences when I add them into anki because of what I said in my last big post, but I have also gotten more comfortable with the length despite the TTS voice really sucking at phrasing at times.

I have met with people from conversation exchange, one older TW lady 2x and one Chinese guy 3x over video chat. My speaking is....slow, but I guess the practice makes it get better. I have definitely relied heavily on the input side the last few months, so I should really focus on setting up more conversation times to practice.

I did have another work trip about a week and a half ago where I got about 14 hours of listening to the Chinese audiobooks in over two days. Even though I have listened many times and thought that I had understood well, i am still discovering whole plot elements that must have gone over my head in the books. I definitely have gotten much more comfortable with the Level 2 books, and my understanding is a lot more automatic without having to think so much. There are still a few words I haven't quite figured out what they mean, but I also haven't ever gone and looked up much of them.

[kealist]

And in a world where nearly every Chinese video has hard subs on it (which I usually like to complain about), I started trying to watch Maiden Holmes, which I downloaded and amazingly it has almost every language subtitle except Chinese. So bizarre. Trying to use subs2srs on it. That's usually why I complain about hard subs--the other reason is that I want to listen, not read.