July and August 2021 Chinese Study Review and Thoughts

July:

Hours studied: 171:25

August:

Hours studied: 88

Media/study specifics:

Podcasts:
故事fm, 大人的small talk, 声东击西, 馬力歐陪你喝一杯, 百靈果NEWS

Reading:
Finished Thrawn 3: The Last Command | 索龙三部曲3： 最终指令
Started: Darth Bane 2  | 达斯·贝恩 2

Watching:
同一屋檐下
灵笼

Pronunciation/Output:
Glossika
1 - 2 iTalki lessons a week
Shadowing

Journaling:
I started doing my Morning Pages and previous day's review using Chinese. As some sort of guard rails, I have been using DeepL to help me get my thoughts out of my mind. My main focus is just expressing myself since it is replacing an important part of my morning routine and I get a lot of value from Morning Pages.

Thoughts:

Over these last two months, I have started trying to output. I have found it incredibly frustrating and humbling. I can understand a rather large amount of Chinese, but whenever I try to speak I simply can not find the words or sentence structures necessary to express myself. Perhaps this is a symptom of immersion learning, perhaps I am trying to output too early. Regardless, I was very tired of only inputting Chinese and wanted to make a change and start outputting more. So far I do think it has been somewhat successful, but until I just simply have tons more time speaking and tons more times shadowing, I don't think I will make substantial progress in my output ability.

You'll notice my time has dropped a lot in August. I have started learning programming. I hope to find more of a balance between this and Chinese going forward. I'm currently preparing to move to Taiwan in November for 9 months of language school on the Huayu Enrichment Scholarship so I'm sure my Chinese time and ability will be increasing in the coming months, especially once I'm in Taiwan.