June 2021 Chinese Study Review and Thoughts
My time spent on Chinese this month is probably the lowest it's been in over a year. There are a couple reasons for this including participating in the Link Your Thinking Workshop (I'll have a post about this soon), traveling a lot, and maybe even some burnout. However, there's always a reason not to do it and I'm going to make some changes in July to get my study numbers back up.
Stats:
Hours studied: 88
Morphs: From about 7100 - 8100 (high due to textbook study)
New known LingQs: 1,580
Stopping sentence mining:
I decided to quit sentence mining since I'm studying the HSK 6 textbooks and making sentence cards from them. Doing both together was just too much
Pleco vocab flashcards:
Pleco makes creating new flashcards almost frictionless. I don't like reviewing in Pleco as much as in Anki, but I've found having vocab flashcards (along with sentences cards), especially for words that contain a new character, very effective. I wish I had utilized this more when reading. Going forward I will.
Media/study specifics:
Podcasts: 故事fm and 大人的small talk
Reading: Thrawn 2: Dark Force Rising | 索龙三部曲 2：黑潮汹涌
I finished book 1 on June 2nd.
Pronunciation: Glossika
Watching: Clone Wars TV. I finished all 5 dubbed seasons on June 30th. Needless to say, I had to binge season 6 and 7 in English shortly after. This has been pretty much the only Chinese thing I've watched since March or April. While I enjoyed it, I'm excited to start watching other things.
HSK study: Unit 10 - 19
HSK/Textbook study method:
This month I developed a method of how to study from a textbook. You can find that in my post here.
Helpful stuff:
Xiaomanyc interview with Julien
- Julien had the mindset of being the best in the world while studying Chinese
- He wanted to be able to speak Chinese exactly like his mother tongue
- When not practicing, he was still practicing in his head
- Have you thought about your mindset and Chinese goals?
- Doesn't think immersion alone will take you to a high level
- It takes active study of the language and grammar (native kids study grammar in school)
Going forward:
Towards the end of June I was really feeling like I wasn't doing anything. Life will always get in the way if you let it.
Link Your Thinking will be ending. This will allow me to focus more on Chinese again, but I'm excited by everything I've learned in the course and want to keep working on my PKM. In July I'm going to attempt to do PKM stuff in Chinese.
I'm going to establish a daily minimum to ensure I at least do some of the most effective things. The minimum is: Anki flashcards, read, and listen/watch something. This shouldn't take too long and really is doable no matter what is going on on a given day.