Week 19 Chinese Study Review and Thoughts

Time: 28 hours 18 minutes

Reading:

Thrawn trilogy book 1

Enjoying the book, but the amount of time I've spent reading has really dropped the last couple of weeks. I want to get back to 2+ hours a day.

Listening:

大人的Small Talk, 故事fm

I had tried listening to both of these before, but did not enjoy them because of the amount of ambiguity. I recently did the free trial of ChinesePOD and listened for at least an hour each day of the upper intermediate level. Although I was really bored of the format of ChinesePOD after this time, I think these two weeks of comprehensible input really helped jump start my listening. Refold stresses native material, but comprehensible input is very powerful too. I don't think one should be afraid to use learner's material for the sake of comprehensible input.

Watching:

Still watching the Star Wars the Clone Wars TV series on iQiyi.

Pronunciation:

Outlier Linguistics Pronunciation course, chorusing, Glossika

I only did chorusing once, but I am planning on making it a regular part of my studying. It is rather hard to get started doing it, but I'm sure it will get easier as time goes on.

I restarted Glossika because Outlier mentions how important it is to get exposed to as many sentences as possible, grammar is pronunciation, and it is a great tool for shadowing.

Thoughts:

A big change I made was starting to do Anki again, sentence mining, and intensively studying HSK 6 passages.

I started to start my studying with these 3 three things. It is pretty intensive so it's best to just get it done with. It takes about 2 hours to get through them all, but it feels like a very productive 2 hours. After doing this, I am free to relax and immerse the rest of the day.

Sentence mining:

Previously I had been really lazy with my anki sentence (Subs2SRS and spoonfed Chinese sorted with morphman). I haven't even done anki in about a month. Changing it to where you are actively picking the sentences just makes it more engaging and relevant to what you want to learn. The Migaku Browser Extension makes flash card creation from native material very easy. There is a large library of youtube videos with soft subs here. You can sort by different topics to find something that interests you.

Intensively studying HSK 6 passages:

I haven't really been intensively studying anything in months. I did some Anki if you count that, but the rest was free flow. Even though I read a lot, I don't go over and over a passage until I get 100% comprehension. I seem to have forgotten the power of intensive studying and picking up every single word and meaning. There is some nuance that is missed during extensive studying.

Someone uploaded the standard HSK 6 reading passages with audio here. I have just been going through them on LingQ and reading them and listening to them several times. I have also taken any sentences that have unknown words and made anki flashcards from them. You can use the Migaku Browser Extension to parse the text and make flashcard creation very easy.