Judith's language learning blog

I am still adhering the schedule, though I overslept once again. These days I am feeling approximately as tired as on a Monday morning when I have to set up an alarm to get into work early. So I can do work and study, but I’m still looking forward to feeling better.

I am spending most of my time now watching the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” on Youtube in Mandarin Chinese with subtitles in simplified Chinese and in English. LordMaChou176 cut up and uploaded the entire TV series!
I find that I am recognizing more and more Chinese because of this activity, which is vaguely reminiscant of Listening-Reading. Often I stop the video, read the characters and find that I recognize most of them, even if I didn’t recognize the words as they were said. A problem is also that some of the characters speak in dialect or use other words than written, but not too often, so it’s still a good exercise. I am up to episode 20 now, though I’ve watched some key scenes beforehand (that’s how I got sucked into it).

I also religiously do my Anki several times a day for my Chinese. I am not too good at memorizing because of the brain being somewhat foggy, but I do know 1754 unique Hanzi now and am about to enter in some fresh characters. So it looks like I learned 254 characters since writing my Attack Plan 18 days ago, an average of 14 a day… if I can keep up that speed, I could learn 1890 more characters until the end of the year. However, keeping up the speed is not going to happen, because I will be on a 4-week vacation in the USA in September/October and I don’t see myself doing much studying around Christmas and New Year’s either. I will keep aiming for a grand total of 3000 characters known by the end of the year.

I also took some Greek classes on Myngle, from the package I still had. However, now my Greek teacher is on holiday and my package is about to expire with two lessons not taken – sometimes I want to curse Myngle for not giving students a reasonable amount of time in which to take those package lessons; leading to a lot of prepaid lessons simply expiring. On the other hand, it probably also succeeds in motivating some people to take some extra lessons just before the package expires; if they and their teachers can fit it into their schedule.