Ticking off all the Japanese grammar points with an N2/N1 grammar book

 I have an N2 & N1 grammar book that I'm working through and very near the end of.

I like the book because there is no English in it, and it is very simple - Grammar structure + 3-5 example sentences, about 10 structures per chapter, followed by 30-odd multiple choice, fill-the-gap sentence questions to test comprehension. My ex had scored herself on these questions, so I need to keep a sheet over the options so as not to know the answer, which makes it a bit harder because I can't see the options and have to try to guess which of the 10 structures goes in the gap and how it is conjugated etc.

Despite having the book for over 10 years, I only really starting going through it about 1 year ago. I decided it was time to finally at least "see" all the grammar structures in Japanese up to N1 level. I felt that if I could at least say to myself that I had seen them all, then it might give me more confidence.

I'm almost at the end - 2 N1 chapters left to go - and I feel like that need has been met. Basically, when I am listening to native level Japanese now, I don't have a nagging fear in the back of my mind that if only I had studied all the grammar, I would be able to understand.

Does this mean I understand the native-level Japanese fully? - Absolutely not!! But I feel like I can just focus on new vocabulary and phrases that I don't understand now - of which there are still many.

The more I study, the more I realise that I need to study more. Haha. Is this a virtuous circle?!

Still going...

Never give up. That should be the motto of all language learners.

It's been over 5 years since my last post. A lot has happened in my life during that time, some good, some (a lot) not so good. But I still have my goals and language learning is one of them.

I passed the JLPT level 2 in 2012. I just sneaked past the pass level of something like 60%. Anyway, this year I have decided to try and take it again... 8 years later!

Back then I think I was in a rush to get Japanese under my belt and move on, so I was cutting a lot of corners. I had passed 2, so I could move on to 1. When, in reality, I still had a lot of work to do on the level 2 grammar and vocabulary.

I've realised that now that I am back tackling this level 2 stuff. I've signed up to an online level 2 course through Udemy. Recorded video lessons going through all the grammar points. I like this method, because it's like attending class, but you can do it at your own pace, and can rewind the teacher easily if you aren't paying attention (not so easy in a real life class). Plus it's cheaper! :)

Here is the level 2 course.

Slave to the flashcards

I fear I may have become too much of a slave to my flashcards. It`s now three years since I began regularly updating my vocabulary from the Tangorin website into my Anki flashcards. I`m absolutely positive that this has increased my vocabulary substantially, but I wonder if I have relied too much on this and neglected other areas that also need work in learning a foreign language. It`s as if the flashcards have become a distraction, they can lull you into the sense that you are progressing more than you really are.

In order to keep the number of cards in my decks at a manageable level I have been deleting them when they get to around the three month mark. This has enabled me to keep the number of cards ticking over, may have had a detrimental effect on my long term retention of some of the less common words. I`ve begun to notice this anyhow.

I`m also frustrated with my lack of progress with fluency. I was hoping that by now I would be a confident speaker in my workplace, or with Japanese speakers in my life, but this is far from the case. I feel I need to take a different tack to break new ground.

I`m currently taking three lessons a week, so I don`t think this is the problem. More likely that I need to use, or engineer situations where I can use, the language more frequently in my day to day life.

JLPT level 2 and new website

Been a while since I updated this blog, and there are a couple of things to report. Firstly, I passed the JLPT level 2! Yippee for me. I was actually a little surprised by this as I was only taking the test to see what it was like thinking I might be in a position to pass next year. Anyway, it turns out you only need t o get over 50% to pass because the test has become more difficult, which is exactly what I did, just. Anyway, a pass is a pass, and I'm pleased with it.

The other news is to report on a new site I've been using to study Japanese. Actually, this isn't a specific study site, it's a news site. It's called FNN News, and they have a lot of short video clips uploaded on their site, and the good thing is that they have the script printed below the video. This is priceless, because trying to catch the meaning of the video without the script is very difficult, but with the script you can, with the help of a trusty dictionary, make out the meaning of what the clip is about. My method is to watch the clip through once, then to read the script, looking up any words I don't know, then to watch the video again while reading the script, and to finally watch the video one more time without reading. By the final time I find that I'm able to understand what is being said, and I start to think about other things, e.g. the character of the people talking, or the reason for this news story, as if I were watching the clip in English. It's good stuff. Thanks to my teacher, Taka Sensei, for introducing this site to me.

Reading a book in Japanese

Despite my last post about how difficult it is to get to a level where you can read a book in Japanese, I've been going for it lately. I've been reading a book written by a Japanese lady who went to China to teach Japanese for a year. It is an account of her time there. This book is good for me because the subject matter is both familiar and interesting to me: I have travelled abroad to teach, and I'm interested in China and have visited on a few occasions.

I'm finding that I'm able to understand around 90% of the book most of the time. The odd word or two I don't understand, but from context it's often quite easy to imagine what it could be. On occasions there are passages which are more difficult, and my understanding becomes a bit more clouded, but I find it's best just to plough through these sections and wait for the clouds to clear, rather than diving to the dictionary every time, which can be distracting and frustrating.

Anyway, hopefully the more I read, the easier and less cloudy it will become.

New iPhone

One thing that has a good effect on my language learning of late has been my new iPhone. It's my first smartphone and I've had it for a couple of months now. I downloaded the Anki app which has really enabled my flashcard usage to go up dramatically. It's great being able to check your flashcards for one minute or so while you are waiting for the train, or waiting at the pedestrian crossing or whatever. I'd say my use of flashcards has gone up by at least 100% if not a lot more.

家政婦の三田 on pps.tv

Another app that is useful is pps.tv. It's an app for a Chinese website where you can access all sorts of TV shows, movies etc. There is a Japanese drama category and I've been trying to watch a drama series from start to finish. There are subtitles in Chinese and Japanese! On the whole, I keep my eyes on the Japanese subs, and manage to follow what's going on quite well. From time to time though, I take a look at the Chinese subs too and get a bit of study in that way too.

The drama I've been watching is, like a lot of Japanese dramas, wacky as hell. It's called 家政婦の三田 (Kaseifu no Mita; Mita the housekeeper) and it's about a housekeeper who is working in the home of a bereaved family who have lost their mother/wife. The wacky thing is the housekeeper behaves like a housekeeping robot behaving and working perfectly, beyond belief, so much so that she actually creeps people out. It's wacky, but interesting to watch, and I'm looking forward to finding out why the woman/robot is as wacky as she is.

I held out from purchasing an iPhone for quite a while, but I've got to say it's a good purchase.

Update and new thoughts on grammar

Well, what with summer holidays and the like it's been a while since my last post, so I'm just writing this as a quick update as to what's going on.

I've got a lot of topics that I want to blog about language learning lined up, it's just that I've come to the conclusion that I'm spending too much time blogging about it and not enough time studying, so I've decided to concentrate on the study a bit for the time being.

I'm using the Oxford Chinese site that I mentioned before, and I'm really beginning to appreciate the benefit of grammar exercises. I think I had been lulled into thinking it was not necessary by some quarters of the language learning world, and this has been detrimental to my progress. Looking back at this blog, I am not sure I would support everything I wrote here or here anymore (although think balance is probably the best way forward, and certainly there is room for both techniques).

It is an atractive proposal not to have to bother with grammar, but I'm finding that studying the grammar really gives you a better understanding of the language and helps to give you a firm foundation from where to build your sentences, and this in turn helps to raise confidence.

Anyway, I'm going to try to make my way through all these exercises over the next month or two, and then perhaps scout around for some new material.

In the meantime, I'll try to find some time for a blog post or two. If you have any thoughts on the benefits of grammar study please let me know in the comments below, or of course if you have any comments on my blog or language learning in general, feel free to drop me a line...

Peacecorp language learning manual

I found the Peacecorp manual for language learning* on the internet the other day. I downloaded it and gave it a read. The manual is filled with good language learning tips, and it is clear that it has been put together by people who have been through the process. It’s not too text heavy, and is pretty practical— there's very little in the way of linguistic theory which was a relief for me.

Developing a learning plan

The manual advises identifying areas of your life where you need to use your target language and developing a language learning plan for these topics. Basically, you should identify something like “sending parcels at the post office” or, like the example they use in the manual, “chatting with other teachers during your lunch break” and prepare for this situation by preping vocab, and developing a possible dialogue that you might have in that situation. You should go over this with a native speaker, the book advises, and practice the pronunciation, register, etc. before going into the situation itself and trying out what you have learnt.

This seems like a pretty sensible way to go about things, so I thought I’d give it a go. Recently, I decided to improve my apartment with a few plants, so I needed to go to a florists to but some flowers. I prepared some vocabulary and a dialogue, (I uploaded the dialogue to lang-8 and got some feedback through that site), then I visited the florists and it seemed to go pretty well. I got to use a few new words and managed to buy myself a nice Chinese Bellflower for my veranda.

Chinese Bellflower:the fruits of language learning

Anyway, I think this is a good tactic. What other areas should you prepare for when you are learning a foreign language? Here’s a list of 5 topics that I think should be top of any language learner’s list:

1. Getting a haircut
A personal one this. I’m not a big fan of getting my haircut, in any language, and I put off going to a proper barber for years in Japan because of this and wrote about it here. But worth the effort, and barbers / hairdressers are great for language practice!

2. Asking for directions
When you’re living abroad, you’re going to get lost sooner or later. (The first time I went to China it took me about 20 minutes. It only took me another 5 minutes or so to find out that your average shopkeeper in Beijing speaks no English whatsoever!) Essential!

3. Asking where stuff is in a supermarket.
This one is another personal one. I’ve a tendency not to ask for help until I’ve exhausted every possible aisle and nook and cranny of the supermarket. Would probably have saved myself a lot of time if I’d just worked out how to ask in the first place. Took me much longer than it should have.

4. Ordering in a restaurant
Pretty obvious and always a favourite of beginner textbooks. But we’ve all gotta eat. This one will get a lot of use. It’s very easy to pick up food ordering language when you live where your target language is spoken, but I think it’s a good idea to cover it anyway, just to make sure you’re getting it right and the waiter isn’t just nodding politely at your dodgy language skills.

5. Telling your favorite story / joke
I’m not a big fan of people who bring prepared stories to the dinner table to be honest, but I don’t think it can hurt to think about a couple of stories that you’ve told in the past and think about how you might go about telling those in a foreign language— you could look up the vocabulary at least I guess.


So to sum up, I think this manual is pretty interesting. The only problem for me is is that it's clearly written for people who have a lot more time to devote to their studies than me. It is time consuming to put these learning plans into action, and is not something I can see myself doing on a regular basis (unless I can get into the habit I suppose).

How about you? When or Where do you think you need to set up a learning plan for? Have you done this kind of thing before?

*I've lost the link for this unfortunately, but I can email the pdf to anyone who's interested in getting it. Just leave a comment below. Or send a direct message to my twitter account.

Grammar focus

Recently, I've been beginning to notice the importance of focus in study. I think it's important to keep yourself focused on a certain point or structure for a period at a time in order to learn efficiently.

In the past, I've been in a hurry to learn, and when I think to myself, "I must study some Japanese tonight" or something like that my inclination is to take on the whole language, as if I'm going to be able to devour the whole thing in one sitting.

This may sound unrealistic, and of course it is, but I think this is my subconscious telling me I've started learning too late, or I'm not going to be living here forever, and I need to get a move on if I'm going to succeed.

Anyway, in recent months I've begun to notice the benefit of remaining focused on a certain point for a period of time—mainly thanks to the fact that I now have a good teacher who isn't allowing me to talk and talk making wildly inaccurate sentences as some of my past teachers have been willing to do (but perhaps this is a topic for another post).

So recently, we have been focussing on the てくださる、ていただく、てくれる、てもらう、constructions. I have been learning Japanese for nearly five years now, and of course I have come across this construction before. But I have never given it enough time or thought to truly master its usage. Now I realise what a big mistake that was. I've been spending a lot of time on this recently and now feel pretty confident using these combinations and it's like massive new areas of Japanese have been opened up to me, and I find it hard to believe I went for so long without really getting to know it well enough.

My approach in the past has always been to hope that this kind of structure would sink in eventually, I guess through a combination of time and exposure. Of course, this takes a) time, and b) you need a lot of exposure, two things that I have complained about lacking in the past. My reasons for thinking like this can probably be put down to laziness on my part, and having teachers who were not strict enough with me.

Anyway, I think it's important to really spend some time trying to get to know a structure or language point like this to get the benefits sooner rather than later.

I think one of the benefits of  focusing on one point over a period of time like this is that it becomes something that you begin to go over in your head when you don't have your books in front of you. This is great "free extra study" that you don't even have to put any energy into. It just starts to go round your head as you're doing the dishes or something like that.

So recently, I've been trying to put this into practice with my Chinese. With my teacher we are currently going over directional complements,  like 进去 - go in, 下来 - come down; and completion complements like 修好 - fix (good), and 买到 - bought. Already I can tell that this part of the language is going to be coming up a lot in Chinese, and I think my past approach would be to hope that it sinks in at some point. I think this is possible, but now my thinking is that to become proficient and familiar with these structures as soon as possible is the better way to go.

Pronunciation reminder

Had a reminder this week about my pronunciation problems. I wrote about this ages ago, and how inportant it was, and then promptly completely forgot about it for a year or so.

It seems that when it comes to Japanese I can kid myself that the pronunciation is so simple (at least compared to Chinese) that I don't need to think about it. Not so!

I've also mentioned before that when you really try to speak as if you are a native speaker, almost mimicking the native speakers I guess, success seems to become easier to come by.  Tonight I was concentrating on doing this in my Chinese language exchange, and I could see my Chinese partner's positive reactions to what I was saying.

10 minutes later however my concentration had slipped, and I was back pronuncing words with a British drawl. My language partner's face had dropped, I could see the pain in her eyes.

Goddamnit! It's bloody hard work learning these foreign tongues. There's so much more to it than learning new words and grammar. You really have to live and breathe the language. You have to mold your mouth around the thing again and again to achieve a modicum of success.

This may sound a little defeatist, but the challenge is not motivation for me. Just technique and opportunity. I need to work on both.

A horrible sentence should be a horrible sentence in any language

I get the impression that I’m doing something wrong. I think there’s a quicker way. Nothing to do with study technique, but more to do with the way I’m thinking about the foreign language.

I feel there’s a shortcut. A better way to remember. A better way to retain the information—to somehow connect word and meaning faster and more permanently.

Take a sentence like this:

你把钥匙放在哪儿了？

In Chinese this sentence is an exotic thing to me. I’m in awe of it in a way. The use of 把 to indicate the direct object is something I can’t comprehend yet. The Chinese characters are both complex and beautiful (one of the main reasons I am interested in the Chinese and Japanese languages) and the sentence is something that is pleasing to the ear.

In English, on the other hand:

Where did you put the keys?

Oh God! What a horrible sentence. Could it be more mundane and everyday? A sentence that can only irritate, or cause frustration. “Oh, crap, somebody wants the keys. Now I have to remember where I put the damn things—I can never remember where I put the damn keys!! I might have to look around for them for a while, they must be lost if he/she’s asking for them. Crap!”

The words ‘exotic’, ‘awe’, ‘complex’, ‘beauty’, ‘interest’, and ‘pleasing’, are clearly words not springing to mind when I hear this sentence in English. So perhaps this is where I am going wrong. This is where my brain is taking me away from the reality of the situation.

你把钥匙放在哪儿了？should also fill me with dread. This is also a sentence to be feared: a sentence to strike fear into the heart.

This must be the shortcut to connect the meaning with the language (something I’m sure all those linguists go on about). This is the shortcut I need to start taking more often.

Note to self: must stop appreciating the beauty and sound of foreign sentences and Chinese characters and start taking note of the unpleasant consequences they can cause.

Using kid's jokes

Recently I’ve started using children’s jokes to study. When it comes to language studying, especially for lowish level people like me, jokes have a number of things going for them as far as I can see:

1. They are short.

2. They contain lots and lots of dialogues and useful everyday language.

3. They usually hold your attention to the end because you are waiting for the punchline.

4. You never get tired of jokes—even bad jokes are good if you know what I mean.


Here is an example of an amusing, bad joke I’ve just uploaded and studied in LingQ—complete with my dodgy translation:


谁是孩子的父亲？
Who is the child’s father?

迈克是学校的勤杂工。
Mike is the school’s handyman.

有一天正坐在家中，突然一只足球破窗而 入，打在他身上，
One day, when he was sitting at home, all of a sudden a football smashed through his window and hit him.

一个小男孩满头大汗跑进来，说：“sorry，我马上打电话叫爸爸来给你修。”
A small boy ran in with sweat pouring from his brow saying “Sorry, I’ll phone my dad immediately and get him to come and fix it.”

一小时以后，果然来了个大个子男人，
An hour later, as expected, a large man came.

手脚利索地把玻璃装好，
With nimble hands he fixed the window quickly

随后向史克要10美元材料费和工钱。
Then asked for 10 dollars for material costs and labour fee.

迈克惊异地说：“你难道不是孩子的父亲？”
Mike said with amazement, “Could it be you are not the boy’s father?”

来人也惊奇地说：“你难道不是孩子的父亲？”
To which the man also with amazement replied, “Could it be you are not the boy’s father?”

It’s a kids joke: it’s cheesy and old, but I like it. There’s plenty of useful language in there, and I wasn’t sure of the punchline until the end, so my attention was held—unlike a lot of language learning material you come across. (although I'm not sure why Mike has to be a handyman, when it's his window being fixed. Maybe I've missed something in the translation here?)

This is where I’ve been getting some Chinese kid’s jokes from, and I've been uploading them into LingQ and saving the vocab in there. If anybody knows of any other good resources it'd be good to hear about them.

Consuming sentences more important than memorizing sentences

I tried for a long time to try and reproduce sentences I had memorized as language practice. This was a slow and painful process. A lot of time was spent digging around in my mind trying to find the clue that would allow me to remember the sentence. Looking back, I think this was a complete waste of time.

Now I just try to consume as many sentences as possible. I just see them, comprehend them, and let them sink in without worrying about being able to reproduce them. It’s easier and more fun that way, and the stress and discouragement that I felt from trying, and often failing, to reproduce sentences has gone. In the past, this kind of discouragement would perhaps have made me down books for a week or two, surely a much more damaging result that just letting a sentence go past without trying to memorize it! I think the thought of having to push myself through this memorization process was enough to make me think twice before picking up my textbooks during those times.

Now I'm banking on the fact that there are only a finite number of sentence patterns in a language, so enough exposure must surely result in mastery of enough of these patterns to achieve a certain level of fluency eventually.

I think this is clearly the case for vocab too. I remember my word list: a sheet of A4 paper that I used to create (by hand) everyday, containing ten to twenty Japanese words with example sentences. I would carry it around with me in my pocket and try to memorize the words every time I had a spare second. I remember there were words like 法律 (law) and 期限 (time frame) and countless others that I can't remember now because they clearly weren't relevant to my everyday life.

Useful, relevant words will crop up again and again, providing you are putting in enough hours in contact with the target language to allow this to happen, and I think in order to put in enough hours, you have to try to avoid discouraging things like sentence memorization.

Using Google images

Yesterday I had a lesson in Chinese about ordering in a restaurant. I'll be honest, I'm a complete dunce when it comes to food. Even in English I have trouble describing dishes and tastes, so trying to do it in Chinese is an Everest sized task for me. Anyway, I left the class with a list of Chinese food stuffs on my sheet of paper and as I sat down to go over the vocabulary today I was struck by a great idea: Google images!

Check it out. Just punch the word into google and you get the perfect idea of what you're looking up.

From the top we have:

粽子 zong4zi: a rice ball in a leaf

春卷 chun1juan3: spring rolls

馒头 man2tou: steamed bun

羊肉串 yang2rou4chuan4: lamb kebabs

粥 zhou1: congee

在香港我吃了真好吃的粥！

The flashcard debate

One of my more personalized flashcards

Are flashcards really the answer? Doubts are beginning to creep in to be honest. They're definitely helpful, and with the audio file added, they give me good practice listening and repeating after a native speaker, which is pretty valuable for Chinese because of the pronunciation difficulties.

But I've begun to think that as far as absorbing vocabulary and sentences goes, maybe using podcast material is more beneficial over the long-term. Podcasts give you more context, and are certainly more interesting than the flashcards, which are really just a series of unrelated, random sentences.

I follow a few other language bloggers on the internet, and I know that there are those that are against flashcards, and those that are for. I'd probably say that I'm in the 'for' camp for now, just from the point of view that they are a good tool for remembering certain phrases, and for remembering Chinese characters.

But they do have their drawbacks. One of the main ones—which is really the reason I have begun thinking about them a little more critically of late—is that you really do have to tailor them for yourself, and this can be time-consuming. I sometimes find myself spending more time, looking for, copying and pasting, and uploading sentences, than I do actually thinking about them in a meaningful, semantic way.

But like I said my current deck of cards has definitely helped me progress in some ways, especially with the pronunciation, so I'll keep them ticking over for now I guess, just to keep my options open.

Music

I still remain to be convinced of the benefits of using music to learn a foreign language. I've been playing a couple of Chinese language tunes that I like on my ipod for a couple of weeks now, but the lyrics are not really sinking in.

I guess I need to study them harder or something, but making out the lyrics on songs was never my strong point anyway. I tend to be more interested in the tune when I'm listening to a song, and very often don't pick up on the lyrics.

Two of my favourite bands are Massive Attack and Radiohead. And I've listened to their albums for years without really knowing the lyrics that well. I think their songs really speak to you through the music itself.

Anyhow, from the point of view of picking up vocabulary, and increasing your ability to speak the language, I don't think music is that useful. One thing I will say for it though is it does give you a topic of conversation to use with native speakers.

Living in Japan, I've come to like a couple of Japanese artists. One of my favourites is Angela Aki. I think she's got a great voice. I don't think she's the kind of artist most people expect a thirty-something British guy like me to come out and say they like, so it's always surprising to people when I bring up her name. It makes for good conversation anyway.

If your interested, this is probably my favourite of her songs 孤独のカケラ — translates as fragment of solitude.

The importance of having options

I think it's important to have a lot of different studying options to hand when you are learning a language, especially in the early stages anyway. It's very easy to get bored with what you're doing quickly, so having a number of different styles of study you can turn to when you get bored with one thing is important.

Today, I've been struggling a bit, I've mentioned this before: if the motivation dwindles it's difficult to get yourself going. But I've been flicking between things tonight, trying to get something done, and I must have accumulated at least one hours worth of useful study I think.

Back when I started studying Japanese three or four years ago, one hour in an evening was a really good achievement, because it meant sat slogging my way through a textbook. Now I have flashcards, podcasts, blogs, music, reading websites, youtube... basically any sort of contact with the language is good in my book now, and I can keep myself interested and occupied. Now one hour is a bad night, which bodes well for my language development over the next few years.

My method for making flashcards

Things seem to be moving quickly of late with regard to study method. I've almost ditched the idea of completing the Smart FM goals (yes, it does seem pointless to set a goal only to ditch it) but I think I've come up with a better method.

I need to really nail those basic sentences and get the pronunciation down pat for the Chinese. So I've started data mining sentences to put into my Anki flashcard deck.

Basically, if I find a word I think is important, say "important" for example, I'll search for sentences that contain the word "important", mostly from tatoeba and nciku. The sentences need to be fairly straightforward, and not contain other new vocabulary that I'll need to learn on top of "important". This way, when I go over the card, I can concentrate on the sentence, the word, and the pronunciation. If the sentence contains recently studied words or grammar that's even better.

I then collate these sentences and put them into anki. Over the course of a day I might add 10-30 new sentences which cover anywhere from 3 -10 new words or phrases.

The final stage of this process is putting the sentences up on Rhino Spike to get a native speaker to make a recording. I haven't really worked out the best way to do this yet, but I've got a few in the Anki deck already, and these sentences in particular really stick when it comes to having to review them.

The only possible sticking point with this method I can see so far is the number of Chinese speakers who use Rhino Spike. It's not a great number at the moment, and the sentences generally take a few weeks to get recorded. Hence my previous post attempting to recruit through a Chinese social networking language sites who's name I won't mention for now.

Anyway, all is good at the moment. Feel positive about this. Just need to knuckle down and start getting through the flashcards.

Chinese character goal

I have set myself the goal of completing all the Smart FM Chinese character goals by the end of February—6 months from now.

This goal will be difficult, but I have made it difficult in the belief that this will get me to study faster and harder than if the goal was easier.

At the moment I’m on level 2. Level 1 took me approximately 20 hours. Considering level 1 was pretty easy for me anyway because I’m familiar with a lot of the basic Kanji, let’s say that it takes 24 hours to complete one level. In that case, a robot would be able to complete the course in 10 days. Unfortunately, I’m not a robot, so 6 months is my goal. That means I have to complete one and a bit goals per month—let’s say 30 hours a month. That’s about an hour a day. When I have to work, that's unlikely, but if I can keep in the game, I can play catch up when I have some spare time.

I'm going to measure my progress by saying 50% of each level should be completed by the 15th of the month—50% of level 2 by 15th September, level 3 15th October and so on, and the whole goal should be completed by the end of the month (so far, so good). Then it's just a case of fitting those other 2 or 3 goals in somewhere along the way.

Should I manage this, then in theory, I should know enough Chinese to read a newspaper by March next year. I guess the grammar might be a little weak here, but if the goals work as they should, then character recognition and pronunciation shouldn't be a problem. Seems hard to believe.

Watch this space.

Need more time

Lately, I've had little free time for studying, and it begins to feel like I might have forgotten everything. Of course it's not true, but I think momentum and continuity are very important in language learning. At times where I have had time to study over a period of days, confidence grows and I can notice the improvement. I guess, it's obvious to say, but I really need more time to study.

On a seperate note, I've noticed that I tend to retain flashcard vocabulary better if it's part of a sentence, rather than just presented on its own, so I'm trying to improve my flashcard vocab decks. I think I might have said this before, but context is important, and helps with memorization.