Week 3 of 52 Weeks of Chinese
Sometimes I fear that my writings and suggestions make me seem like a super man, or seem like I do everything right. Other language blogs I read are often written by extremely motivated and accomplished Chinese learners. Sometimes, that can be an inspiration, but other times it might be a bit discouraging, too.
But don’t despair. I’m not a perfect language student, or a perfect person. This past week is a good example.
Last week wasn’t a successful week. Getting sick took away a few days, leaving me busier than usual. I also planned to do too much, a recipe for possible failure. I’m often overly-optimistic when it comes to planning, and so this week, I’m eating a bit of crow.
I didn’t plan to get sick at the beginning of the week, but that’s happened. When I have the flu, my mind doesn’t work. I just lay in bed, drink fluids and rest. My recovery found me busily working on my website for learning to study hanzi and read Chinese. It should be finished in a week or so.
I only studied once this week. But this week is over now. I won’t carry my regrets to next week. One bad week happens once in a while. The key is to prevent one bad week from becoming two and then three bad weeks in succession.
How to prevent bad weeks from happening
AJATT has good advice on this: create your environment and plan your environment for learning your language. To avoid the temptation of watching US TV or reading too much news, I’m going to remove the English related apps reading and video apps from my iPad. That will leave me with the Chinese apps and lots of good Chinese content.
Realistically, next week will be tough. Being Chinese New Year (aka. Spring Festival or 春季 Chūnjié), I don’t know how much free time I’ll have to study. So, I’ll do most of my studying in the morning after waking up.
After waking up, the first thing I’ll do is crack open my iPad and do some reading. If you’re a morning person I suggest you try the same. If you’re an evening person make studying Chinese the last
thing you do before you go to bed at night.
Actions you can take:
- Create your environment: remove the things that prevent you from studying Chinese from your life and add the things that help you study it.
- Study first thing in the morning or right before bed.
- Study things that are fun.
- Only try to focus on one or two things at a time.
What I did last week
- Read 3 articles on 财信
- I failed to add any words to my flashcard sets. I’ll try again to do so this week.
- Look for a language partner: another failure. Unfortunately, this will have to wait till after the holiday.
- Watch the news. Simple, yet I didn’t do it. Part of the problem here might be I find the news more boring than watching paint dry.
- Watch a movie/video with my wife: We watched an old Stephen Chow 贺岁片儿(hèsuì piànr: a movie released around the Lunar new year) called 家有囍事 (jiā yǒu xǐshì: All’s Well, Ends Well). It was funny and wacky in the way HK movies used to be in the 90′s. Like most HK movies in China, it was dubbed in Mandarin. Stephen Chow apparently always uses the same Mandarin voice actor for all of his movies.
If you’re keeping score, that’s 2/5 this week.
The plan for next week
- Flashcards. I’ve just about finished the beta SRS Flashcard functionality for 3000 Hanzi, so I’ll begin using it to study. It ties seamlessly into the articles that I’m reading, which makes it much more convenient than other options.
- Watch more TV: since next week is the Chinese New Year, this should be an easy task to do.
- Read more articles on caixin. Next week, I’ll make Caixin my only source for news. The goal is to read some everyday.
Summary
Don’t get discouraged if you have a bad week. Make the next week better by changing your environment so that it works for you.
It’s comforting to know that even the greatest Chinese learners (like you) have bad weeks. I’ve had a bad start with my Skritter goal as it’s hard to find motivation for certain type of studying during my holiday. I think I should force it first and when it becomes a habit it wouldn’t need so much effort to start. Where a software that only allows me to use Skritter for the first 15 minutes after opening my laptop?
You mentioned getting rid of English apps on your iPad. I managed to find some great Chinese apps for my mobile yesterday. One is to teach basic Cantonese, it has simple words and sentences with audio. Then I found a app that gots a lot of Chengyu with English translation and short background story in Chinese. Also one app has 1000 short stories that seem to be great to my level. On top of that I finally found a dictionary to my phone as well.
That sounds like a lot of apps! What’s your favorite one so far? Is your phone Android or iPhone?
I have android phone, but can’t download apps from the android market, because I don’t know the password with which to login to the market. But luckily I found Chinese app market’s app from my phone. I’m really liking the 1000个小故事 and try to read one short story before I go to bed.
Great post! I should write something like this, too.
Apart from agreeing with what you hav already said (I think the avoiding a bad week from becoming two is really good), I have a theory:
It’s the minimum amount you do that will determine how much you learn.
Is this true? I dont’ know. But I do know that my minimum amount of studying is considerable, even though I don’t live in China and take no courses. I listen a few hours each day, I do around 200 flashcards. I chat with people in Chinese all the time. I read some.
Anybody can do twice that much or more, actually without trying too hard. The problem, I think, is that many people aren’t able to sustain that for years. That’s why I think your advice is so good. I’ll think about this and perhaps I’ll get back to you with a post in reply later! Great article anyway.
I’m not sure if it’s the minimum. I’d say it’s probably the median amount you do that determines how much you learn or forget. Don’t do enough and it goes away.
I look forward to your post.
Yes, of course it’s the total number of hours (which can be described as an average over a centain time as well). I meant that the minimum time spent tells us more about how a studetn performs.
I find your post good beceause it focuses not on your average week and not on your best week, but on your worst. This is also where most changes can be done (I mean, if you already stufy at full speed, you can’t improve that much, but anything that helps you avoid weeks of passivity is great).
You know what, the one thing that I like to do best is to save a whole bad week by pushing myself really hard to accomplish one super good thing just before the week ends. I’ve managed to shrink the cycle of this pattern to a day instead of a week. After a whole hour watching youtube and got nothing done I’ve pushed myself to finish quite a few tasks within the last half hour before bed.
) At least you won’t feel too guilty for the time you wasted, and also help to avoid the bad pattern to stretch into the next day or week.
[...] or maybe because of the oddness, I did a good job. I think I made up for my failure to be the perfect language student last [...]