One Month Progress Report: Chinese is still Impossible (but I am failing upward)

I am one month in, so it is time for a look back on the progress, or lack thereof, that I’ve made in my Chinese studies. I’ve nearly met some of my goals. Others were completely missed or outright abandoned. Others still are new, added a couple weeks into my program. Needless to say,  The Plan no longer is, and I ought to update the My Method page.

Cool website/resource I found this month: zhtoolkit: tools for studying Chinese. His post on the Anki “Myth” is relevant to me and hopefully interesting to you.

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Glossika Fluency 1 – 3 Statistics: Unique Word and Character Counts, both Simplified and Traditional

I have already posted the Glossika statistics wibr compiled and posted on Chinese-Forums.com (thank you, wibr!) on my statistics page. Out of curiosity — and because I know one of my three readers wants more Glossika statistics — I decided to do a brief analysis of Glossika’s Fluency 1 – 3 program using imron’s Chinese Text Analyzer. Let’s try answer the question: “How many words are there in Glossika?” Continue reading →

The Chinese ABCs are not as easy as one, two, three

It is time for a progress report, and since I am long-winded, I will restrict this post to discussing my Hanzi learning journey.

In the lead-up to writing this blog, I scoured Chinese-Forums for a couple of weeks in my spare time trying to pick up the best advice and wisdom it had to offer. In one memorable thread, kongli declared he would attempt to learn 1500 words in a mere 30 days (that’s 50 words as day for those of you who aren’t mathemagicians). It was a fun thread. He admitted what he was doing was the linguistic equivalent of The Great Leap Forward to which BertR agreed, writing: “Learning 1500 words in 30 days won’t be your biggest challenge. That will be not to forget 1300 words in 90 days…” Continue reading →