Great
End of ‘winter 90 days challenge’ start of ‘spring 90 days challenge’ update:
(2000 known words)
Failed my Dec-Feb 90 day challenge quite badly. The reason was my lazy flight to English language material in order to be entertained, because in Chinese interesting content was still out of reach. Rather than reviewing somewhat interesting but thick and heavy Ch lessons, I put on some easy English podcast or lecture. This lack of listening made my lingqs learned count and listening comprehension lag far behind my lingqing and reading. Now though I consciously banish English and other languages from all but one day of the week.
I’m now in a maybe unusual position where it feels like my Hanzi literacy is actually ahead of my effectiveness in the spoken language.
I see how my word count goals by deadlines were too short term focused. As many sources of personal development tell us: You tend to overestimate what can be done in the short term and underestimate what can be done in the long term.
Even though I didn’t feel ready to speak at all, I still had a conversation at the end of the challenge. 谢谢 to TroisRoyaumes for sacrificing herself to be my very first Chinese conversation partner. I probably sounded like Benny Lewis after 2 minutes of study, the most meaningful and expressive of my 3 active words being ‘uuuhhhhh’ (嗯), but in my mind I actually did better than I expected I would.
I now start a new challenge that will see the targets well exceeded. Also, for this semester I signed up for a language exchange program through uni. I got hooked up with a Taiwanese girl, who’s learning German. There will probably be one or two meetings a week. I’ve heard from two independent sources that the Taiwanese accent sounds very cute in girls, but in turn kinda fruity and effeminate in guys (no slight to our gay brothers). Like Argentinian in Spanish I guess:PPP For now, after the first meeting, I can tell that she pronounces ZH as Z and SH as S. And of course we’re texting past each other a little bit since I’m for now based in simplified.
So that motivates me to drown myself in enough other Chinese input to relativize her influence (even though she’s very nice), and I’ll probably also meet other Chinese people around.
LingQ of course is and will by far be my main system for the rest of the year. In addition I’ll get into a little bit of popupchinese, chinesepod and new-chinese.org (German) and whatever the Uni’s language lab offers.
加油everyone!
I’ll be bäck
3000+ words update (end of April ‘15) OVER THE HUMP!
Nearing the end of the second 90 days challenge. (I know that’s kind of devaluing the challenge to always be in a state of challenge but hey.)
Looking back at the process since the beginning of the year, and in other terms the road from the low 1000s to ca. 2500 words, for the longest part of it the going was a slow grind, climbing word by word, swimming through this thick soup of hazy content.
The courses I was doing were Wolf & Huahua, Native Mandarin Chatradio, and random intermediate pieces. Lots of blue and yellow fog taking ten times the length of the audio to push through.
In my perception, from 2000 words to about 2300 the going was getting extremely slow, slugging along through content that was too advanced.
While my macro-motivation for the language and goals was and is strong, my micro-motivation for the immediate content was dissipating, because I stuck too long with the same stuff and lost sight of the forest between all the trees.
Though, I should state that all of it was still a more pleasant than not, rather low effort process. I did put in time and positive energy, but not a single word was ‘memorized’ in an effortful manner and I didn’t really force myself against an inner resistance.
Btw I had a few little distractions from other languages. Not distractions of inner motivation, but more like speakers of other Ls coming at me from outside. Still the biggest one was certainly the inner distraction of tempting procrastination with English youtube infotainment.
As far as speaking is concerned I had an actually pretty ok conversation with a Chinese girl I randomly met. Btw the Taiwanese girl through the Uni exchange program dropped out almost immediately so there was none of that. Other than that I have been putting off the speaking boost to a later time.
My mistakes were:
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Staying too much of the time with too advanced content (maybe the opposite of the ‘staying too long with beginner stuff’ thing many people do) not noticing that I should fresh it up by grazing on other content, maybe temporarily retreating to easier stuff.
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Not putting in the listening time, both because the content was not yet really interesting, nor did I understand the content I was going for well enough to really stay tuned to the audio.
Then about three days ago, around 2400 words the dams broke and I got the ball rolling like never before, swiping up the 600 words to 3000 within three days, and vacuuming in another 200 as I’m composing this, much of that being learned lingqs. The plateau and blindness are over.
This was mostly triggered by moving my focus to the easier and informative Slow Chinese series, newly discovered more interesting episodes out of the Native Mandarin podcast, and revived micro-motivation by exploring real content more closely for the first time (iPartment, Miss Puff, Jiangsu TV, movies).
Now rather suddenly I find myself with a real perceived jump in listening comprehension as well as reading fluency, and these large chunks of vocab are clicking in like nothing. Real, interesting content now feels within reach.
Strangeness and foreignness of the L are fading rapidly, and the language is becoming notably familiar and part of me.
My plateau experience again reminds us of an important lesson:
Maintain your eagle eye overview and metacognition active to recognize when your wheels are spinning or you’re stuck in activities that are losing their appeal and their usefulness. Keep the advance and retreat, guerilla, grazing varied content approach in mind. Mind your micro-motivation for the content.
But also sometimes there is just a bit of a time lag between what you put in and the results that show. Together with our subjective perception of our progress, it ends up seeming like a very non-linear process.
Now…
The trip to China and Taiwan is a sure thing now. July to September it is.
For the remaining two months until July my new goals are:
-7000 known words for level intermediate 2
(perhaps once more overreaching and too ambitious, but at my newfound speed it works out at under 100 a day) Maybe there’ll be other plateaus coming up, but now we know even better how to deal with it.
-Creating at least another 4000 lingqs for 400 more coins I need to buy the Great Wall for my Avatar.
-Enjoying some real content before the trip. I will watch Miss Puff, iPartment, anything on Jiangsu TV, movies and anything else I find among @iaings tips.
-Discover more of the Chinese internet. (Already signed up on Weibo)
-Having a few hours of conversation by way of italki, lingq and annoying restaurant staff and owners to get the
Chinese throat and mouth muscles pumped up.
All in all I feel that I can reach my long term goals from the beginning after all, and definitely be in a secure pre-flluency level for maximum benefit for the trip.
Watch out for a last pre-Asia update by July. And as always 加油！
Ps: Big thanks to the team for the improvements regarding word spacing accuracy and pinyin!
Your update was an amazing read, and very inspirational! Congratulations on getting over your hump. Mine still feels like Mt Everest.
I was thrown too when I first heard the Taiwan accent in a stranger I bumped into - she kept making 是 sound like 四, not to mention the different pronunciation of zh.
POST-CHINA UPDATE – The First Year of Chinese
THE CONCLUSION……
So the promised pre-Asia update has become a very late post-Asia update. But I hope it will compensate with more perspective. Together with the early dabbling let’s call it a year and a half and counting.
I left for Beijing with 5200 known words. So yes, in terms of the word count I just didn’t make it close to the aimed at 7000 before summer. I feel like I could have done somewhat more, but I was and am content with my progress.
Aside from lingq, two shows I found really fun and watched regularly were 非诚勿扰 and 世界青年说 on Jiangsu TV. The first is a dating show that features an unlikely amount of foreigners and the latter is all about foreigners discussing all sorts of topics and comparing life in their countries in flawless Mandarin. I recommend both shows to intermediates.
Additionally I’d had about ten conversations and managed to buy the Great Wall, a computer, a smartphone and chopsticks to fulfill all the most basic needs of my Chinese avatar, while I was off LingQ.
At an estimated B1, I felt comfortably ready for this thorough activation trip.
My route went as planned through:
Mainland I: Beijing, Jinan, Zhengzhou, Xian, Chengdu, Chongqing
Macau, Hong Kong
Mainland II: Shenzhen, Nanjing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Xiamen
Taiwan: Kaohsiung, Tainan, Taichung, Taipei
As David James and Steve suggest, with enough previous input, you can activate decent fluency within a short while of being dropped in the target country. Not too long into the trip I felt like being boosted to a rough B2. As long as the hua was putong enough and the trains of thought not too muddled and twisted, I was comfortably understanding and was understood. On rare occasions when a conversation entered unknown depths, became unfamiliar and fast, the Chinese cerebral lobe
crashed and I only heard an indiscriminate toneless mash of sh x ch zh j c y again.
Like this: - YouTube
By Hangzhou I tried to get reading on lingq again, because I felt that my reading was beginning to lag behind my colloquial chit-chat skills. I completely switched my browser to traditional to do as well as possible in Taiwan. I had picked up quite some traditional incidentally, and was alright in Macau & HK, but from Hangzhou to now I switched over completely.
It was my first time in Asia and the trip was three months long. Obviously the impressions and observations are too many too recount here, so I leave that for another time and place.
After China:
In my last stop Taipei I refilled my now empty backpack with 28 books. I was barely able to lift the thing. Learner books much better than anything I was since able to find in Vienna, for learning the nuts and bolts of Chinese, Chengyus, patterns and business lingo etc, for learning Cantonese and Japanese as future projects.
Mostly though it was non-fiction on history, political commentary and culture. All in traditional of course, since I want to keep putting special focus on traditional, while conversely picking up simplified incidentally. Here the list to give you a sense of what I’ll be reading in 2016 for Chinese:
Modern Chinese History as NOT thought in Taiwan, Simple History of the Chinese Revolutions – from Sun Yat Sen to Mao Zedong, History of Taiwan, Japan and Taiwan – two countries in one body, The current Psyche of Taiwan, Taiwan’s future, Short stories by Lu Xun, Murderer (supposedly worthwhile thriller), Chinese people – East South West North, History of Chinese Philosophy, Zen Buddhism in comics, From western Philosophy to Zen Buddhism
In order to arrive at a point where I can even begin to somewhat comfortably tackle this wealth of knowledge by next year, I will plow through the following Wikipedia articles in Chinese, selected on interest and random wiki surfing:
Sun Yat Sen, Jiang Kai Shek, Zen Buddhism, Chinese language, Qing-Ming War, Daoism, History of the Kuomintang after the move to Taiwan, Democratic Progressive Party, Taiwanization movement, Nanjing incident, Sino-German cooperation, History of Hong Kong, History of Shanghai, Falungong, Fist Opium War, Second Opium War, Xinhai Revolution, Written vernacular Chinese movement, Confucianism, May Fourth Movement, Tiananmen incident, Chinese cultural sphere, Nanjing Massacre, Mao Zedong, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Lu Xun, Lao She, Hu Shi, History of the Republic of China, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping, Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Chinese Unification, First Sino-Japanese War, Second Sino-Japanese War, History of Taiwan, Simplified-Traditional Debate, Tang Dynasty, Koxinga, Puyi, Yuan Shikai, Taiwan-Japan relations
The road ahead:
December and January are 100% Chinese
Goals: 10.000 words (from the current 6.000)
March to June are Spanish and Russian. In the second half of the year I will try to write the HSK6.
The timeframe of this thread is well over and as such it shall stand. I’ll start a general open-ended language journal at some point, as some here have done, and also produce my two cents as to how to REALLY learn Chinese 
THE END – final comments welcome
Awesome update and results ! I don’t know Chinese, so I can’t appreciate all you have explained, unfortunatelly.
Tommy, have you been blogging about your trip ? It sounds super interesting and I would love to read about it.
Hi Tommy, love your updates. I too have been self learning Chinese. I use Learning With Texts to keep track of known words (pretty much similar to lingq system), so I’m way further along than my Lingq count suggests. I have a question regarding the speed at with your word count has grown. When do you consider a word known? I’m somewhere around 2500 known words. I don’t upgrade a word to known until I can recognize and read it instantly(Hanzi), and I understand it automatically without any thought when it is spoken as single word and the middle of a naturally spoken sentence. I’m just curious what your criteria is for elevating words to known status. Good job so far!
Hi!
My word count here is basically founded on characters and pinyin. I put a word to known exactly when I (basically instantly) understand the characters, remember meaning and pinyin, and am confident that the same will be the case the next time it shows up in any content. Exception: When there are one or more very different meanings or pronunciations, one of which I know but not yet the other, I leave it unknown until I also know the other meanings/pronunciations.
The word count is in fact a written recognition word count. The written language is like a hand-railing for me to hold on to. I find that if I know the characters and the associated pinyin, that is the most useful basis from which stronger listening comprehension can develop. I’m only reading on the computer for now and all tv is subtitled, so everything that I hear I can also see, I find the written form to be the best practical frame wherein listening can grow strong.
Actually character knowledge, pinyin memory and listening comprehension largely go hand in hand for me. But on the whole listening comprehension is harder to be sure of and tends to lag behind a bit.
Example:
When I listen to a real life “advanced 2” linqed lesson at full speed or watch a real tv show with character subtitles, I will still miss a lot of words that would basically be in my known words count. To really get a comprehension indicative of my word count I would often have to stop the audio or video and catch up with the subtitles.
That is not to say that there’s not the odd word that I’ll know by sound but not by charracters.
Unfortunately I haven’t recorded this trip in any form except very amateur fotography. I am going to get into not blogging but making videos. The skill and time investment for this is a lot higher than just typing. That makes it a challenge to get into initially. I think video and podcasts are a lot more palatable for the followers. We stare at screens so much already and have much more listening time than dedicated time that you can’t ask people to read even more on a screen. I’d much rather watch a guy on youtube while having lunch, or listen while doing chores than sit down and squint at the machine for the 10th hour that day, no matter how good the content.
TommyTrueTravel was of course a brand name for an envisioned youtube channel about the trips, but I think instead of narrowing down my theme to travel with that name, I’ll cut the stage name down to TommyTrue which leaves open all possible career paths from philosopher to pornstar.
Because having more options is so important in life ! 
Three years later, but it’s called youdao dictionary 有道词典
I have just spent the like 30 minuets reading this and reading through the comment congrats on your success! I hope I will have the same kind of success learning Spanish which is my target language at the moment and would like to perhaps in the new few years tackle Chinese if my Spanish and other languages go well!
LingQ has the upper intermediate and advanced ChinesePod articles. Search for ‘upper intermediate’ or ‘advanced’. I’m hoping that they will get the intermediate articles from ChinesePod. For the ChinesePod articles, if you click on the ‘full text’ icon near top, right, you get characters, pinyin, & English translation for almost all of the articles. I find this very useful. The Audio has more than just the article - it has 2 or 3 people talking about the article. I find these discussions very useful because I think it is very typical conversation.
Man! Old thread. When I started it most of those features did not yet exist. Thank you anyway
Just curious - how would you rate your level of fluency now? e.g. intermediate, upper intermediate, advanced etc. I’ve been studying for 2.5 years - I think I’m at upper intermediate for listening & intermediate for reading.
You said that you are going to continue Russian. Did you start Russian with lingq. Any tips you can share with the Russian? Good luck with the Chinese.
The only tip pay attention and look for sounded radicals. It will teach you the sound but not the tone. Keep also an eye out for semantic radical for example the water radical in the word for ocean below helps give you an hint on what the word means.
For example: 羊, yáng
洋, yáng (ocean)
樣, yàng (manner, appearance)
養, yǎng (to support, to raise)
氧, yǎng (oxygen)
In 2015 (Jesus H. Christ three years) I had about a B2. Since, I’ve slipped and gotten rusty. When I get into it for a week I’ll be there again.
Thanks. I know well how radicals and the characters work.
Yes I started Russian on LingQ. For Russian there is well enough interesting material on lingq to launch you. After that https://echo.msk.ru/
There’s nothing mysterious to it. Just do it
Do you know if there is something like echo in German? I mean a radio station that provides both transcripts and audio?
That is pretty amazing. I think you must be very gifted and a hard worker.