3 Year Timeline Dump

Hi all! It’s crazy to think that more than three years have passed since landing in China. Even though this post is a few months overdue, I was fairly certain at one point that it wouldn’t even happen at all. I’m not sure what crazy people will have use for this post but here it is (in its full barely-edited diary-style glory). Reflections are at the end as always.

2 Years 2 Months (Nov 2016)

11-10-2016: Many of the characters I see are ones I already know (studying the 3000 Hanzi deck)

11-12-2016: Today, suddenly it became easy to understand the Taiji instructor's Anhui accent. A lot of the phrases are really familiar now and I can recognize them even with all the extra variation

11-25-2016: I can listen to real, newscaster, movie dialogue-speed Chinese now. I wrote a post a bit ago about class finally being easy to understand. Between my character comprehension (currently studying the last 1000 of the 3000 character deck) and my listening to my Taiji instructor, movies almost feel easy. Now, I don't understand about half of what is said (especially specific vocabulary like the rules of a game of mahjong) but I can get the gist by reading the subtitles and listening to the audio. Feels very cool, like I am on the edge of finally be bilingual.

Remembering characters is very different than when I first started nearly two years ago. Now, I have seen characters enough that at least part of it comes back to me and the other part I can usually make out as the meaning or sound component. By writing and looking, I can tell if something is missing. Small details like a dot or slash just "feel" right or wrong. If I can't remember the radical or component, I can cycle through the ones in my head and usually pretty quickly pick one that will "fit the character". Patterns in the Chinese language are starting to open up nicely.

2 Years 3 Months (Dec 2016)

12-11-2016: For the last two weeks or so I have been watching only movies. All the kid shows are gone. The combination of native-speed audio and traditional characters (in many Jackie Chan movies) means that I get to learn how to read some of them and forces me to listen a bit harder. My listening jumped up a discrete step since that night with the Taiji teacher and I don't really have any problem understanding native speech which is pretty cool. The main barrier is vocabulary, idioms, and cultural stuff. Thank I might be ready for HSK 6 :)

12-13-2016: I haven't found a quick way through this part of studying...building the web. You have to go through each character, word, and grammar structure and notice similarities and differences. These connections and links make the whole thing "stick" better but it takes multiple passes and with each pass taking months to years, it’s no short process.

12-22-2016 This week my voice recovered and pronouncing the tones (especially 1-2, 3-2 pairs) are starting to feel easier as I repeat and focus on them. I can tell when my pronunciation is as good now. All this lets me put more focus on sentence intonation and stressing how I want the connotation to come across just like in English.

2 Years 4 Months (Jan 2017)

1-7-2017: All the character studying is paying off. The transliteration and name characters have filled in almost all of the gaps. When I read a story or message or update on WeChat I now know like 98% of the characters and can also read them correctly. I can also hear my "reading voice" clearer than ever and just how bad and choppy my pronunciation is, which is great for getting better (and terrible for my confidence)

Having a lot of doubts that my Chinese will be up to par before I leave Asia this year. Feel like I should be speaking and listening 24/7 immersion style to start filling in my speaking gap faster.

1-18-2017: Now that I know all the characters and pronunciations, my listening predictive ability has increased a lot. I have confidence that I know the characters being spoken and should be able to guess meaning about 95% of the time (although I usually realize it too late in the conversation). Reading is this way as well. Even if I can't pronounce correctly, I can still skim and get general meaning very well

1-21-2017: This also means that I can see characters in my mind's eye as convo progresses which helps with listening (as mentioned) but also helps with character recall.

I took a look at the HSK 6 test and my reading still feels a bit too slow to take it. Taking the practice test is a long process, so I'm kinda pushing it off…

1-23-2017: Read an entire article in Mandarin about the note 7 battery recall press conference. Pretty cool.

1-29-2017: I cleared the hump!! The MimicMethod calls it the point at which conversation stops sucking. I'm still trying to quantify what makes this happen. It's definitely a few different things. I think comprehension is around 90% when someone slows down and uses simple phrases. I can listen in on conversations and here enough to get the "gist". I can also hear words from a convo and use key phrases that I know the listeners will understand (no matter how bad I butcher the pronunciation) I can usually understand something if I ask for a different way of it being said. I can recognize so many characters now that just hearing part of a word gives a huge clue to what is being talked about. The 3000 character card deck has paid off immensely. My grammar still sucks but I can string together enough really comprehensible phrases to get my point across fluently which feels amazing (again knowing how native speakers say a phrase is so much more important than just picking one of the matching words from the dictionary which could be dialect, out of date, or just rarely used).

2 Years 5 Months (Feb 2017)

2-2-2017: I saw the character 警 for the first time today. I've never learned to write it. And I distinctly remember a friend of mine (week one of classes way back in 2014) struggling to remember it for what felt like weeks. Literally took me five seconds to see the top part and think of 敬 and then the speaking radical. I've seen the character enough times in the last two years that the bottom part instantly comes from “photographic” recall.

2-9-2017: Down to the last 400 characters (unsurprisingly is all stuff I have already studied. I reversed the deck so that the more rare characters would appear first) so I'm not particularly enjoying putting in an hour every day to review old characters. Looking forward to starting the deck in reverse, learning traditional, and improving all the areas of learning.

2-27-2017: Finished the 3000 most common Hanzi deck. As I've mentioned before I was really surprised at how much my listening comprehension, and speaking have improved. I was mainly aiming to master writing all the most common characters and along the way I discovered just how fundamental character understanding is to everything else. Knowing that I know characters that cover 99% of the language gives so much confidence in guessing what I am hearing because even if I don't understand the sentence I can probably guess the phrase or characters. Reading is near full-fluency thanks to context and knowing pretty much all the individual character meanings.

2 ½  Years (Mar 2017)

3-23-2017: Just getting the review cards in the 3000 deck down to a minimum before reversing the deck. Practicing speaking when the voice is healed and watching movies often. Really need to be doing mass input but haven't found a way too yet.

3-30-2017: Pronunciation is slowly getting easier and better. Mostly focusing on sentence cadence at this point and trying to correct the occasional tone error. My reading speed has increased a lot by using movie subtitles.

2 Years 7 Months (Apr 2017)

4-19-2017: Reading has noticeably gotten easier in the last few weeks. I can cruise through an article and get the gist fairly quickly. Hardly any new characters and my knowledge of pronunciation is solid. Still working to pare down the review cards on the 3000 hanzi deck.

2 Years 8 Months (May 2017)

5-13-2017: I finished The Alchemist in Mandarin about a week ago. Took about a week to read and now I'm looking to conquer other books. My pronunciation continues to improve and right now it feels like I can say the full dynamic range of the language plus emphasis without my vocals being a limiting factor. I can do exaggerated falls and rises and my vocal "range" is large enough to support it. Feels great.

5-25-2017: I heard 否则 eavesdropping and I could "feel" what was supposed to go after that phrase. Natural grammar at work. What a marvelous thing.

5-26-2017: 很有可能 was read by feel (hearing the words in the head) rather than by tone rules. Mimicking kids shows that have simple grammar and word structures is helping a lot

2 Years 9 Months (Jun 2017)

6-4-2017: Pronunciation happens without thinking in some cases 博物馆 while teaching a third grade science class

6-8-2017: Don't kid us 耍 came to mind and just sat there waiting to be used. English and Chinese are simultaneously being produced in the mind at the same time?

6-24-2017: I can read fluently without stopping now. It’s almost easy enough that I can begin looking ahead to predict sentence endings

2 Years 10 Months (Jul 2017)

7-7-2017: My character recall practice is starting to change. I'm starting to forget many of the things that I used to start memorizing characters in the first place. Now recall is mostly just either "there or not". Trying to think of better ways to improve recall in the long term when many formative memories will be long gone.

I can just pick up a manga book and start reading. Its easy enough where the act of reading can be enjoyed and it doesn't feel necessarily like practice. I have to look up a word every page or two and even though I know my pronunciation isn't perfect, it lets me get lots of exposure to natural grammar and new concrete vocab.

2 Years 11 Months (Aug 2017)

8-31-2017: It's a very strange place to be at this point. I'm technically 3 years after I landed in China but a lot of those months have been spent in different countries so I'm more close to 2.5 years. Regardless, I've been seeing Chinese characters since then and it’s really paid off.

I'm not exactly sure when, but Chinese has become "old" just like English. Half of my brain still kicks into high gear whenever I see Hanzi and the other part is already halfway through deciphering the first sentence before I realize it.

I went to a Taobao page and was about to skim the whole webpage before realizing that I was already into the second sentence and understanding everything. Over the summer in America, I just kept up with Anki and probably watched a few episodes of adventure time but landing back in China I feel basically (and I mean basic) fluent. Doesn't matter the topic, I know with enough questions, I can get someone to say something that I understand and that is a huge relief for things like picking up lost luggage and dealing with important issues like where the delivery man should put my fried chicken.

Being here is bizarre because I don't spend hardly any effort thinking about all the basics I slaved away studying to master (pronunciation, recognizing characters and words, and straining my ears to hear keywords). I just spent an hour or so with real estate agents chatting up about all sorts of basic things. I could tell they were priming simple questions and answers but that's hardly a problem. I could be in China for two more years. Trying to become fluent in a set amount of time has lost its focus, which I'm not sure to be afraid of or apathetic about.

All the articles read on my phone, all the manga, and all the listening is paying off but the strange thing is, the results are more and more subconscious and I have to actively engage to tell myself all the ways I'm still making progress. IDK, it could be the jet lag but it feels like I've teleported through time and am suddenly fluent and that's about as trippy as it is cool.

3 Years (Sept 2017)

9-10-2017: Pronunciation is taking on a deeper level which hasn't happened in a while. I can feel the mouth and throat muscles relaxing and being more open as I speak. In words like 三十一 it is much easier to do the rising tone. It reminds me of Taichi a bit. The more your practice, the more the ligaments open up and the easier it is to do moves you thought were impossible at one point. You stop focusing on the foundation skills and place the mind on the nuance

9-14-2017: Studying the 3000 Hanzi anki deck is useful now for reviewing pronunciation after seeing a character in the wild (reading, talking, movies, etc.) and being too lazy to look it up in the moment

9-21-2017: Reading 杂货店 a Japanese novel translated into Chinese is a lot of fun and crazy easy. Long bus rides are now productive and enjoyable

9-30-2017: I can look up words and their differences now. I was still unsure about the different connotations of 旅行 and 旅游 so I did a baidu search in Chinese. 区别 popped up even though I was about to type 差别 so I learned something there as well. And sure enough I got a bunch of results and cool articles. Just like looking up difference between "affect" and "effect" in English

A lady at the hospital I went to asked me if I was Chinese. What a compliment!

I'm basically fluent at this point. And I mean "basic". I don't always understand everything and definitely not at native level but with a question or two I can always understand and that is quite a relief in a lot of situations (finding lost baggage at the airport, getting food delivered to your apartment at 3am, talking to nurses at a hospital, etc.) It's a bit surreal and I'm always kinda taken aback when I open my mouth and lazily speak Mandarin like it’s no big deal. I often forget if convos were in English or Chinese and it was a little depressing to start this year because I didn't really have any "huge" goals up on the to-do board. It's just more of the same. More listening, more reading, more speaking, and more writing to get as much exposure as possible.

3 Years 1 Month (Oct 2017)

10-7-2017: The novel I'm reading right now has been translated from Japanese. All the anime I watch has traditional characters. I kinda forgot that one of my goals was to learn more about Asian culture in general by living in China but here I am three years later and I have a growing sense of the strange interplay of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese pop culture that you hear so little of back home in the US.

10-22-2017: I'm about 75% of the way through 解忧杂货店 and my reading has improved tremendously. When I first started reading the book, I was just reading lots of characters and word groups in a row. I didn't know where the sentence structure started and ended and how to read a full sentence properly. Even though there are still about 5% of characters on a page I don't know, I can still read a sentence with those unknown characters and still feel the "structure of a sentence". I can hear the audio in my head and I can feel the rhythm of the words. I can feel the style of the author. It's not just a blur of characters and words, but an actual experience which is cool.

10-24-2017: Noticed this a month or so ago but forgot to write it down. Watching videos that have subtitles in your target language doesn't seem to prevent your listening from improving. If anything it seems to help quite a bit. Almost all Chinese media has subtitles in Chinese which is great for reading comprehension and listening combined.

I’ve started studying Japanese! Even though I don’t have any solid plans to master the language, with the amount of anime I consume, it didn’t make sense not to do something. Having studied Mandarin for the last three years and realizing that listening is in some ways #1 on the steps to fluency, it made little sense to not take the hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of anime-watching and start to consolidate some of that experience into some level of language comprehension. I’m studying an Anki deck of Japanese with answers in Mandarin which is a great way to ease the guilt of diverting time away from my main goal. Interested to see where this goes in a year or two. Currently studying 5 words a day.

3 Years 2 Months (Nov 2017)

11-16-2017: Still don't have the difference between 已 and 己. It doesn't create any problems when reading because they are always in word groups but when I go to write them, I often forget which is open is which is closed. One of those things that even an intermediate/advanced learned still has trouble with I guess.

3 Years 4 Months (Jan 2018)

1-7-2017: things that still trip me up are characters like 倒 and 空 that have multiple pronunciations

1-9-2018: pronunciation since returning to China after winter break feels so easy. The amount of enunciation I have seems like it just increased by a factor of two or three

Thoughts: I’m so glad I’ve kept up this bizarre, poorly written look into the journey that has been Mandarin. At this point on the road to fluency, I’ve been doing it so long, I’ve almost forgotten that I’m still studying. I’ve definitely forgotten just how much time and effort has been invested. And I’ve definitely started to rethink all of the things I take for granted as being easy, that I struggled years to build. Mandarin and studying Mandarin have become such a routine part of life that it has slid nearly into a subconscious place in the mind. The further along you go, the less big “markers” there are to remind you that progress is still happening, that you are even on a road in the first place. Every once in a while I have to pinch myself to remember just how long this whole thing has been.

Right now, it’s very much a focused effort to not just understand and be understood but actually sound like an intelligent adult human being. There’s a desire to be able to express nuance and really become aware of the history and culture of not just Mainland China but all the places that fall under that banner (Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc.).

Will there be posts here in 2020? Probably. I couldn’t imagine being here in China for more than two years when I first landed and now it looks like it could easily be five. The winds sure do blow a strange course…