Three Years Later: How do I study?

I've been meaning to put up a little video of my speaking progress and fluency since December but life has kept me busy. Thankfully it is the Chinese New Year's and all of my international students have returned to their home countries, are traveling, or just taking a break...giving me time to finally write a little bit about this last year.

How I Study on a Weekly Basis

I would say that I average about 2 hours everyday of studying. This breaks down into

1. Reviewing characters and how to write them (20 minutes) 
I use an Anki Deck with the most common 3000 characters. I have shared it on here before. I have long since finished the deck and now about 30-40 cards appear each day to review. I still use these sometimes to remember a character's pronunciation when I'm reading and forget (read: too lazy) to look up a word. I can actively recall 90% of the characters and how to write them and for only about 10-15 minutes a day, its not a bad trade-off.

Starting around November of last year I also started an Anki Deck for learning Japanese. This introduces me to lots of concrete vocabulary I might have missed on my first time through the HSK vocabulary. The great thing about this is that it also introduces lots of synonyms for words I already know which really strengthens my foundation and gives me many ways of saying the same thing.

2. Reading a book or news on 腾讯新闻 (30 minutes)
In the past year I conquered my very first book in Mandarin and have read many since then including
The Little Prince《 小王子》
The Alchemist 《牧羊少年奇幻之旅》
Detective Conan 32-33 《名侦探柯南》
《解忧杂货店》
The Three Body Problem 《三体》 （currently reading the first volume)

If I have time on the bus and I've forgotten my kindle, I will pull up Tencent News and read about things happening in China. Of course, I also gets lots of reading practice using Wechat as well.


3. Watching TV (40 minutes)
I would say that out of the 7 days of the week, I probably only watch TV about 3 of those days. Usually I will watch a movie and since it is 2 hours plus, that averages out to about 30-40 minutes every day of the week. Unfortunately there is so much good content in English and Japanese, that I still do not spend as much time as I like immersed in Chinese audio.

4. Wechat and daily activities (30 minutes)
One of the great benefits of living in China is all the constant exposure. For me, now that I'm graduated and work from home, most of my exposure this last year was through my Taiji instructor who only speaks Mandarin and student's parents who prefer to communicate in Chinese. I really wish my daily Chinese use was a little higher but unfortunately all my tutoring sessions are in English and spend time writing blog posts like these all in English. What a WeChat message looks like:

5. Reviewing Grammar (0 minutes) 
I don't review Grammar on a weekly basis and I'm not convinced there is much usefulness in doing so. I usually review Grammar points every couple of months or so after seeing repeating patterns in books and movies. Grammar usually comes pretty naturally after exposure to lots of native content. (I also find studying Grammar to be quite boring.)