My plan

Ok, so now that I've taken the first step, after a few stumbles, I am now ready to share the first draft of my plan for learning Chinese. Most of these ideas I got the website All Japanese All The Time.

Step 1 attitude, environment, commitment, the goal.

Learning another language is probably the hardest thing an adult can learn. So, if you really want to learn another language and not just complain that you wish you could learn it, then you must be prepared to bust your ass every single day of the week for hours on end.

You must have the motivation to put in the hard work. Without the motivation you will not succeed. Sounds so elementary but it's the key to learning anything. As an ESL teacher in Asia I am intimately familiar with the inability to force someone to learn a language if they don't want to learn it. For some reason parents love to force their kids to learn English, but it NEVER works.

You must be willing to give up your native language. In the next few weeks I am going to wean myself from english movies, english books, english video games, and yes, english music. This is the hardest part for me, having to give up everything English. But, if I am not willing to take this step, I will never reach my goal. Ask yourself this, how bad do you want it? Are you willing to give up everything for it? If not, then don't waste your time.

Obviously I plan on keeping my blog in English and talking to my family in English because those are necessities, without which, I will lose my motivation to study.

My goal is to achieve near native fluency in 2 years.

Step 2 the method and the tools.

Right now I am meeting a tutor twice a week for two hours. That is not enough. I am going to ask my tutor to help me find more tutors so I have a tutor 5 days a week for 2 hours each day. Additionally I plan on studying 3 to 4 hours a day on my own. In the summer time I will have to increase my self study because I will have less tutors.

I am using spaced repetition software to help me learn the 2000 most common Chinese characters. Once I feel I have learned the majority of them, I will work on memorizing 10,000 sentences using the same spaced repetition software. I will try to get the majority of these sentences from Chinese movies, books, magazines, and songs. This way I can learn slang, useful language, and I can pick up more cultural cues. Learning from CDs is worthless.

It will take time, and a lot of work, but I feel it's worth the effort.