Overdrive

My brain has been on overdrive lately. I've been cramming my brain full of Chinese characters, making it adjust to new contact lenses I bought with the help of a friend, and forcing it to learn Zhangzhou style Mahjong. Needless to say, it's pretty tired. For the record, I'm up to 335 characters. I only have 1 month left to reach my goal of 700 before the school year starts.

Study method

I've tweaked my study method slightly. I've started listening to Chinesepod podcasts continuously over and over and over and over allllll day long. I've broken them up into groups of 5 episodes, each between 8 to 12 minutes long. Each day I listen to another group of 5 episodes and absorb what I can. It's kind of amazing how well it works, sometimes I don't even pay any attention to it but it's playing in the background and I still pick up things. I even listen to it when I sleep.

The other thing I have to start doing is adding complete words and sentences to Mnemosyne. Ideally, I should just power through all 6000 individual characters but I need to learn actual language for my survival. So, I'm jumping the gun a bit by starting this phase while only knowing 220 characters.

QQ

I finally got QQ to work on my English XP machine. I followed these simple instructions.

1. Start -> Run -> Intl.cpl
2. Switch to Advanced Tab, and choose "Chinese (PRC)" for Language for non-Unicode Programs and click OK.

What is QQ? It's an instant messenger program used mainly in China. It's use outside of China is pretty limited. But, if you live here you're pretty much going to need to use it. My friend had to get a QQ number (screen name) for me because the sign up page is in Chinese.

So this is what it takes...

...for me to learn a language. The idea of learning a foreign language is so huge in my mind that I would rather do just about anything than try to learn one. But, I have finally found out what it takes to actually do it. Some people can just make a decision to learn another language and they do it. They can become fluent while not even living in a country that speaks the language. I am not one of those people. The only way I can overcome my resistance to learning the language is to put myself into a situation where it becomes necessary for survival.

That's kind of sad.

Past 4 days...

...I haven't done much. I haven't learned any new characters, words or sentences. But, today my motivation is back. On Tuesday my new Chinese teacher asked me to go to KTV (karaoke). She invited 3 other teachers from our school and after singing for a few hours one of the teachers asked me to go play pool with her. I've come to the realization that unless I learn Chinese my chances of a decent social life are pretty slim. She asked me the dreaded question every male expat is asked, "how long will you stay here?" The question is impossible to answer but this is the best I can do..."If I'm just by myself I can't stay long because it's too boring, maybe just 2 years. But, if I can learn Chinese and make a lot of friends I'd like to stay much longer."

So, yesterday I was too busy brooding over my terrible social life to study Chinese when it hit me. I've got to try harder. So, today my motivation is back and the studying has resumed.

Mnemosyne

I'm just starting to appreciate the power of the program Mnemosyne. First of all, I can spend just a little bit of time learning a single character because I know once I put it in Mnemosyne I'm going to see it again tomorrow, and probably the next day, and on and on until it finally sticks in my mind. It takes time to learn this way, but the effort required is much less than writing it out a billion times. The other cool thing is that it knows which characters I have trouble with, and it'll show me those characters more often. The characters I know very well, it will show me less frequently. I don't need to worry about keeping track of thousands of flash cards since it's all computerized. All I need to do is use the program every day and I'm all set. I'm up to 140 characters.

It's back to 10 a day

I don't know what I was complaining about, it's not like I have a busy schedule right now. So it's back up to a minimum of 10 characters a day. I bought some English books in Xiamen the other day, one of which cost 99rmb. Can you say rip off...only good thing about the trip is I now know where all the bus stations are and my Chinese is good enough to get me there and back.