The 2011 Aims and Objectives Progress Thread

[Kenny同志]

she can keep them and give me the muscle, haha.

[xianhua]

1. Finish of watching 奋斗 and work through other TV series' adding new (and useful) vocabularly to Anki. Keep up 15 minutes of Anki a day.

2. Try and find that language partner this year. Practise daily with my wife.

3. Continue reviewing 'Boya Hanyu Intermediate 1' as well as moving onto another intermediate text book (perhaps not Boya).

4. Continue with Lang-8 journal entries.

5. Memorise and practise at least four more songs for KTV time in November (为爱痴狂 is the first one to work on.） Thanks to all those who contributed with ideas on the 'Taiwanese hits from the 1980's' thread).

[Liebkuchen]

1. Read some contemporary Chinese novels albeit in translation- just ordered Red Dust, Shifu You'll Do Anything for a Laugh and Wolf Totem.

2. Complete my DK Eyewitness 15-Minute Chinese book, learning as many characters as I can along the way, by April

3. In September, either go to University of Jinan in Shandong or SWUFE in Chengdu (if they'll pay my tuition) for a year

4. Save/earn enough money to help with no. 3

5. Swim a mile front crawl

[hackinger]

Hi,

here is my goal for 2011:

Study Chinese for two hours per day and see how far that will carry me. I use mainly NPCR and the flashcards for NPCR and the old HSK.

I cut corners a little bit here, because I run or bike (almost) daily for about an hour and listen to Chinese sound files. And I count that as one hour studying.

The dream in my white chamber is to have a first shot at reading real Chinese stuff by the end of 2011...

Cheers

hackinger

[roddy]

Have made this a sticky topic and unstuck the 2010 topic, and also added links back and forth to the first post. This is now our fourth of these, the first one in 2008 started out with me asking about New Year's Chinese Learning Resolutions and got four pages in total. This one is already half as long and our Hogmanay hangovers have barely cleared. Thanks to Jennifer for starting it.

Good luck all!

[renzhe]

After failing my last year's goals spectacularly, let's try this one:

- Finish 水浒传 or get as far as I can. Progress here: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/29794-project-for-2011-%e6%b0%b4%e6%b5%92%e4%bc%a0/

- Get my hands on a decent grammar book and work my way through it. I feel that NPCR was not enough, and I need to consolidate.

- Finish a couple of TV shows, focusing on listening.

- Finally do some newspaper article reading. A short one a day, ideally. Progress here: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/30172-newspaper-article-of-the-day/

- Conversation, and loads of it

- If I find time, some 朗读 exercises.

[Gleaves]

I've been giving these some thought. This is what I've settled on:

1. Three hours of conversation/speaking practice a week.

A mix of tutor, meetups, speaking exercises, etc.

2. Finish ten TV shows.

I have more than a few shows that I have started, so I have a pretty good head start. I'm going to include cartoons as well, which should make this easier.

3. Beat five video games in Chinese.

This shouldn't be too tough, but the real point of this goal is to remind myself to have fun with Chinese. This will likely be games on the DS mostly, but I might try to play some RPGs on the PC as well.

Good luck to everyone in their goals.

[BaoMiHua]

Previous years didn’t write any targets due to laziness and thinking I can just keep goals to myself and still accomplish something.

Did not work out so great, so lets try this way now.

Speaking/Listening:

- Listening to tones, I must be tone deaf since this is still very difficult for me, I can mostly repeat the words when i hear, but still cannot always make sense of the tone.

- Speaking with correct tones, if i concentrate the tones are not too horrible, but if not paying attention or too excited then talk falls mostly to the bla4bla4bla4blaa4-toneland.

- Try to improve pronunciation

Reading:

- Keep reading every day something in Chinese

- Start reading more technical stuff, ie. engadget in Chinese or similar

- Change one computer OS to Chinese to see if it’s usable or if it will then take 10min and heavy usage of dictionary to do any trivial things.

Writing:

- Write more by hand

- Start writing blog or diary dailyish to help tracking progress (or lack of it...)

- Learn some character based input instead of pinyin input.

Other:

- Continue Russian studies using Chinese materials (earlier studied with English).

- Continue Spanish studies using Chinese materials (earlier studied with English).

- Learn to play guitar in hopes this would also help train my ears/brain to handle tones better.

- Learn QT/QML. This is the only target not really related to Chinese, but maybe can change to be related if I code something useful for studying Chinese..

Main weight this year being on tones and pronunciation, hoping its not too late to still fix them.

And then of course the normal “lose weight”, “exercise more” and “live more healthy lifestyle” ones

[abcdefg]

I made this little sheet to give to my teacher as a guide to what I want to focus on in one-to-one classes starting tomorrow morning. The second page (Methods) is just for me; I didn't burden her with it.

For further context and background, please see prior post. http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/30193-a-year-in-beijing/

2011 STUDY GOALS.doc

[JenniferW]

abcdefg - Where are you studying now? I've seen from previous posts that you studied for 6 months in Kunming. I'm curious as to whether you chose to go to a university or a private language school there, and if you've tried both, how does each meet your needs?

Also, how do these particular goals fit in with your longer term goals or ambitions as regards Chinese?

[Chinadoog]

My main goals right now： Finish reading all of Ranma 1/2 within the next 4 months or so and continue learning at least 10 new words a day

[JenniferW]

It's not even the end of January and I see myself as already heading for failure on my first objective!

I said, '... my target for May is the characters and grammar for level 4, plus the reading, writing and and listening levels that exam will demand. I've been using the BLCU 汉语教程 / Hànyǔ Jiàochéng coursebooks, and I have those to cover (I think) up to around HSK level 4.'

I sat down and worked out how many weeks there are till the HSK exam in May, looked at the number of units in the course book, and given the time available each week (plus a holiday already booked), the two don't add up!

So, which do I do - skim a lot, and go back over the same material after the exam (boring), or study less, but fully and to my own level of satisfaction, and risk not knowing more of the HSK level 4 material?

Remember I'm studying on my own, and only part-time! Any advice, essentially on revising this objective?

[imron]

I would do it fully and to your own satisfaction - because surely that's the way you want to learn. Goals are great, but sticking to goals you know you can't meet will just set yourself up for disappointment. I think it's far healthier to continually assess your goals and adjust them accordingly. The HSK will still be there after May if you wish to take it again

[OneEye]

OK, time to put something down I guess.

First thing's first. I'm moving to either China or Taiwan this August. It mainly depends on where I get a scholarship (if I do), but one way or the other I'll be moving over there, and hopefully starting grad school when I get back after a year. My goals mainly revolve around that.

- Time to get a tutor. My spoken Chinese sucks because I've always studied at home with no partner, so I've mainly focused on reading.

- I'm currently working a lot on Classical/Literary Chinese. I plan to focus on modern Chinese while I'm in China, so I'd like to get a decent amount of 文言 under my belt while I can.

- I'm reading through some graduate linguistics course syllabi from Ohio State University (Marjorie Chan's Intro to Chinese Linguistics, History of the Chinese Language, and Study of the Chinese writing system), and an undergrad history course syllabus from the University of Texas (David Sena's Early China: History and Archaeology).

- I need to take the GRE before I move so I can apply for grad school while I'm in China, so that hopefully I'll have somewhere to go when I get back. I've been studying vocab lists and brushing up on my math (it's been a while).

Much of my spare time is spent in the UT library reading and studying. If I can familiarize myself with some of the literature before I start grad school, I'll be in a much better position when I do start.

[JenniferW]

I started off the 2011 thread saying things I really thought would be possible. It's not even the end of January and I can see I was wildly over-optimistic!

I plan to take the New HSK Level 4 exam in May (in the UK), and given my rate of progress over recent weeks, there's no way I'm going to get through the character list for that by then! I'll do a fair proportion of it, but never the whole list. So it will be interesting to see how well I do in the exam despite that.

One of my aims was to somehow tie the fact that I also study Chinese painting and calligraphy in with the language studies - and today I actually managed to do that. I use anki (which I love) for several things, including writing the HSK list of characters. Normally I test myself using pencil and paper - but today I got out the Chinese ink - and did it all by brush! Interesting experience - very different to writing in pencil. And very different to the sort of thing you do in calligraphy lessons.

[OneEye]

Well, I have a tutor. She's from Shanghai and has a clear accent, although she talks a bit faster than I'm used to. I'm speaking more than I ever have, but it's slow going.

I'm working through Fuller's Introduction to Literary Chinese, and I'm on lesson 4.

I've found the history readings very interesting, and the linguistics reading a bit tedious. I'm still working through the "History of the Chinese Language" syllabus, which I find more interesting than the "Intro to Chinese Linguistics" course, likely because I've already covered much of the material in the latter. I did find the Early Chinese history syllabus a bit specialized for my current level of knowledge, so I'm using a syllabus from Georgetown's History of China course, which is more of a survey course.

All in all things are going well. I'll be sending in my CSC application tomorrow, and we'll see what happens.

[Gleaves]

报道--

1. Three hours of conversation/speaking practice a week.

I am failing at this pretty badly. I do only about an hour a week, so I need to step it up.

2. Finish ten TV shows.

I finished off 落地请开手机, so one down, nine to go. It was good.

3. Beat five video games in Chinese.

I played through Drawn: The Painted Tower (谜画之塔汉化包发布). It was a fun point and click adventure game.

[Meng Lelan]

1. Load 5000 characters in both simpl and trad into Skritter and cycle through all of those in 2011 and win some prize through Skritter at some point.

So far I've loaded 1500 characters.

2. Enter a wushu competition in 2011.

Will do this in March or July.

3. Blog more.

Blog on....

4. Travel to Shanghai/Suzhou/Guilin or to Montreal/Quebec City this summer of 2011, can't decide which though, can't do both China and Canada in one summer.

Budget cuts in Texas mean I don't know if I'll have a job this coming summer so this is off for now. More likely I'll go to Vermont and Montreal, not to China this year.

[OneEye]

Budget cuts in Texas mean I don't know if I'll have a job this coming summer so this is off for now. More likely I'll go to Vermont and Montreal, not to China this year.

That's serious business, man. My wife has already been assured unofficially that she will not have a job next school year. Not that it matters since we're moving to China, but it sucks for everyone remaining in Texas, especially in non-TAKS subjects (my wife teaches art and music). Good luck with all that.

[JenniferW]

OneEye's unforeseen change in the job situation is typical of real life, though, isn't it. Just as you've made your plans, it all changes! For the Chinese studies, this will mean big reviewing of the aims for this year, won't it? Will you still carry on with some of your plans?