Celebrate Your Chinese Learning Milestones/Breakthroughs Here

[StChris]

I think it's somewhat inevitable that many of the threads on a Chinese learning forum will involve study problems, plateaus etc (I myself have been going through a bit of a bad patch for the past few months). While these threads still manage to stay admirably positive, I thought it would be a good idea to have a thread just for celebrating our achievements in learning this difficult language. As well as just being a feel-good/humble-brag thread, I feel we can learn from each others successes as well as our struggles.  

 

Feel free to post your own recent Chinese language milestones or breakthroughs here (try and include a bit of info about how you achieved them as well, if possible).

[StChris]

I'll get the ball rolling.

 

Listening/watching Chinese content at 1.5x speed

 

I'm not sure when exactly I started doing this, but a couple of years ago I started listening to some English content at 1.5x speed (or even 2x speed for certain content). I watch a lot of both English and Chinese content on youtube, and at some point I started to speed up some Chinese videos too. I didn't even think about this at the time, I just kind of did it without even noticing. As I said in the OP, I've been a little down on my lack of progress these past few months, so realising that I have been speeding up some Chinese content has definitely cheered me up a little bit, especially when I think back to those dark times a few years back when I had to go through TV dramas sentence by sentence due to lack of comprehension (奋斗 is a show that will forever be burned into my brain until the day I die!).

 

This is something that just kind of sneaked up on me, it was never a study goal. I guess it is just a result of many, many hours watching TV shows (very slowly at first, pausing to check vocab), and listening to podcasts and audiobooks. 

 

One of my main two study focuses at the moment is trying to understand the news at the same level I can understand TV dramas (through a combination of reading the newspaper and watching the news for one hour everyday). I hope I can return to this thread someday to say that I can speed up the video when watching the news, but unfortunately I'm very far off that point at the moment.

[mackie1402]

5 hours ago, StChris said:

I'm not sure when exactly I started doing this, but a couple of years ago I started listening to some English content at 1.5x speed (or even 2x speed for certain content). I watch a lot of both English and Chinese content on youtube, and at some point I started to speed up some Chinese videos too. I didn't even think about this at the time, I just kind of did it without even noticing.

 

When I was preparing for the HSK 4 a while back I did this. I wanted to get in as much practice as possible in my limited time, plus I wanted to make the test day seem less stressful. I put all of my CDs from the listening mock tests into Audacity and sped them up to between 1.2x and 1.4x. I'd do a test and listen, then later that day I would listen to the audio again on my commute to/from work. I did it for a few weeks building up to the test and my god it did wonder. On the day of the test I felt like everything was in slow motion. I highly recommend it! Not only did it help with the test, but I managed to get in much more practice. I was more willing to do a couple of listening tests in 1 session when I could cut the amount of time listening down. 

[道艺]

On 3/6/2019 at 2:31 AM, mackie1402 said:

everything was in slow motion.

Nice tip...I've always loved the idea of the hyperbolic training mindset hahaha.

 

I prefer the full immersion technique, but sadly daily life and conversation doesn't necessarily prepare me for HSK, as immersion has been boosting my 口语, but not as much my 阅读 or formal language. I will definitely train this way when I start to prepare for the test - thanks for the tip!

 

OT, my recent achievement was playing some 扑克牌 with the kids I tutor, and I had to explain the rules of scat to both the kids and their Shanghainese 奶奶. A lot of tripping and fumbling, but in the end we were all on the same page having some fun.

[Shelley]

I have had 2 notable breakthroughs.

 

The first was whilst reading a short text from my textbook in pinyin. As I was reading I thought to myself this would be much easier if it was in characters. From that point on I have avoided pinyin and I have found it much easier to read.

 

The second was also to do with reading but relates to preserving the word order of the original Chinese text and not translating it in to correct English. I started a topic about it here https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/50055-preserving-word-order/?tab=comments#comment-383691.

 

These 2 things combined means that I am just reading and understanding without going though the translation process. This has sped up my reading and increased my reading pleasure. 

 

 

 

[Publius]

2 hours ago, Shelley said:

As I was reading I thought to myself this would be much easier if it was in characters.

I can relate. ?

[Publius]

I once was on a Japanese Go server that does not support 8-bit characters and was chatting with a Chinese person using pinyin. A French guy asked, "Does everyone in China know pinyin?" I said, "Yes, pretty much everyone. But we don't use it unless in abbreviations."

[Tomsima]

rare bonus: no tones, no spaces pinyin, zheyangxieshibushitebiefangbian, shenmeshihoufeizhihanzi, zhenshitailuohoule!

[Publius]

Shuo shihua, da pinyin de shihou shui hai zaihu shengdiao a. Tai mafan le. Yiqian shouji bu zhichi hanzi de shihou dajia doushi zheme yong de. Du zhe shaowei fei dian jin eryi.