The first 500

Tonight I hit a big milestone - 500 characters studied from the Heisig book. Although I didn't reach the goal as fast as I wanted to (my original schedule was crazy!), it's still a great achievement. I hope to have the next 500 done in less than 2 months. Easily obtainable if I can maintain the 10 a day pace.

Today I learned the characters for "San Francisco", which I knew already from previous studies (but did not know they formed the name for San Fran).

旧金山 － "Old gold mountain". Interesting!

The disappointing thing was that I couldn't recall the writing for "gold" (even though I had no trouble recognizing it when shown). This is one of the flaws in my current review method - I'm primarily focused on "recognition" (looking at a character and recognizing the meaning). This method leaves the "recall" portion alone, which isn't great if you need to write something. I need to find a good way to integrate that into my studies.

Not much for updates / studies over the next 10 days due to my vacation. I'll update again in early April when I'm back to it.

乔丹收到一个email

这个星期我写信给中文节目的host。今天他写信给我。我让你们看看：

你好 乔丹
谢谢你的信，也感谢你对我的节目的支持！
希望你一直喜欢收听加拿大中文电台的节目！

金川

Navigating Gmail in Chinese

Here's a screenshot of my Gmail converted to Simplified Chinese. Given the limited set of characters I know, I thought it would be challenging to navigate around. Actually, even only knowing a few characters the different sites are easy to switch between. At the top, we see this:

Gmail
日历
文档
网页
阅读器
更多

I only know 1 character from each one of those menu items, but it was enough for me to figure out which is which.

日历: 日 means "day". I guessed that this meant "Calendar". 历 actually means "Calendar", so you have "Day Calendar".

文档 - 文 means "Language" or "writing". The second character, 档, means "file". You can logically move from "Writing file" to "Documents".

网页 - This is the only one I knew both characters for. First you have 网, meaning "Network" (or "Internet"), and second you have 页 meaning "page". This is the link for Googles "Web Pages" feature.

阅读器 - I had no idea what any of these characters meant, but I assumed it was Google Reader based on my old menu. Looking up the characters, you have 阅 ("inspect" - yue4) 读 ("read" - du2) 器 ("vessel/instrument" - qi4). Reader seems to be correct.

更多 - Knowing that 多 means "many" or "more", this menu looked like it would provide more options. The arrow beside it also helped.

So far, pretty easy. I think having the characters in my face all the time like this will force me to remember them better (and in context). Slowly I'll start doing more and more things in Chinese.

Week #8 Update

This past week I managed to learn some new characters every day - making it my first week with no days of 0 characters! I set that goal last Sunday and was successful. In addition to that, the total # of characters learned was 51, my highest total since early February. I also feel pretty good about the quality of review I put in.

Sunday - 10
Monday - 5
Tuesday - 10
Wednesday - 6
Thursday - 7
Friday - 2
Saturday - 11

This next week I'll only have 6 days to review + post, since a vacation to California is looming. It'll be interesting to see what my progress is like while traveling. I suspect I can fit in the new characters, but that review will be more challenging without my laptop & anki.

乔丹写信一个email。

今天晚上我写信一个 email：

－－－－－

你好！

我听说你喜欢收到 email， 所以我想要给你写信。

我是加拿大人。我用你的节目薛中文。每天晚上我开车的时候我听到。我觉得你的节目很精彩。

我希望你明白这个 email。

谢谢，
Jordan （乔丹）

Week #7 Update

With the Olympics being over, it's been easier to get my studying done. While the last week was higher than the past few weeks in terms of total characters, it was still not at the level I'd like. Fortunately I did do some good things that didn't contribute to my total # - all new characters were added to Anki, and I've kept my reviewing consistent. On some days there can be a very large # of characters to review, simply because of how quickly I've been adding them to the deck.

The last week my total # of characters was 39:

Sunday - 6
Monday - 0
Tuesday - 6
Wednesday - 7
Thursday - 6
Friday - 0
Saturday - 14

My goal for the next week is to 1) increase the average # per day to something closer to 10, and 2) have NO days with 0 characters.

Another thing I did today was to change my language preference on Facebook from English to Simplified Chinese. Although I don't use Facebook much anymore, I think this will give me more exposure to characters. Is there anything else I should switch to Chinese?

Week #6 Update

上个星期我没学很多新中文。我复习我的简体中文字。上个星期我学：

星期天：0
星期一：0
星期二：4
星期三：10
星期四：0
星期五：0
星期六：0

真的不好。这个星期我打算做很多。

加拿大上个星期赢了冰球金牌！哈哈哈！

Week #5 Update

Well, the Olympics are over, and that means no more excuses for not studying as much as I should. Starting today I'm going to get back on my 10 character a day pace. Last week was a little slow (only 22 characters). I won't post the #'s this week - but I will say that I took some time to add all of the new entries into Anki. They were building up in my notebook and not getting reviewed. This needs to be done right away or the stories for each character will be easily forgotten.