So my 4 months are up and unfortunately, the last 2 months have been a bit useless for various reasons, so needless to say I haven’t really managed to achieve my goal. Over the last month I have probably only spent about 10 hours learning Mandarin, and the bulk of that was probably reviewing characters on Memrise. I have still not yet completed all 30 lessons from Pimsleurs Mandarin 1 so that is still on my todo list.
I have improved by reading comprehension and my speaking a little, but I don’t think I would be able to hold a 5 minute conversation yet. Ah well. I have enjoyed it and so I will continue to plod on at my previous pace and see how it goes. Even though I haven’t achieved what I set out to, I still think it was a worthwhile experiment and I will continue to set targets for future learning in the hope that some day I do manage to learn Mandarin to a conversational level. With that in mind, here are my goals for 2013:
- Finish Pimsleurs Mandarin 1 (yes it’s still here, I’ve got to do it someday!);
- Increase my character knowledge to 1,500 characters;
- Make use of Verbling (a new service for having short conversations with native speakers) to improve my spoken Mandarin.
So nothing over the top, but hopefully they’re achievable.