The 2025 aims and objectives

I have been absent from these forums for a long time. I've been on hiatus from Chinese. In the meantime, I've learned Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, and have substantially improved my French. (Only listening and reading skills. I can watch a documentary in Spanish and understand almost everything, but can barely string a sentence together.)

I do plan on returning to actively studying Chinese, but it won't be this year or next. I've blocked out the next two years for learning to understand Japanese, so I've got my plate full. However, that doesn't mean I'm neglecting my Chinese!

For the past couple of months, I've been focusing really hard on improving my Chinese listening comprehension, which has always been absolute crap, particularly compared to my reading comprehension. So far, I've listened to at least 41 hours (it's more than that, but I didn't start logging time in my spreadsheet until late January), and I'm really seeing tangible improvement. I watched my first TV series ever in Chinese (降世神通), have listened to a huge amount of news broadcasts, and am now branching out into political analysis and commentary, vlogs, and tech content.

I am making my first serious stab at an audiobook. I'm listening to 纳尼亚传奇. I definitely could not have understood any of it at the beginning of this year. But thanks to the hours I've  put in, it's become approachable, if not necessarily easy.

My goal, in as much as I have one, is to fully catch my listening comprehension up to my reading comprehension by the end of 2026. Put another way, right now, I often watch a video and feel like I didn't understand some section of speech, but then rewind and look at the subtitles and find that the grammar and vocabulary used was well within my competency. I want instances of this to trend to zero by the end of 2026. 

If all goes well, I'll be wrapping up my studies of Japanese around that time, and will then be able to turn my attention to doubling my Chinese vocabulary from ~20k words to ~40k words. 

On 12/24/2024 at 11:26 AM, Lu said:

Goals specifically for next year:

- Read more Chinese

- Do something with/for Taiwanese literature

- Learn katakana, so I can make sense of more Japanese text, just because it would be nice to be able to.

Katakana is going well. I took it at a very, very leasurely pace and have learned them all now. That is, I learned all the katakana that were in this Anki deck, I think there are a few extra ones/variants, I should look into that. It was in fact so painless that I'm considering doing hiragana next, even though that's not very useful since I don't know Japanese and have no plans to learn.

Doing something with/for Taiwanese literature is going well: my next translation project will be a Taiwanese book (contract not signed yet, so fingers crossed, but it should work out).

Just doing "something" for 20-30 minutes per day is all I ask of myself these days. 

Could be reading a bit, or watching a video, or taking a class. 

Try and keep it simple! 

1. Visit the forums once a year.
2. Feel guilty for my level of Chinese.
3. Resolve to find the perfect way to learn.
4. Give up in frustration while still in set up.
5. Do absolutely nothing.

This year I'm just going do steps 1, 2 and 5.

On 10/9/2025 at 12:57 AM, self-taught-mba said:

1. Visit the forums once a year.
2. Feel guilty for my level of Chinese.
3. Resolve to find the perfect way to learn.
4. Give up in frustration while still in set up.
5. Do absolutely nothing.

This year I'm just going do steps 1, 2 and 5.

If you're going to skip any of these steps, make it step 2. That one is the least productive by far.

If you want to do more, consider doing a little learning imperfectly instead of first finding the perfect way. That's a classic version of the textbook fallacy: searching for the perfect textbook instead of just sitting down with an okay one. On the other hand, as I understand from a few recent posts I read of you and Imron, perhaps figuring out How To Learn is the thing you are actually into and have made some good progress in, so in that case, keep at it.