About

This website is dedicated to one of my best friends, and my language learning mentor, Khatz – from All Japanese all the Time. One day he mentioned that he had made the goal to just touch Chinese at least once a day. Touching Chinese in any way for even a minute a day was considered a win.

This makes very good sense because overcoming inertia is usually the hardest part of getting any project started. Once you actually crack a book open or start doing reps on your srs you’re likely to keep going just a little bit longer. It’s like trying to get a four year old to take a bath. Oftentimes you have to drag them kicking and screaming into the bathtub, but once they get in the water they’re fine and then they don’t want to get back out again because they’re having so much fun playing pirates.

Perhaps that’s why I tend to feast and famine on my language study. I’d binge on Korean for weeks on end, and then just ignore it completely, only to come back and start the cycle all over again. Korean and I have a push-pull relationship. We love each other… we hate each other. We break up to make up. I thought Korean was too demanding, when all it really needed was a few minutes out of my day.

The cumulative effect of small doses of language study added up over time is what makes for proficiency, so it’s important not to lose the habit of making that steady and consistent progress. My goal, then, is to come into contact with Mandarin at least once a day for at least one minute. This is my bare minimum goal, but it’s a goal that I believe is obtainable and will not lead to burn out. Every extra minute is just kudos for me, since feeling good about doing stuff is one of the best ways to keep motivation high in the long run.

But in case that doesn’t work then this blog makes public my progress, because the threat of having to publicly admit defeat can also be quite motivating.

My current goal is to use the site as a sort of notebook where I can keep track of what I’m learning and how I’m doing it. I plan to write down the methods I’m using, thoughts I have about the process, different media I’m learning from, mnemonics for characters and mined sentences. I hope that if I carefully tag each post in the last two categories that it will eventually become a resource for people who are studying characters whereby clicking on a tag of interest takes them to other characters with the same components and mined sentences that include them. If this helps other students in any way it would be great, but ultimately I believe this process will prove of most benefit to myself.

In the end I expect to be able to refer back to earlier posts and chart my progress, to quickly locate notes on what I’ve studied by searching the site, and to more accurately pinpoint what needs improvements and where I should put my focus next.

Disclaimer: This website is a learning tool for myself. I do hope that others may get some benefit from it, however I am not qualified to do any translations or transliterations myself. All sentences are mined from trusted sources. All characters are checked with a dictionary. Pinyin is computer generated and double checked.

Mandarin Media is taken primarily from youtube. An attempt is made to find videos that are entertaining, have chinese characters, pinyin, and an English translation. This is no easy task as you can imagine. So if the videos have pinyin without tone marks, or no chinese characters, or no pinyin, or just suck, please be tolerant.

If you see any errors, or have any suggestions for how I can improve this website so that others can benefit from it as well, please use the contact form to send your feedback.