My 90-Day Chinese challenge is over as of today. My thoughts?
Pros: A challenge for me has to be long enough to gain momentum, but short enough to keep sight of realistic goals. It’s easier to see 90 days out as opposed to 180 days. This leads into the downside of this challenge.
Cons: Since, 90 days is a relatively short period of time compared to a 180-day or a 120-day challenge I took these last 3 months for granted. I thought I could wing it and I got off track a lot. I realized past the half-way point that I needed to set several attainable, measurable short-term goals while keeping the big picture in mind. I clearly overestimated how much I can get done in 90 days.
What I’m most proud of: I learned about 500 hanzi or Chinese characters
I’m finding my groove using Heisig’s book. I originally planned on learning 30 characters per day. I found that it’s more efficient for me to focus on 2 lessons per day. Some lessons have 15 characters some have about 40 or so. Monday ? Friday I go through 2 lessons per day. Saturday and Sunday, I go through 4 lessons per day. That means I go through 18 lessons per week. This week, there are 481 characters in 18 lessons.
Seeing how there are only 55 lessons, I should be done with this book before the end of February if I keep going at this rate.
I’m fired up! I wish that I had started Remembering the Hanzi when I first started this challenge. I was going to learn 30 characters per day, but I’m getting through 30 in just 10 minutes. I’m well aware that characters by themselves may not necessarily reflect the same meaning in a compound word. Still, I love the ability to recognize so many individual characters in such short period of time.
When I first heard about this book, I wondered how could a book that teaches you to learn 1500 characters could be useful if it doesn’t teach you how to pronounce them. I can now see, that that’s not the point. Introducing pronunciation would just slow down the process. The book itself is a memory training manual using Chinese characters as its subject.
I’ve reviewed the characters I already learned, and was able to recall 99% of them. Not bad. I’m upping the ante by learning 50 characters a day instead of 30 characters.
I’m gearing up for the Great Blizzard of 2010! If it snows as hard as the forecasts say it will, then I’ll be pretty much stranded on Saturday and much of Sunday. Naturally, I’ll either be snuggling up to Remembering the Hanzi or staring at the wall. I get through at least 1 lesson per day. Maybe I’ll shoot for 3 lessons per day on Sat and Sun.
Just a quick update here. I’ve been at this a grand total of 15 minutes and I’ve gone through the first 2 lessons. In the first lesson, Heisig tells us that the first 15 characters are those that we already know. He was right. Right off the bat we get the characters for the numbers 1 – 10. The last five in the group are the hanzi for mouth, day, month, rice field, and eye. So, in 2 lessons, I went through 32 characters.
I mentioned that I’m also doing memory training. The concepts in the memory training program and in Remembering the Hanzi are very similar because they encourage the use of vivid imagery to engage the mind. Our minds tend to think in pictures. I can really appreciate Heisig’s techniques. Onward!
