Hello everyone. I am working hard at Chinese. Here’s what I’m doing.

• Heisig. Each day I study 60 characters from Heisig’s famous book, Remembering Simplified Hanzi. 60 characters is a lot and it takes 2-3 hours every day all by itself, this is a big chunk of time if you have a full-time job. I’m doing this because my ambition is to get to the end of Book 1 (1500 characters in total) within the next two weeks. I sent Dr Heisig a fangirling email and he replied! A very nice exchange and a kind man.
• Duolingo. I’m doing this more or less competitively now because I like having a high rank in the leaderboards.
• Skritter when I have time, is great for correcting my stroke order. Reading and writing are very important to me.
• I like a Chinese Pod lesson from time to time, they’re nice and clear. I’m better with the video than the audio because I can read Mandarin much better than I can hear it, see below.

Stuff I’m not yet doing but want to do.

• Reading books! I’m nearly at the stage where I will be able to decipher simple literature such as books for children and maybe young adults. I watched all 24 episodes of the TV series Put Your Head On My Shoulder and it was absolute drivel but ideal for someone who is learning Chinese because the dialogue is so simple, they just endlessly say ‘let’s have lunch’ and ‘let’s go to the library’ and so on. So anyway, I found the book on Ali Express! Super exciting! It arrived at my house in London from its origin in China in only one week and I want to read it because I think the language won’t be too hard and I have a general idea of what it’s about and what everyone’s names are, which has got to help.

Stuff I’m not yet doing but urgently need to do.

• HSK listening practice. I think I’m capable of achieving a good standard of literacy in Chinese if I keep working at it, but one half of the HSK proficiency tests is listening skills, and I have hearing loss. That’s a real problem. Westerners struggle to understand spoken Chinese at the best of times but if you have hearing loss as well then it’s immensely difficult. The HSK 1 test that I’m booked in for is in September and I have ambitions to take HSK 2 in January, so I have a lot of work to do.

Right, I’d better get on it. See you soon. Good luck in your studies, if that’s relevant to you.