This is going to be my third attempt at learning Mandarin. My first attempt was in 2014-15, and the second one, I don’t even remember.
I’ve also decided to revisit Japanese and go for another breakthrough.
If you’re unfamiliar with my history, I basically did a 12 month challenge back in 2022-23 and achieved fluency in everyday spoken Japanese. I moved to Tokyo, where I still live. But I lost the drive to continue learning — I had achieved my original goal, after all. I soon decided to stop learning actively and moved on to other endeavors such as Judo, so my Japanese plateaued completely.
Recently, after 2.5 years of being in this country, my passion for the language seems to be coming back.
When learning a language, the most powerful factor is daily consistency — coming back everyday for a loooooong time. The only way to do that is to either motivate yourself somehow, or to decide that you will make it a non-negotiable habit.
My first two attempts with Mandarin didn’t go anywhere because of a simple reason: not having the right motivation, and not engaging with content that I enjoyed.
My motivation at that time was completely career oriented. I saw it as a “skill” that could come in useful. What a terribly weak motive.
For both languages, I’d like to be able to get to a way higher level of proficiency.
My favourite way of increasing my ability in a language is to find content I really really like, (something I wouldn’t get bored of even after listening to it a dozen or more times), and then listen to the same content again and again until I not only fully understand each line, but also know them by heart.
For my first milestone, I’ve picked a Chinese TV show that I find interesting (it’s called 机智 的 上半场) on LingQ, and I believe that finishing this TV show alone will level-up my Chinese to a fluent daily conversation level.
Don’t have any more to say; see you all in the next update.
