It’s time to celebrate my first 30 consecutive days of learning Mandarin.
In the first 30 days, I have been able to do just one full pass of one episode of [机智 的 上半场], an interesting Chinese TV show I found.
I will continue to read and listen to the episodes. Over time, the number of days taken per episode should drastically go down.
My stats say I know “2363 words”, but that is mostly an error — it’s a remnant of days past from my first attempt at Chinese on LingQ, most of which I’ve forgotten, so my actual known-word count is much smaller.
I’ve seen a few episodes of this show already, and so far I’m enjoying it a lot. It’s a slice-of-life drama with very real everyday situations (among friends and family, with professors in a classroom, etc).
There are also no cheesy / quirky characters, so nobody speaks in unnatural Chinese, but there are some characters who speak in dialect / too fast or too slow, which is tough but also good because I’m training my ears to comprehend a variety of spoken Chinese from day one.
And yes, I purposely never study from “beginner-friendly” or “intermediate” content. There are literally playlists that have “slow chinese”, which is somehow supposed to help people learn in a more progressive manner. I personally disagree. You get good at whatever you practice — these student-facing resources might be good to learn some vocabulary and sentence structure, but in the end, there is no substitute for authentic content.
I’m a huge believer that long, daily consecutive streaks are the best and fastest way to see incredible, stress-free progress.
In other news, I’m also 14 consecutive days into my second innings of learning Japanese. This time I intend to make a leap from intermediate to highly advanced. Thankfully, since I live in Japan, my proficiency hasn’t gone down by much, but I still feel like from a vocabulary standpoint, it has tapered off quite a bit.
I’ve picked up a new series called “4989 American Life Podcast”, which is a solo podcast by a Japanese woman who lives in the USA. So far it’s wonderful, but I’m also looking forward to revisiting content I finished during my last innings.
Perhaps an interesting goal would be to get to 1000 days in both languages.
