Chinese Notes: Intro
Brand new year, brand new me as the saying goes.
I have now decided to pursue AJATT end game and start learning Chinese. To be honest, it wasn't something I was ever really expecting to do. After my Taiwanese residency ended, I was more or less content to just move on seeing that I only went a total of 5 days over a period of three years. But honestly, I thought it was such a waste to have had that residency for three years and not have done anything substantial with it and soon came to realize that the real blocker was the fact that I knew no Chinese. So here we are, learning Chinese in 20261.
It's been about 21 days since I started and for the most part it's been pretty much exclusively Anki. I really should be adding in at least an hour of immersion every day but haven't really made it a priority quite yet. The negative side-effects are already starting to show though since the Anki cards are extremely difficult since I have no real reference for anything lol. Although over the last few days I have been able to start understanding some of the sentences on the back of the cards so it's been a great boost and motivator. I've got about a 100 cards learned now and doing five cards a day. The goal would be at some point to bump it up but I probably won't do that until I actually build out an immersion schedule.
The goal now would be to do at least just my Anki everyday and maybe like 15 min of some Chinese audio i.e. something easy to commit to. Very unAJATT of me I know2. But don't let perfect be the enemy of good and all that. The other thing I'd like to do is blog everyday about what I'm doing. Which is crazy since the entire reason this blog exists is due to Khatz's Chinese Notes series and here I am, some 15 years later doing my own. Funny how life works like that.
As for Japanese, my new year's goal was to do absolutely nothing lol. The past few years I've explicitly made some goals to try and do some Japanese immersion as a daily habit so this year we're doing the opposite. Set a goal of zero and then anything I do will be a win. Genius move I might say. While not particularly related to Japanese, I do have some other goals related to Japan that are currently in the works and will hopefully post about them once things settle down.
I don't really plan on any of the blogs being this long after this. I feel like Twitter3 might be a better place but there's something nice about having control of both the content and appearance of what I'm trying to convey. Updates will probably be much shorter moving forward 🫡