Today, is the day where I can say, I have now been learning Mandarin for a Month. Technically I have been learning for almost two, although with holidays and moving house I have only been able to settle down this month to start to properly learn.

Now I started out and promised myself that I would spend an hour a day learning, and to be truthfully honest, it has not happened. Some days I have spent learning for a lot longer than an hour, but more often than not, due to me wanting to read, everything there is out there about Mandarin and Chinese culture, and the various other things I do, I just have not had the time.

However, I have still learnt a lot, and will continue to do so. I can now count in Mandarin, although my pronouciation still needs considerable work, can recognise more characters and can read pinyin infinitely better than I could a month ago.

You hit a stage when you start learning Mandarin after the first barrier, where you bound along learning many new (easy-ish) words. You make real progress, but suddenly you will hit another harder barrier, and it can be easy to stop there. Which I have been guilty of so far. It is so much more pleasing to burst through the barrier and make even more progress.

I cannot wait to bring this to two months of Mandarin. Or six. Mandarin seems to me to be a language you will never stop learning once you start. I was seriously scared and put off this week when Bill posted this link: voicesinshanghai.posterous.com/, which has lots of Chinese natives speaking in dialect as they really do in China, and it is great to hear the people really speaking the language, and not just the studio-learning accent. However it did make me realise how much of an enormous task I have started, and it was rather humbling to see how far I really had progressed this Month.

Charlie.


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