- Review contents of my core textbooks (23 chapters)
- Learn all the characters in Reading & Writing Chinese (2,000 characters)
Reviewing one chapter a week seems like a comfortable pace. A sustained pace of 50 characters a week also seems reasonable, and I think I’ll try to exceed that initially since the first 500 or so characters should come back to me pretty quickly. In any case, I should be starting to feel comfortable about my reading and writing skills by summer, at which point I’ll decide either to tackle some real prose or to work on my oral skills or both.
In the past I’ve found that writing exercises really helped build my memory for characters and grammar. I think it would be a good idea to incorporate regular writing, maybe something diary-like, into my study plan. Writing a little blog in Chinese might be an option… not that I’d have the skills to say anything worth reading, but simply the act of formulating the entries might be valuable practice.
While I’m at it, let’s test whether 43things will permit me to include actual Chinese characters in my entry: 你好! Looks good, if a bit tiny.
