The next project, the next level...

Last year's was grammar. And I will defininately continue with that quest.

This year, though, I plan on a focused attack on written Chinese once again.

I have pondered about this for quite a while now, although I shied away from posting it here:

http://chinesepod.com/connections/viewpost/RJBerki/connect/Resolutions+for+learning+Chinese

as I wasn't sure I will actually have the guts to do it.

It will contain of two interrelated tasks:

1) Following Goulnik's lesson *and* 

2) Repeating Hanzi (yes!)

The most inspirational post for me in several month was furyougaijin's:

http://chinesepod.com/connections/viewpost/furyougaijin/connect/Experiments+in+Chinese+Language+Study%3A+Learning+the+Alphabet 

and it contained lots of interesting tips on how to proceed.

I will not try to copy furyougaijin's achievement and I am certainly not able to do so in 5 month. Both time restrictions, other construction sites (grammar, lessons, goulnik's news,...), and last not least my slow brain will keep me away from that. But I try to utilize his advices.

The reason for doing so is simple:

I am still convinced that forcing me to learn to *read* 2000 characters (which took me about 18 month, by the way) were the prerequisite to attack the CPod Intermediate level. And I also believe, that you need about 4000 to truely become capable of addressing the Media level. Right now I can roughly follow the Media-banter, but when it comes to listening to the Media content in audio form or trying to remember the related vocab I am still lost.

Disclaimer: Of the many private projects I started, most failed, and quite a few did so in embryonic stages (starting a blog?, sports??). This might happen here again. Familiy and work dominate my schedule. But then, I will be in China again soon, which usually gives me additional time and motivation.