"The Think System"

Personally, it sounds like you're not having enough opportunities to use your new vocabulary and you are therefore forgetting it. What helps me remember vocabulary is hearing it in different contexts and circumstances. Speaking the words in conversation also helps a lot. I used to listen to C-Pod lessons repeatedly in the hopes that it would drill in some of the tough vocab but I found it did little for my retention. I'm not getting your comparison between the musical and Chinese but I'm pretty sure it's flawed since children don't spend years just listening and then suddenly,one day, bust out a Shakespeare sonnet. From what I remember, not being a parent myself, is babies spend years goo-goo gaa-gaaing until their words become coherent, Hell, I'm still learning how to pronounce some English words. Just my 2 cents.

One of the things I've started to do is chat with Chinese people online. There are a bunch of sites where you can find people looking to learn English as they help you learn Chinese. The text-based communication gives me extra time to decipher their comments, look up words I don't know, and craft a response. I often find myself going back to recent ChinesePod lessons to find a grammatical construction or a word I want to use. People are very nice about it when I am slow and my comments are often incorrect. The practice is great, and I even learn a little about Chinese cultural perceptions. Thankfully, I can still honestly say that my Chinese is not good enough to engage in political conversation.

Yes definitely, without using and reusing vocabulary I find it gets lost, and it can get really hard to find ways of reusing it. In the early stages, I found it helped a lot to listen to a single dialogue dozens of times, that's what my brain needed to become very deeply familiar with those sounds. I think that's really paid off in my pronunciation ability. Later, frustrated by having limited opportunities to re-use lesson vocab words, I decided to take the instructions super-literally. Listening to many podcasts, maybe 10 or 20 in a row each time, any word which recurred many times would lodge in my memory all by itself and I reckoned that the other words could go forget themselves, just padding for the "real" vocabulary. This also has the side benefit of getting more exposure to phrase and sentence patterns. (Of course some lessons would still be studied completely too.) But I've never got it with those patterns either, probably the only poddie to not "get it" but it's true. The idea is educationally superb: instead of ramming rules and admonitions down our throats, we just listen and gradually see for ourselves how these patterns work out. But somehow I never see the patterns, all I see is a random jumble of words and confusing inconsistencies. Sure, sometimes I do notice something and get curious, even go so far as to hypothesise on how it might work... then find out by counterexample that I'm wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. It doesn't get any better over time, actually, because this experience becomes inhibiting. After two years the constructions in newbie lessons still mystify me, and I tend to try to speak Mandarin in English sentence structures, fighting against this tendency when it "doesn't sound like Jenny" but still only half believing that it's right because I don't know why it could be that way. I can't bear to spend brain cells on guesses or acts of faith to erase later. I always need to know why, right from Day One, and usually within a minute or two of that question arising, or else I get the shts and give up. I guess that's what I've done a bit, given up on grammar and structure because it snubs me. It was a long time before I realised that almost everyone here had also used a course or a textbook and was getting that info from elsewhere, probably from day one, which is also why they were coming out with strange words like "hanzi" that I'd never seen on the site. I guess I should have studied grammar from a book at the same time, but I wanted to play the game properly instead of listening to my learning needs. Until now I really believed that the magic pattern listening absorption method was good so it would surely work for me eventually. Never let your intellect, obedience, or faith override whatever brings joy to your heart!