Sunday, March 31, 2013

we've moved!

Guess what? I am quitting blogger. Blogger is terrible, horrible, breakable, no fixes, nothing.

My new blog opens tomorrow, April 1st. Please visit the new blog! I'll even give you a link to it.

Go to: http://blog.keith-lucas.com/

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

what now?

How about a post for February 2013? OK, I'll tell you what happened.  After I wrote my last post, which was about all the handwriting practice that I was doing for Chinese and Japanese characters, I went to the bowling alley and bowled 10 games. That turned out to be not such a good idea. I had to give my wrist a rest so I got behind in my writing and studying of Chinese and decided not to take the HSK tests.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

progress report

I finished the first book which is for the new HSK 1 exam.  I did the mock test in the back and got 100% of the problems correct.  I have started on the second book which is for the level 2 test of HSK. This book is much thicker than the first, but it seems to have just used more pages on testing.

The HSK books are in Japanese, but I'm not bothering to read much of the explanations in Japanese when I already understand the Chinese example sentences. I basically just copy all of the Chinese words and sentences and then listen to the audio, and then I do the test at the end of each lesson.

This series is kind of bad, in the way it uses words in examples that it has not yet introduced. First, it has a list of words at the beginning of the lesson. But it also has a supplementary list of words at the end of the lesson. These words are then used in the testing section which appears right afterwards. So there's no real chance to learn the words or get used to them before you are tested.  Hopefully no users of these books are only learning Chinese from just these books. Although, both the first book and the second book started out with lessons on pronunciation, which I skipped.

Friday, January 18, 2013

strengthen your neural connections

Lately, I have been strengthening my neural connections, and it feels good.  I'd like to tell you what I've been up to lately.