And I have no doubt that you will ace your next exam too @Sonja-Mandarin-HSK_3! Sorry to hear about the stress of your daily life, but I’m glad that languages gives you an escape. I bet you would be a great team member to have in one of the Escape Room games too!
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It’s great reading all of your goals! If I had to be intentional, this year I would like to:
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Become conversationally fluent in Spanish. My mom is of Mexican descent and speaks Spanish and I grew up in Southern California, United States around many Spanish speakers. I can understand and read Spanish quite well (have studied it on and off for the past few years), but have a lot of trouble articulating myself verbally in the language. I think a lot of this stems from anxiety I have around making mistakes myself when communicating with native Spanish speakers. I strive to work in healthcare in the future and know that language barriers impact access to quality care, so I really want to improve my speaking abilities and be a part of facilitating access to culturally-sensitive care.
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Learn proper Vietnamese character pronunciation and a few common phrases. My partner is Vietnamese and I’d love to be able to communicate with his family members in their preferred language! He practices with me, but I have a lot of trouble with the correct pronunciation of Vietnamese characters as a native English speaker. I am working on it and hope to be able to use a few common phrases by the end of 2022! In Southern California, there are many Vietnamese speakers and I’d love to one day be fluent enough to provide access to healthcare resources in this language as well.
Wishing you all the best with your goals for 2022!
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Great to read those Angelina, especially your 2nd one. I really love goals that are related to family.
My wife is Italian and whilst she speaks English, along with most of her family (to varying degrees), I’ve really tried to push only speaking Italian with them when in Italy.
They always tell me not to bother but it’s a matter of pride, and a lifelong challenge. Plus it does us no harm to not have to rely on our partners!
Good luck with your journey and welcome to the forum. I’m sure you’ll get to where you want to be with both languages.
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Great to have a fellow Vietnamese student in the forum finally! Welcome to Flexi Forum.
If you have a minute please make a post under the Vietnamese section. I am the only one posting there at the moment and sometimes feel a bit lonely 
I promise I will reply straight away (whatever it is about 
)
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I was tidying my house and found this from my 2019 resolutions. At that point I’d been in Taipei 2 months. 50 chinese characters seemed like a real lot back then!!
Right now I have around 4700 words on Hack Chinese (not sure on number of individual characters) - have come a pretty long way from my 50 characters goal 
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wow you smashed those goals! Well done
So 2022 is almost over… better get cracking on that “reach HSK 6 level” goal 
some small motivation to do a Chinese learning ramp up again!
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Yes, we need LTL HSK6 classes soon 
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I love the fact that our Flexi students keep progressing so fast that we keep needing to add even higher levels 
HSK 6 is in the works
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And 7-9 right after that 
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Nice bump Chloe - going back to mine, here’s where I am at.
Mandarin - Remain consolidated as I presume I’ll be out of China for the vast portion of 2022. Keep taking Flexi Classes and using it whenever I can in my day-to-day life so that my level doesn’t drop off!
Not taken many Flexi Classes for Mandarin but I believe I’ve JUST about spoken it enough to keep that level topped up.
Italian - Start to have comfortable conversations in all tenses. I can have basic conversations now but always hit a brick wall at some stage. I’d like to break through that and become conversationally fluent. I also plan to give half of my wedding speech in Italian which I need to start working on soon!
Improvement for sure (I gave half my wedding speech in Italian which was an amazing moment), far from conversationally fluent but I’m definitely ahead of where I was a year ago.
Japanese - Be able to have basic conversations. Japanese for me is more a distraction and a bit of fun so I’m putting little pressure on myself but want to make progress. Right now I can do very basic things but would struggle in any conversation. I’d like to push that forward and actually be able to reply to questions rather than stare blankly!
Enjoyed plenty of Japanese Flexi Classes this year. I’m going to Japan in February for 3 weeks and this is sufficient motivation to push hard in the coming months. I spoke some Japanese in Qatar over the last two weeks with Japanese football fans and that definitely boosted my confidence but I would say I still struggle with anything beyond very basic conversations.
Korean - Same as Japanese.
No progress. I can read Hangul and ask two questions. Hampered by time.
I also plan to dip my toe into Russian but I will leave the goal as to simply be able to read the Cyrillic alphabet with ease.
I took the first 5 Russian classes with Teacher Alina. She was super and I would say I can read Cyrillic, JUST about. A nice surprise but I’d need to revise it soon otherwise it’ll go again! Would like to take more lessons next year.
All in all I’d say a 7/10 year. Italian the language with most progress, followed by Japanese. Mandarin I remain comfortable enough but I’m sure I’ll get a shock when I go to Taiwan in February!
Will set new goals in January.
What about everyone else?
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I just found this site about a week ago. I would really love to learn Korean and Japanese. I am unsure whether I will actually be able to conversationally speak either but it would be amazing if I could. I just graduated with a new bachelors degree so I have time around my work schedule now that kids are grown.
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Steady progress Lisa, take baby steps and you’ll be surprised how quickly you can improve.
Welcome to LTL also by the way, hope you are enjoying your lessons and the community 
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I found that I’ve written to reach HSK3 as a goal for 2022, but I’m currently far ahead as I’m studying HSK5.
This year I had my first interview in mandarin, it was really difficult but I hope I will be able to work in Shanghai next year.
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Now that’s a win! Very well done Antoine. Hope Flexi has helped
So, 1 month later, I can feedback on my 2022 goals/status.
- I finally got back on top of my Hack Chinese:
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For my “be HSK 6 level” goal, I think I am on the way. I haven’t made as much progress against the vocab lists as I would like, BUT, I see from my Jan 2022 post I had 4,700 words. I am now at 7,300 words, so a good improvement. It’s been a busy year at my new job so I think I have done the best I could have done. Also, given that I learn from the TW textbooks, HSK is just a rough approximation of my level. So I have :
HSK 5: 127 vocab left
HSK 6: 3,130 strong | ~1,747 left
New HSK 6: 3,453 strong | ~1,807 left
HSK7-9: strong 4,697 | ~6,133 left -
I spent a lot of time working on my fluency this year. I had a lot of language milestones:
- First contract negotiation in Chinese
- First time having meetings in Chinese
- First time going to the doctors in fully Chinese
- First time buying phone / headphones in Chinese
- Phone now fully in Chinese
- First time having dinner with my partner’s friends and being able to understand and communicate [side note: some might think this is a very late stage to be able to do this! But I have found that when talking to my own friends in Chinese / in a small group, they are happy to slow down and use simple vocab, like I do with my foreign colleagues in English. If it’s a normal social situation with all Taiwanese people who are not my friend group, people don’t think to adjust like that!]
Finally, I think now I feel like I can say “yes, I speak Chinese”. I feel my fluency has really improved this year, even my colleagues and partner’s friends have commented to say so. Thank you LTL for helping me on this journey! I think I have had approx 100 hours with LTL this year.
So… goals for 2023:
- Be HSK 6 level for real
- Improve my business Chinese to improve contract / work specific language
- Increase using Chinese wherever I can - work, home, general life
- And… give a speech in Chinese at my wedding! I got engaged a few months ago and we just booked the Taiwan wedding for Nov '23… so I have some time… . The negotiation with the wedding vendors being in 100% Chinese is also massively helping my fluency!
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That’s the sort of screenshot I want to see, starting from today!
I have spent my New Year in Italy and after a month of intensive/immersive Italian it’s time to jump back onto the Japanese and Mandarin bandwagon.
I’ll be spending 3 weeks in Taiwan and 3 in Japan so I want to give myself the best chance.
Chloe - your Hack effort there has inspired me to boost myself forward in the 6 weeks I have.
From today - it’s 6 weeks of intensive Hack study, with no day being missed.
Let’s see how it goes.
Good luck to everyone this year with your language studies, and remember, it’s not a race. Enjoy it
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