Why do you want to learn Mandarin in the first place? Why is it worth the enormous amount of time to require the language?
If you are clear about the reason your prospects for motivating yourself are better.
Hm, I like this. Perhaps an automated email, sent once per week, saying something like:
My goal is to pass the Chinese proficiency exam by 2017. I have X days left. In the last week I’ve spent X hours practicing.
I want to learn Chinese because:
I want to work in Singapore/China/Taiwan after I finish University.
I want to prove that I can learn a foreign language.
I want to speak with my SO in her native language.
I fear that I would start ignoring the emails after a few weeks. It feels similar to Tony Robbins’ advice to keep telling yourself why you do what you do everyday. Sounds good on paper but I can’t for the life of me implement it in my daily routine.
I’ll give the emails a try and see what happens. Thanks.
It feels similar to Tony Robbins’ advice to keep telling yourself why you do what you do everyday. Sounds good on paper but I can’t for the life of me implement it in my daily routine.
I suspect some of the value of these sorts of affirmations is to identify which goals you get tired of, and which goals actually excite you. (But I also don’t seem to like daily habits of that variety, so it may be a personality thing.)
Why do you want to learn Mandarin in the first place? Why is it worth the enormous amount of time to require the language? If you are clear about the reason your prospects for motivating yourself are better.
Hm, I like this. Perhaps an automated email, sent once per week, saying something like:
I fear that I would start ignoring the emails after a few weeks. It feels similar to Tony Robbins’ advice to keep telling yourself why you do what you do everyday. Sounds good on paper but I can’t for the life of me implement it in my daily routine.
I’ll give the emails a try and see what happens. Thanks.
Instead of once per week you could send it whenever you drop below X hours of studying.
Those are good reasons (especially the last one). Keep it up.
I suspect some of the value of these sorts of affirmations is to identify which goals you get tired of, and which goals actually excite you. (But I also don’t seem to like daily habits of that variety, so it may be a personality thing.)
Should you be including some work on hearing and speaking Mandarin as well as reading and writing?
I’m heavily constrained by what I can test/grade. Writing code to grade the correctness of my Mandarin pronunciation is hard.
Listening exercises are easier to grade and they are definitely on my TODO list.
Can’t you ask her to tutor you?