The next big push

I've been a bit quiet here lately. I've moved to Italy for the Summer and there has been a bit of business travel too so I've neglected my studies (and blog) for the past few weeks.

I'm finally back on track, and this very morning I spoke with Aggie from Chinesepod about my Practice Plan. I've signed up and begin tomorrow. I'm really keen to make this push me to the next level. My local (Ireland) Chinese teacher told my classmates and I that we were at a point on the journey uphill towards Chinese whereby one more big push would make all the difference. I hope she's right. I know I'm probably progressing, but most of the time I do feel like I'm trying to fill a leaky bucket.

With Aggie, the Skype connection wasn't great so we switched to a phone line after a while. I'll try again with Skype tomorrow with my Practice counselor. The plan is to use the first hour of my day (9-10 CET) preparing the day's lesson, and having the phone call. At 10am it's 9am Irish time and I can just get to work. In the evenings I usually have an hour or more to recap if necessary, and begin the preparation for the following day's lesson.

According to Aggie I'm an Intermediate, which kind of surprised me. Perhaps I am from a listening comprehension point of view, but certainly not as far as my spoken Chinese is concerned, or my hanzi reading either. So the practice sessions will be based on three Intermediate lessons a week, and two calls to revise, recap and bring all the threads together. I'll be concentrating on travel Chinese to prepare for my big trip - I can't believe it's only 6 months away.