Wednesday, July 04, 2007

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.

3 comments:

liulianxiaoyu said...

终于又看到你的新贴了。:)

听说欧洲很多国家夏季公司员工都会有很长一段时间的假期,你们放假了吗?

Brendan Lawlor said...

不放假了。 这里我在工作。 只需要一个因特网联通可以工作。爱尔兰的假期比较欧洲的不太长。我们有20个天但是在法国(比如说)有大概30个天。

liulianxiaoyu said...

谢谢,我明白了。

你的中文写得很好,只是我想如果稍微修改一下,也许会更好。

“不放假了。现在我在工作。我只需要连通因特网就可以工作。爱尔兰的假期比欧洲短,我们有二十天,但是法国(比如说)有大概30天。”

Here "天" is a measurement because you omits "假期" in the sentence----我们有二十天(假期),但是法国(比如说)有大概30天(假期)。 Therefore, it is not necessary to add another measurement "个"

希望对你有帮助。:)