After coming back from China, I’ve been in a slump with my Chinese. Yes, I still read Chinese everyday and listen to some music, but I feel like I need a goal. A direction.

When I was in China, all the new Chinese came easy. It was like I was on autopilot with improving my Chinese. Now… it’s effort. However, I did not feel it before. I guess it comes from getting things easy. What g0es up must come down.

But besides that, I feel like I’m reaching a point where my vocabulary acquisition is reaching diminishing returns. If I learn new words, like for instance I learned 讲究 the other day. It means “to pay particular attention to” or “exquisite”. Now, that’s a cool word right, but really how much is it used. I’m scared of learning words that are really obscure, which will make me end up sounding like a pompous speaker.

I think next should be learning more vocabulary that are certain areas of interest. I want to brush up on web/tech vocabulary, ‘cause it is an area that interests me, but could also be valuable for future job prospects. It’s just hard to find something functional after I have been in China. There it was like this: I need to book an apartment. Check up in dictionary some words. Use them.

In some good news though, Billy from StudymoreChinese has a daily sentence challenge going. He posts words, usually two of them and you have to make a sentence. I quite enjoy this. Takes about 5min everyday and people help each other and read other sentences. Rather nifty. Follow this group to join in.

Also, I’m busy redesigning Social Mandarin on my own. I know some CSS and PHP, but its a nice challenge. It is going good!