Phase 1 is over. Another big yippee! Pimsleur is awesome, but it's sweet to be finished. I still have to load the final 100 spreadsheet entries into supermemo, but that's a cake walk. The final stats, about 1400 supermemo entries. About 500 words, and 900 sentences, very well engrained in my brain.
Phase 2 is almost over. 3 more lessons to go. We've exhausted the entire syllabus that we were using as a vocabulary guide, and are now just conversing for an hour. This is so much nicer. Extrapolating the last 3 classes, I've will have learned 1000 words in 45 lessons, or 9 weeks. This was expensive, $100 per week, but it has been invaluable to me.
I think I'm using a little over half the words now. I used to think I was lagging by a week or two because I hadn't yet drilled the words enough. This is probably a contributor, but now I think whether or not I've used the recordings is a bigger contributor. In the beginning, due to some technical difficulties, it took a long time to begin using the recordings. I was 2 weeks into phase 2 before I began using them. Now I see clearly that I'm much more likely to use the words from the recordings then those I haven't gotten to yet. Being forced to pull them out while driving, with a set time limit, really helps evidently. Lesson learned: stay on top of the recordings. Don't let them fall behind.
Phase 3 will begin on the 23rd. I'm very excited. I want to be really aggressive about conversation in that one week of class. Not only in class, but from the moment I clear customs. I always speak English until I clear customs; I'm paranoid they'll think I'm worthy of questioning or something because I speak the language.
Phase 4 (yes, that's a new phase) is Chinesepod. I was able to listen to all 200+ Newbie lessons while at work the last week or so. Rather than download the dialogs, I just noted the new vocabulary. I got about 200 new words. Now that I'm at home, I'll probably download all the lessons for my trip. Even though I've been listening to a lot of English explanations in the newbie lessons, overall I feel Chinese pod has helped my listening a lot. And the advanced lessons are great to listen to for pure Chinese. Two very clear female voices, eloquent and beautiful. I catch quite a few phrases now, but am nowhere near comprehending the dialogs. It's a nice break from the slow pace of the newbies though.
FSI's first module is over. I was very pleased with the program; excellent descriptions of all aspects of pronunciation. The drills are very helpful too. Unfortunately I uncovered a problem that I didn't know I had. My tone recognition is not very good. After doing poorly on the FSI tone recognition drills, I confirmed with 2 other sites, shufawest and pinyin practice that I can recognize single syllable tones 80-90% of the time, and double syllable tones only 50-60% of the time. After a lot of fussing about this on another site, I've come to the conclusion that I just need a lot more listening practice. Time to be patient. I will try to do about 10 min per day tone recognition drills though, just in case that can really help.
So it looks like I'm in good shape for my trip. I'll probably try to memorize the 200 new words and cram them into into supermemo before I leave, but may not make it. If I do, my word count will be 500(pimsleur) + 1000(tutor) + 200(chinesepod) = 1700. Not enough of course, but not too shabby.
