Well, I promised I’d keep up with blogging here.
I’m now quite settled into my new place in Tokyo. I’ve been here just over two months. My Japanese is coming along reasonably well considering my work at Outlier is essentially full-time (though I work from home, so I have a lot of flexibility). My Chinese doesn’t seem to have stagnated, but I’m not putting as much time into it as I would like. Here’s what I’m doing:
I’ve become an early riser. I’m up at about 5:30 every day, though recently it’s been a bit later. I take a walk most mornings before my wife wakes up or while she’s getting ready for work. During my walk I listen to a Taiwanese talk radio station or to some recordings I have from my interpretation classes last year. The teacher gave me a ton of material that we didn’t go through in class. If I have time before breakfast, I’ll read from either The Independent Reader or 古文觀止. My first month here I read some palaeography stuff too, but as my work load has increased I’ve had to put that aside temporarily.
After my wife leaves I spend an hour or so learning about FileMaker, which is the database software we’re using. Then I spend a few hours on Japanese before lunch. After lunch it’s all Outlier work until my wife gets home, then we have dinner and we both usually work a few more hours. I try to read something in Chinese in the evening. Right now I’m re-reading 《流星·蝴蝶·劍》, which I’ll hopefully finish this time.
That’s it, I guess. I don’t get a lot of chances to speak Chinese these days. I did meet a Taiwanese lady at a party last week and we talked for a while, so that was fun. I also met a few Taiwanese girls randomly at a few restaurants recently, so now I have some Chinese-speaking friends in town now. We’re working on a big project at Outlier this month, and hopefully once it’s done I’ll have time to join a Chinese meetup group or something.
Daniel Burke said:
Thanks for the update. Good to know you are settled in.
Chenke86 said:
Hi, I’m an Italian student of Chinese and I’m writing for a request that maybe is not appropriate as a comment here (sorry 😦 ). Having read about the textbook 從精讀到泛讀 (The Independent Reader), I bought I used copy on the Internet. I think it’s one of the best textbooks I’ve ever seen, but unfortunately I don’t have the audio. I thought that maybe you could have it, in that case I would be immensily grateful to you if you could help me.
ChineseQuest said:
Unfortunately, as far as I know, no audio exists for 從精讀到泛讀. Or at least, I’ve never heard of there being audio for that book. It is a fantastic textbook though!