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Procrastination is a dangerous animal. And it bites me quite often.
I’ve known about the Chinese Characters Challenge promoted by Olle Linge at Hacking Chinese since January.
However it took me a month to join the challenge. Well, I finally did.
It’s all about learning how to write Chinese characters in an efficient way.
While Chinese people spend a great deal of time learning how to write characters by repetition since the primary school, a person that starts with Mandarin when he’s older shouldn’t follow this tactic.
It’s boring and it takes ages to learn how to write characters this way. Modern technology blessed us with SRS (Spaced Repetition Softwares), that is clever algorithms that allow us to only review the characters/words that we are about to forget.
However we tend to misuse them, abusing our brain with endless repetitions of the same character till it sticks on our memory.
Now this is quite retarded. Yet most of people do this mistake.
Am I like “most of people”?
Yup, lately I slipped again on my wrong habits.
When I started my own challenge to finally learn mandarin, in late February 2012, I was full of enthusiasm.
Even if I was focusing only on reading, listening and speaking, during my the first six/seven months of flashcards reviews I was taking the time to check the meaning of the parts that compose every character, creating mnemonics to fix the character on my mind and so on.
Then things slowly went downhill and, if I look back at my last three/four months of flashcards review, I must say that my results were quite poor.
I guess this happened because, while in the first months I was progressing fast, then I reached a plateau. I was bored.
What professional athletes do when they reach a plateau on their performance? They change training method!
This is why, in a previous article, I wrote that I wanted to start to learn how to write Chinese characters.
Joining Olle’s challenge is my way to commit again to Chinese learning (my old commitment was for a year, that is till the end of February 2013) and, at the same time, overcome my plateau.
Disclaimer: If you don’t know what a SRS is but you read till now because you are also interested on learning how to write Chinese characters, make yourself a favor and take the time to read Anki flashcards: a shortcut for learning Chinese.