Preface

I have been in a bit of a rut. Nothing bad, just have more free time now since I am between school and work, and time has led to both introspection and tackling a few different projects. I wanted to write this to see and show what my current projects are and how long I have been tackling them!

Daily

What have I been doing each day?

Learning Chinese

I have been learning for around 2 years now, and probably doing it daily for the past month. This has a few different projects inside learning chinese.

Remembering the Hanzi

Two books that systematically teach ~3000 chinese characters. For each character the book teaches you how to handwrite it, as well as an english keyword that is similar to one of meanings of the character. I have augmented the system to also teach me the pronunciation of the character. I have been doing this daily for the last month and am ~500 characters in. I try to do ~30 characters a day.

Reading about learning Chinese

I think this is more procrastination than studying, but I spend too much time on https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/ and https://www.chinese-forums.com/

Go on the internet on my phone

I spend a lot of time on Hacker News, Reddit, and YouTube. Internet obsession for me started at a young age, with my iPod touch and my grandfathers old PC.

Weekly

Things I do at least once a week

Running!

I got into it again after a haitus last month, and have been doing it a couple times a week. I might run the golden gate half marathon in november. I also bike fairly often.

Time with Friends

I really enjoy chatting with and seeing friends, as well as making new ones, so I try to make plans fairly often.

Reading books in Chinese

I have read quite a few. Currently I am reading an abridged version of 西游记, Journey to the West as well as The Witches by Roald Dahl translated into Chinese. I think I read at least once a week for an hour, upwards of 5 hours a week.

Reading books

I listen to a lot of audio books, and try to read books on my kindle/phone at other times. Hope I can make this a daily habit. I peaked in reading around middle school, dipped a lot in high school, and have been doing it more often in and after college.

Video games in Chinese

Currently I am having a lot of fun playing Eastward on the Nintendo Switch. I have also recently played Pokemon Snap, Pokemon Unite, and Oneshot in chinese which have all been quite fun.

Video games

Dark Souls, Startdew Valley, Brawl Stars, and Slither.io have kept me busy in the past few months. I have loved video games ever since in elemetary school I played my brother’s pokemon game.

Monthly

Lifting weight/gym

I am not very consistent with this, but hope to get better so I can get stronger!

Programming for fun

I like learning and programming. I have started back up with this because this course Programming with Categories just seemed too fun. I am very good at starting, but not finishing lots of things I put my effort in. I am not too harsh on myself.

Watching a show in Chinese.

I have paired language learning with netflix with an anime Hunter x Hunter that has both subtitles and audio in Mandarin Chinese. I am one season in and there are six seasons. I have been watching it on and off for half a year. I watch in spurts, been a while since I last did.

Yearly

BLOGGING

I wrote my last post nearly a year ago! Oh well. I have lots of ideas on what to write about. Book reviews, my time at UC Berkeley, python explanations, my experiences with learning chinese, and more. We shall see what I get to, and maybe future me will go back and add links to those posts from this article as I make these posts?

Traveling

I am lucky I get to do this a few times a year.

Conclusion

Listing things I am doing really shows me how much I am doing. Even then I feel like I am “wasting” more than half my day when I browse the internet. Though I do recognize it is good to recharge to avoid burnout.

Chinese is my current biggest hobby. Before that in college it was teaching, in high school it was programming, in middle school it was chess. Reading, exercise, and learning are things I do fairly consistently and have been doing them for many years, which I am proud of. I can, however, do better.