Moving to China, subs2srs, Rick Harbaugh, etc.

This is Nanjing. Maybe I'll be there next year?

Mkay. So my wife and I have decided we're moving next year to either China or Taiwan. We're leaning toward China a bit more, but we'll see. I'm planning on enrolling in a non-degree Chinese Language Program at a university and tutoring English on the side, and my wife is planning to teach English.

I've read that a lot of Westerners have the most problems with learning characters, since they're having to keep up with the Korean and Japanese students in their classes. So I've taken up learning single characters again, but as a side project. But more on that in a minute.

My main approach will be SRSing sentences (as usual) and getting a local tutor so I can practice conversation. My speaking ability sucks. Hard. I've always focused on reading and listening, and my output has been close to nil. Obviously that won't do if I'm going to live in China next year.

I've also found a Mandarin meet-up group in Austin. They meet a couple times a week, sometimes for language purposes and sometimes for cultural things like kung fu lessons and movie nights. I haven't met up with them yet, but I'm going to try to make it to their lunch meet-up this week or the beginner/intermediate workshop this coming weekend. The workshop will be hosted by the owner of a local Chinese school/tutoring service, so that may turn out well for me.

For the SRS, I've finally figured out how to get subs2srs working! If you don't know, this is a tool that converts movie files into Anki flashcards. You give it a subtitle file and the video, and it outputs a spreadsheet complete with line-by-line subtitles, images from the video, and audio. Ideally. It isn't 100% accurate with the audio clips, but that's easy enough to cut up yourself in Audacity. And if you give it both Chinese and English subtitles, it will give you both in the deck. Sweet. I've got Infernal Affairs (無間道) done, but the audio needs cleaning up a little. I'll start working through that if it doesn't prove to be too difficult, otherwise I'll work through one of my Disney movies.

I'm also using ChinesePod lessons. Intermediate lessons are on the verge of being too easy, but I'll keep doing them for now. But I'll be focusing on the Upper Intermediates. Sentences and audio in Anki. I usually have it all imported into Anki by the time I finish listening to the lesson. Supa easy.

So, on to learning characters. I'm finally working through Harbaugh's book (available online here). I'm working with a few other members of the Reviewing the Kanji forums to put all the info from the book into a spreadsheet so we can make an Anki deck. Once we're done, I'll be including images of the 說文解字 Small Seal characters, since Harbaugh's book is more or less organized around the 說文 (I may also include other ancient forms from chineseetymology.org is there's enough interest). If you're interested in helping out with this project, please let me know! We would love some help! We've got almost 400 characters done so far, so about 10% of the total number of characters in the book, and the project was only started about 2 weeks ago With another set of hands or two, we should be able to finish in well under two months. This would be a great opportunity to learn about Chinese etymology and the history of the writing system. It's been really interesting for me so far.

So anyway, that's what's going on! Exciting stuff!