I mentioned last time that I was adding vocabulary items from my JLPT studies to my SRS. I did that, got a nice healthy number of items. There was an unfortunate side effect from inputting them as just kanji and kanji compounds though. What happens is that I always go straight from working on my Cantonese items to reviewing my JLPT words, and then I get completely confused and try to read them in Cantonese. Stuff like 膨張 looks completely Cantonese, doesn’t it? It takes me several minutes to reorient myself every time.
Apart from that, everything’s going swimmingly. I’m not even letting the Christmas holidays distract me (though I did skip SRSing on Christmas day). As a matter of fact, I’m starting to see the lack of Cantonese learning material as a clear advantage instead of a disadvantage these days. When you start learning a language with a ton of resources, there’s the temptation to spend days and weeks and months just gathering material, reading reviews, discussing best approaches, etc., etc., with fellow learners.
With Cantonese there’s very little to talk about, you just take what you’re lucky to get and dive in. There’s a limit to how many Canto-learning blogs and forums you can waste time on, and fellow Canto learners tend to be at a relatively low level so you can’t spend all day feeling intimidated either. It’s pretty swell.
So without much ado, back to Teach Yourself Cantonese! I try not to put too much pressure on myself, but I want to be done with that book by March, God willing. I skipped along to the end and there’s a ton of vocabulary in there so I should be pretty far ahead by the time I’m done with it. After that, well, we’ll see.
