New Month New Goals

[forestofglory]

Somehow its December already. So its time to look back on my goals for last month and set some new goals.

Here are the goals I set for November:

1) Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Break
Thanksgiving went really well! I was able to invite my parents a few local friends and I got to feed people! I also did a good job of enlisting help with cooking and not over doing things with my wrist. The kid was sadly sick for all of her break so we didn't do any expeditions.

2)Write fic or Lady Business posts on 15 days.
I wrote on 16 days, mostly on my reviews of fake books fic which is now around 3k words, and still very fun to write.

3) Sew two long sleeve shirts for the kid
I sewed one and got started on the second. I keep over estimating how much sewing I can do in a month. here is a picture of the shirt I did finish.

4)Complete another classical Chinese lesson, stretch goal: complete a second one
I did great at this I finished lesson 13 in A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese then did lesson 6 in An Introduction to Literary Chinese and even a bit of lesson 7. Switching back more beginner lessons was nice because suddenly things where a lot easier, which means that I've learned something!

November had lot going on. Our house was painted which was very noisy, the kid was sick a lot, my mother in law had cataract surgery. I deliberately set myself smaller goals than I sometimes do because I knew that the painting and the surgery would make things more difficult. However I did succeed at my scaled back goals!

December is always a busy month so I'm going to keep setting scaled back goals for this month. My December goals are:

1)Write fic or Lady Business posts on 15 days.
Keeping it a smallish number of writing days again

2) Finish the second shirt

3) Sew some reusable gift bags
Since my wrist isn't so good traditional wrapping paper has been difficult for me, so I thought I would make some drawstring bags to but presents in. I have lots of good fabric for this!

4) Rec a thing everyday
I love recing stuff and social media has been a bit quieter so I'm going to try to rec a thing every day in December. (Where a thing can be fanfic, profic, non-fiction, visual media, tea, sewing patterns, something else I haven't thought of yet.) I plan to cross post between Twitter and Mastodon and use the tag #DecRecs.

I posted about this yesterday and several people are going to join in and rec things! I'm very excited! (I have already bought two ebooks and added several things to my marked for latter)

5) Winter Break and Winter Holidays
The kid has two weeks off school, and there are several holidays happening this month

6) Finish the intro section in An Introduction to Literary Chinese
This is lesson 7 which I've started on and lesson 8, so not a huge amount. I think I can do it!

I hope you all have a wonderful December!

Comments

[clevermanka]

The fabric pattern of the shirt is adorable! I look forward to seeing your recs.

[forestofglory]

Thank you! I really like that fabric too

[spookykingdomstarlight]

I think it's so impressive that you're studying classical Chinese! How are you finding it difficulty wise?

[vorvayne]

I'm not forestofglory but I thought I'd wander in and say that I flat out don't think it's that difficult. The trick is to not get in your head about it and decide it must be all mysterious and complicated: in fact I like to take the Elle Woods approach to stuff other people say is difficult ("what, like it's hard?")

Basically as long as you can ditch the idea that the sentences are going to be structured *remotely* like English or any European language, it's honestly pretty intuitive in a lot of ways, and the only real bugger is the number of characters you have to learn. But there's ways and means for that too.

[spookykingdomstarlight]

I appreciate the insight. I've been studying Mandarin for a little over a year now, so I'm not really thinking it's some mysterious or impossible thing to do and was more just curious about the experience since I don't know anyone who's studied it. I'm also not fussed about any potential differences in sentence structure and I actually really like learning characters, so that's totally fine with me.

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts.

[vorvayne]

Yes, it's not that I think you would necessarily approach it that way, it's just that I've seen so so many people overcomplicate it and overthink it, and any ancient language has a bit of mystique usually so I just wanted to dispel that.

A more balanced and complete view would go like: Classical Chinese is _incredibly_ context-heavy. The sentence structure is very intuitive, yes, but it's intuitive in a way that leaves a whole fuck of a lot of interpretation work for the reader to do. There's a lot of ambiguities in the way a sentence might be read, and you can argue at great length about interpretations, and you have to look at the context of the rest of the paragraph, the rest of the work, and - if something is really gnarly - the rest of the author's works and contemporary works on the same subject and so on. This is how people can spend their lives trying to understand the Zhuangzi. And then you can get the idea of like, well gosh that sounds absurdly complicated and mysterious! But I think it's more like: the language itself is built with generous room for the ambiguities in both thought and in the world in general. There's stuff that's easy to say in classical Chinese that I'd need a twenty page essay to say in English because I'd spend so much time sorting out exactly what I meant in English.

RE mandarin - it will really, really help your mandarin. People tend to hit a bit of a wall at around HSK5-ish, because they're starting to see a lot of structures that come from classical chinese that they just have no tools at all to understand, and deliberately studying CC just gives you such a leg up on the rest of mandarin.

More on this here: https://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-classical-chinese-is-for-everyone-no-seriously/
which I post here also because I suspect forestofglory might find it useful, as there's links to potential avenues for progress.

[forestofglory]

I don't really have much to compare it to difficulty wise. I went from "langue study is not for me" to "classical Chinese is awesome!" very fast. Before this the last time I tried to learn a langue was high school latin and that was very different. With a class you need to keep pace, whereas with self study I can set my own pace. (And also accommodate my disabilities). Also there are a aps now and I find several of them very helpful!

So I'm just going along very slowly. I do get frustrated and wish I could learn faster sometimes, but I mostly find it very fun. I wrote a longer piece on how I got started and want I like about it that you can check out if you are interested.

My impression is that classical Chinese is more vocabulary intensive than Mandarin. Also I'm learning traditional characters which are more complex than simplified. But there are more resources for Mandarin

[spookykingdomstarlight]

Thanks so much for sharing your experience and that link. It was really interesting to read! I'm glad it's been fun for you. I think this is really, really cool.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> 3) Sew two long sleeve shirts for the kid
I sewed one and got started on the second. I keep over estimating how much sewing I can do in a month.<<

Cool. I noted that sewing had a bit of activity too. You might share your sewing goals/accomplishments there.

I've made shirts, but more often I made looser things. Fitted shirts have so many pieces.

>>3) Sew some reusable gift bags
Since my wrist isn't so good traditional wrapping paper has been difficult for me, so I thought I would make some drawstring bags to but presents in. I have lots of good fabric for this!<<

Good idea. Also fun are reusable toppers.

Re: Thoughts

[forestofglory]

I'm not sure I would call this a fitted shirt. It's very loose, which is good for a growing child! This pattern https://www.twigandtale.com/collections/children-dresses-rompers/products/driftwood-blouse-dress-child-digital-pattern-video-class#_ Which I've made many times now.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Oh, a chemise -- I know that style from Renaissance garb. It looks great. Yeah, those are good for kids and pretty forgiving.

"Shirt" tends to make me think of things like button-ups or polos, unless it says "T-shirt."

Thanks for sharing the reference.

[lunabee34]

I hope kiddofeels better.

[forestofglory]

She does, Thank you!