Chinese Reflections - February

This is my first proper post where I'm going to try and reflect on what I've been learning. I'm still unsure what kind of format I want to do this in, but I'll figure it out as I go along.

I actually followed through with my plan to take notes after Duolingo sessions; mostly phrases I kept messing up or I think are useful for some basic conversation.

Frequent Mistakes

I often mess up

or similar phrases. I think it's because is wired wrong in my head where I see flavour as an attribute of chocolate and not chocolate as a description of the flavour.

Past tense is another one I struggle with, since I'm so used to English:

. In theory it's much easier than English, since you just need to remember the verb and add the appropriate particles. But where I need to add it or how to disambiguate different kinds of past tense is a bit tricky.

A different kind of mistake I often make is using the wrong 'of', especially when listening. To be fair it's not surprising since

and sound very similar. However, they're used in different contexts so I should be able to tell them apart.

New Phrases

A useful phrase I learned this month:

. I haven't been able to use it in a sentence though, I think I need some more complex vocabulary before I can really make use of it.

I also learned this month:

. I struggle with the , often so I try to pay close attention to phrases like this that use in in multiple places.

Another one where the phrase is not necessarily the most useful, but I think it highlights a common structure in Chinese:

. The is again fulfilling a different kind of role here.

. This should be pretty useful when I'm ordering food.

. This is more of a reminder to myself than anything else. :D

Closing Thoughts

As I've been trying be more conscious of my learning, I've noticed that I rely a lot on pinyin to read Chinese. Bar a few of the more common characters I almost never really read the characters. For the exercises where you have to match a character to a sound I find I can just 'match' the sounds and don't really need to remember the characters.

Given that there was quite a lot of pinyin in China when I visited I'm not too bothered, but I'd like to be able to read the characters at some point. For now though I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing and see how it goes.