Seven months or so of Chinese

Making steady progress in Duolingo. I have made it onto the top rank of leaderboards not so much from increased effort as from things getting less competitive as summer hit. I'm still trying not to respond to the gamification too much, but that's at least one "goal" it will stop bugging me about.

I forgot to mention in my last update that I'd come across guardian_learning, which started off as a community for fans of a specific Chinese sf franchise but has transitioned into a more general Chinese learning community.

At the Reno airport, heading to Westercon, I came across the first Chinese sentence I have been able to understand in the wild: 您需要帮助吗？("Do you need assistance?") Okay, so it was on a poster with the same words in six other languages including English, so it is not like it was useful to be able to read it, but still! I understood real-life Chinese! Perhaps this effort is not entirely wasted!

I have also reached the point where, instead of only recognizing characters from previously encountering them in Japanese, I am recognizing characters I only knew in Chinese when I bump into them in Japanese text. On a soda can, for instance, I was able to read that it was 10% fruit juice (果汁).

I finally picked Hello Chinese back up this past Monday after reaching acceptance with the fact that I'm not going to be able to nail every pronunciation exercise perfectly. Ironically, the pronunciation exercises seem much easier now and I am actually nailing them on the first try more often than not. Go figure.

Draft schedules

I've already gotten my draft schedule for Chicon 8. Getting them out over a month before the con is good even for a regular local con; for a travelling convention like a Worldcon, it's just short of a miracle.

Exact times, panelists, etc. are subject to change, so I won't post it yet.