How I will learn Chinese

I decided to write down what I will use to learn Chinese.in the coming weeks. Here are some of the things that I am currently doing and some things I will be doing in the near future.

Watch videos on Youtube
There are a bunch of videos I have already watched, there are also a bunch that I bookmarked. Here is one of the videos that I have already watched several times

I like Dani Wang's videos and will watch all of them shortly.

Here is a video that I have bookmarked but will watch this week. This video is by Yangyang Cheng, it is a Google hangout showing you the most effective way to learn Mandarin tones, tone pairs

Listen to Podcasts
I downloaded the Learn Chinese | ChineseClass101.com podcast

I have already listened several time to Lesson #1 - What's Your Name in Chinese? It is actually fun and quite interesting. I listen to most podcast at 1.5 speed but always have to remind myself to set it back to 1.0 speed with this language podcast


Visit websites
There are a bunch of sites that I have bookmarked, I have read some of these already and some are bookmarks because those sites were listen on some of these but I did not get enough time to read them all yet. Here is just a small list for you to check out.

Wikihow
How to Learn Mandarin Chinese

Tim Ferriss, 4 hour workweek blog
How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months
How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour
12 Rules for Learning Foreign Languages in Record Time — The Only Post You’ll Ever Need

BBC
Real Chinese - For starters
Quick Fix - Essential phrases in Chinese

Lingholic.com
How to learn Chinese

Semanda.com
Printable PDF Mandarin Flashcards


Books
CHINESE in 10 minutes a day
I have the Italian version of this book, it contains the following

• 132-page illustrated workbook
• Full color throughout
• Organized in 25 easy steps, by essential categories
• 150 Sticky Labels for home and office
• Ready-made Flash Cards

This is a real beginners book and is fun to learn from. It will arrive by the end of this week so I will be doing all the other stuff I mentioned in this post instead.

Movies
Watch a movie in Chinese and trying to understand it. I own only 2 movies that are in Chinese: Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But luckily for me, my local library has a lot of Chinese movies, here is just a small example of the stuff that they have, there are several of these cases filled with movies.

I won't get to the movies for a couple of months, at this stage there is no point, I probably might recognize 5 words in total. But I will try to watch my first movie in April or so and will let you know how that goes.

My 2016 new year's resolutions

I decided to put some of my new year's resolutions down in a post. These are non professional goals, here is what my goals are

Learn a new language

I want to learn a new language in 2016. I already know Croatian and Dutch, in addition to those I can understand most of German, I also have some knowledge of Italian and Spanish. The more languages you know, the easier it is to learn another language. To make it more difficult for me, I am picking a non European language. I decided to try to learn Chinese this year. 

When I say learn, what I mean is that I must be able to communicate with a person in Chinese as well as being able to watch a movie in Chinese while understanding 80% of the movie. By Chinese, I mean Mandarin, it would be really funny if I picked a movie in Cantonese and then couldn't understand anything. 

I work with a bunch of people from China and Taiwan, so I can always check with them to see if I am pronouncing words correctly.

If learning the Chinese language goes well, I want to then learn these 4 languages the next 4 years following 2016: Greek, Japanese, Portuguese, Korean. 

Read 30 books

In 2015, I read 20 books, this year I want to read 30 books. I want 5 of those books to deal with American history, I have been living in the US for 20+ years and most of the history books I read were about European history or World War i and World War II history. I also want to read more technical books, so 6 of those books should be technical.

Do a handstand, walk 30 feet on my hands

I can barely hold a handstand for 2 seconds, this year, I want to try to improve on that. My goal is to be able to do a handstand and hold it for 30 seconds. I also want to be able to walk 30 feet on my hands.

Improve on lifts

I would like to be be able to bench press 200 pounds, squat 300 pounds and deadlift 400 pounds by the end of the year. All of the lifts should be raw.

Blog more

I want to write 100 blog posts in 2016, this should not be that difficult, it is only 2 fricking posts per week, but sometimes I don't write anything for 6 months straight. In 2016 this will change, one thing that will make this easier is I will document the progress of my goals, this will be mostly focused on my progress learning the Chinese language.

So there you have it, that is my list, seems very doable and I will keep you and me posted on the progress of these lofty goals.......