I’m back…

Two months have passed since my last entry… the usual reasons.

Anyway, it’s good to be back.  How’s my Mandarin progressing?  Fair.  I’m not surprised, of course.  However, I do wish my brain was better at multitasking.  Context switching between work and home tasks and keeping up my stamina after a brutal commute to/from work are sometimes just too much to deal with.  When this happens, all I want to do is shut down and go to bed.

A few updates… I finally got further along in the interview process for the Technical Manager position. However, after talking with my future boss, he let me in on some of the challenges I would be facing my first day on the job.  After hearing these, I chose to not pursue the position.  The primary factor was that his team (which would be my future team) was filled with misfits, including one person with a rather violent temper.  Anyway, my current manager is setting me up on a path to becoming a Technical Manager in my current group.  However, there’s no ETA on when this could happen.  In the meantime, I will be happy as a Technical Lead.  Happy?  Yeah, cuz this will free up my brain cells for learning Mandarin since I have been a Technical Lead for year (even though I didn’t officially get the title until earlier this year).

Our trip to Taiwan is still on schedule for this November.  In the latest version of the itinerary, my wife will leave Atlanta a few weeks before me.  On the return trip, however, we will fly back together.  We’ve done this, as well as the reverse, a few times.  I really love it.  Why?  I love being married, but I really enjoy my time alone.  I’m a big introvert.  The other cool thing is that when my wife and I travel, she’s always in control.  So, I never really get the chance to take on that role.  And, being able to travel to Asia alone, even though it’s just a plane ride and layover in Tokyo or Seoul for a few hours, I just love the idea.

So, in just less than six months from now, I will be back in Taiwan.  Woohoo!

Upcoming Taiwan Trip / Mandarin Tip

During my upcoming trip to Taiwan, nobody is going to quiz me on how to write in Chinese. Therefore, I’m not going to worry about being able to write glyphs from memory.  I do, however, need to be able to read and converse.  I still need to learn/recognize the glyphs, of course.

COUNTDOWN TO TAIWAN TRIP 2010… 240 DAYS

Yep, the days are ticking away rather quickly.  However, I have been making good progress on my Mandarin.  I’m in the process of replacing English for all things related to household chores (e.g., take out the trash).  My wife reviewed (and corrected some) the vocabulary that I got from mandarin.about.com and has agreed to speak Mandarin when asking (that is, telling) me to do particular chores.  This will help immensely with my conversation skills.  And, a lot of the conversation vocabulary I pick up can be used in other situations.

I’m also making good use of my new iPad.  Using Mental Case enables me to quickly review vocabulary throughout the day (and it has a beautiful interface).  Using Mental Case for my Mac, I created the flashcards (called Mental Notes) and synced them to my iPad over wireless.  So far, I have 166 Mental Notes (around 100 singly glyphs and the rest are multi-glyph words).  It took less than two hours to create these cards.  The Chinese characters look pretty because they are actually graphics.  That is, I typed them in LibreOffice, exported the document as a PDF, then used Mental Case to take a cropped screen capture of each character (while zoomed in a lot).  Tedious, yes.  The built-in font for Chinese characters in iOS is hideous.  So, this was not an optional step.  Here are some screen captures:

countdown to Taiwan trip 2010… 249 days

A few updates…

• No word on the technical manager position I applied for.  Waiting on the hiring manager to get back to me.
• I ordered the “new” iPad.  According to UPS tracking, it’s in Chengdu, China right now.  However, it is supposed to arrive at my door next Friday as promised.
• I’m back to drilling sentence patterns and vocabulary into my brain.

COUNTDOWN TO TAIWAN TRIP 2012… 255 DAYS

Got over the flu last week, parents in town yesterday and today, may be flying to New York for a day or two this week.

COUNTDOWN TO TAIWAN TRIP 2012… 268 DAYS

So, basically I have wasted away 100 days since my last “countdown” posting.  Other than rearranging / reformatting the sentence patterns document, I really haven’t made any progress in mastering the language.

Back from 3-month hiatus…

The usual excuses, so there’s no reason wasting space here. I’m back!

Sometime in the next few weeks, I should know whether I will be transferring to another group at my company.  In late January, I applied for a Technical Manager position.  Today, I’m officially a Senior Systems Developers.  However, in a week or so, I have been told that I will be promoted to Technical Lead.  Since I have been in my current group for eight years, it’s time for me to try something new.

24 sentence patterns learned, 76 to go.

Making it through the first 24 sentence patterns,  I can now construct sentences for talking about past and future events.  One learning technique that has really helped me actually remember what I study is to record myself and play it back while commuting to and from work (2 hours a day).

I use a free iPhone app named iTalk to record myself.  After connecting my phone to my computer, I can use iTunes to copy my recordings from the app directory into my music folder.

One of my recordings is simply English sentences.  After each sentence, I leave the appropriate amount of silence so that I can translate it into Chinese.  In the other recordings, I read out each sentence pattern with example sentences (again leaving silence for me to practice out loud).

Countdown to Taiwan Trip 2012… 357 Days

Although we haven’t purchased the tickets yet, we are planning to go back to Taiwan next year in mid November.  We’ll know for certain whether or not we are going in November hopefully by May or so of next year.  The only thing that could affect our plans is my job.

Short work week = lots of studying

It’s the day before Thanksgiving and I’m working from home today since my company said we only have to work a half day today.  No use in me wasting one hour driving to work and one hour to drive back home.  I’m only a few hours away from a four-day weekend (Thurs, Fri, Sat, and Sun).  This means I will have more time to study Chinese.

Today, my wife is supposed to follow her normal Wednesday routine.  Shortly after lunch, she will go workout at the gym.  This will give me some quiet time to get in some good studying.  Otherwise, when she’s home, it’s a little hard for me to concentrate (loud TV downstairs, she calling out chores for me to do, and so on).

Although, I’m only at sentence pattern #8, I do plan to get through pattern #20 by the end of today.  With that, I will have roughly 80 patterns remaining before my self imposed deadline of January 31, 2012.