Final look back
Time to look back on the semester. I practiced for about 25 hours, which is not spectacular, but considering how difficult it is to just sit down and write for more than 30 minutes, I think it’s not bad. I was primarily looking to learn to know how to properly write characters and learn things like stroke order and character composition. I think I’ve learned quite a bit from when I started.
In my final assessments I tried to recall the names of the eight basic strokes—I remembered seven (I remembered three at the beginning of the semester). I also flipped through the book and tried to specify the stroke order of ten random characters. I was correct for eight of them, as opposed to my original two.
Qualitatively I think I’m doing better too:
I’ve noticed in my transfer task (English writing) that I am now a bit better at visual space preservation, which was an unexpected side effect of needing it for Chinese writing (I didn’t realize how much I would need it for Chinese). I also think I have better chunking/memory representation of characters and can recognize and remember radicals much more easily.
All-in-all, I’m glad I did it. I feel like I’ve gotten a good start. There’s obviously always a lot more to learn, but I managed quite a bit over the course of just a couple of practice sessions here and there during the semester.
Your Chinese writing looks not bad, hehe.