Week one of Mandarin done

 Today is Friday April 26th, and I have finished my first week! It's been tough but my experience with learning Spanish and beginner Japanese has definitely been helpful. I actually find quite a few similarities between Mandarin and Japanese which makes the grammar a lot easier to accept. For example, the idea of something existing when wanting to ask someone if they carry or have it, i.e. instead of "do you guys have a washroom" they would say "does a washroom exist".

I have been pretty sick the whole week other than today which did make things rough, waking up at strange hours, unable to sleep, coughing throughout class. However, I also had nothing to do but study which is good.

My studying consists of:

1. vocab building, I have a great app (Pleco) which allows me to do flashcards in all sorts of fashion. 

2. Pronunciation,  listen and repeat exercises, watching youtube videos on how to pronounce.

3. Listening, an app that says a word and you have to guess its spelling (in pinying) and the tones. Also watching some mandarin shows on netflix and just see if there are ANY words I can understand. I also went to my first language exchange which was helpful, especially meeting foreigners who learned Mandarin.

In addition to class, I am also using Chineseclass 101, I used this for Japanese and found it very helpful.

The one area I am lacking is writing, you this no easy task but I think I have enough time to gain benefits and as I did learn quite a few characters with Japanese, I think this won't be as hard as it seems, even to just start.