Spent 2 hours on March 1st outside of my normal pimsleur, teach yourself routine listening to podcasts. I feel like I finally have a grasp on how to fit in extensive listening and intensive listening and all the bits in-between. Rather than jump to next challenge will focus on doing more listening this way and try not to get bored the key is rotating the comprehensible input so I dont get bored with repeating content. I can see the theory starting to align with what am comprehending the goal is not to understand but to process faster. I was searching for the elusive think in chinese or stop translating but now am just hearing the words and though i recognise it I dont stop to translate/process it unless its one of those words that just keeps evading me then I look it up but mostly i just let it all fly by and move on. The brain really just knows what it knows. I look for over 80% comprehension that I enjoy and play it as much as I can before I get bored. I try and mimic along for a few minutes here and there. I am also back to focusing on my characters as my way of increasing my vocab I used to put this off trying to make passive vocab active vocab but there's just too many occurrence of the same word needed for me not to move forward. Reading is also going well using short passages like Mandarin Bean looking to find ones with good audio to mimic. avoiding content where they tell me the meaning of the audio so I can actively use my knowledge. Really excited about the next few months I will trying tracking but most likely just a guesstimate based on leaving audio on all day and moments where am intensively listening would be from one task to another in-between breaks.