Been way too busy to get anything done. Yesterday I cut out some time after my Skype lesson to go over my notes from it, and re-record all the dialogue (questions and answers). Disappointed I couldn't meet my goal but I wasn't quite anticipating the stress of preparing for my move to China. I feel overall I've definitely made some progress with pronunciation, I was getting a bit lazy and this served as a good reminder to tighten it up, while also revealing mistakes in sounds I wasn't aware I was making.

Found some new sentences added to my WaiChinese account so I went through them, don't feel like I'm going to meet my 10 hour target as I'm preparing to leave to China in 4 days time. I'll try and get what I can done but I don't feel like piling on any extra pressure right now!

Completed more WaiChinese, now almost all my submissions are 4s/5s. Shadowed more dialogue using Audacity. Did what I said I would do before and didn't let pronunciation get in the way during my lesson. I recorded the lesson and played it back to see how I sounded, there was definitely mistakes, especially for new words, but on the whole it wasn't terrible in terms of pronunciation.

Little more WaiChinese. I also spent some time recording myself reading pinyin so I could focus purely on pronunciation rather than reading characters as well. I then played it back and tried to recognise any mistakes on my own, followed by listening to the text being read by a native speaker. I then re-recorded it being aware of the previous mistakes made. Feel that with this conscious effort I do sound better but a lot slower, obviously over time I can speed this up so I'm happy with how it's going.

Shadowed all sentences from a NPCR dialogue, didn't move on until I had it as close to the audio file as I could hear. Sent it to my tutor on Skype to give me some feedback. Will hear back soon. I've decided to relax a bit with pronunciation when it comes to my Skype lessons, I find over-thinking is holding me back far too much, trying to nail everything I say perfectly is on my mind when having a conversation. This appears counter-productive to the goals I want to achieve from completing the challenge.

It's gone midnight so counting this as today! Watched some YouTube videos that helped explain how to replicate the tricky "r" sound, I had seen it before but needed to reinforce this. Submitted a few more WaiChinese sounds, don't have too many left now.

Went through the HSK sentences in WaiChinese and worked more on the lower scored submissions. Starting to identify some of my problem areas that I didn't know about. Paid greater attention to my pronunciation throughout all my speaking, such as while going through my Anki deck and during my Skype lesson.

Sent off more recordings to WaiChinese, mainly the ones that I scored low on again for a second time. Did some more shadowing using Audacity.

I signed up to Wai Chinese and played through lots of the tone pairs, using the web-based version to record myself and play them back, trying to match myself to the speaker as much as possible. I sent off one submission which received a 5/5 "very good" feedback. I hope the feedback in the future is a little more detailed, as I'm sure there's massive room for improvement.

While going through my Anki deck today I also paid more attention to pronunciation than usual. For longer sentences I put them into Audacity and shadowed them, starting at a slower tempo and increasing it when I felt I was matching the native speakers audio.

I feel my pronunciation is good when I know exactly what I'm saying, but when I'm trying to create a sentence on my own, I can hear myself not getting the tones right and I sound a bit unnatural

Yesterday I got properly stuck into WaiChinese, I went through the "Top #10" list and moved onto the "10-20", I received 5/5 feedback for about half, but scored some 2s and 3s. I revisited these and even after reading the feedback and listening over and over again, I'm struggling to spot the difference between my recording and the native speakers. Such as "yī shēng yī shì", the feedback says my second "yī" sounds like a second tone, but when I listen to the native speaker it sounds like a second tone to me as well.

With my flashcards I've continued to slow them down to focus on pronunciation, not sure how much it's helping yet.