Spent a solid four Focus Keeper sessions working my way through 《望天門山》，《月下獨酌》，《木蘭詩》, and 《都挺好的》and then recorded a recap video of it all and a little bit about my process during the challenge. I'm tired and it's 16 minutes until 2021 here, but I'm feeling good about sending out 2020 like this. HAHA.

Happy New Year, y'all!

Shadowing YouTube videos for 《都挺好的》and 《木兰诗》. Feeling much more confident with both the poem and the song. Still not KTV or stage ready, but I look forward to further perfecting my "performance" on each until they're mastered.

Reading aloud during my HSK 3.0 audit today. With 11,092 items to audit, it's nice to mix things up a bit and keep my brain focused to prevent errors. For two Focus Keeper sessions I would read the characters aloud from my master list and then check the pronunciation on the page I'm checking vocabulary from. Certainly have some mistakes in my pronunciation of certain characters (mostly tone errors) that are nice to fix up. This is also really good Simplified Chinese practice for me since I mostly read Traditional character content.

Short practice session of 《木蘭詩》during the kiddos nap time. Been tough to get proper study sessions in during the holidays, but glad to find a little time to keep the ball rolling on the challenge!

Deep dive into 《木蘭詩》today. I listened and mimicked the poem on YouTube about 10 times and then went line by line into poem at a slow speed making sure all my tones and pronunciation is 100% accurate. Any time I was on the fence about the pronunciation I would look it up and then re-read the same line again from the beginning. Next step will be to put the entire thing together as a full piece tomorrow.

Busy family day, but I did manage to sneak in 15 minutes of some 《木兰诗》practice in the evening

Single Focus Keeper lyric practice session of 《都挺好的》 using Language Learning with YouTube during the day. And another Focus Keeper session at night using Apple Music lyrics mode. I like Apple Music because it doesn’t have Pinyin, but I wish they’d show the lyrics in Traditional characters. Not a big deal, but the song was recorded in Taiwan.

《木兰诗》practice today

Today I decided to go a little unconventional with my pronunciation practice and work on a (future… maybe) KTV song I’ve been trying to learn for a while—《都挺好的》—江靜 Jiang Jing feat. 張震嶽 Ayal Komod. Honestly, it was a lot of fun to work on shadowing the singers. I really like this song, and 張震嶽’s part is a fun challenge that I'd love to overcome before the end of the month if I can.

Mindful Skritter session working on some sentences and new characters along with more 《月下獨酌》practice.

Practice, practice, practice! Did a trial run of my lecture along with my notes before class and then another run-through with my teacher for 55 minutes. Lots of good notes about small improvements on key phrases, minor tone errors, and the like. Taking a break the rest of the night and then back at it again tomorrow for the final phase. Let's go!

演講還有問答都成功了！

Practice recording of my lesson and listening back for any tone issues and areas I can improve one last time.

演講還有問答都成功了！

Focused pronunciation and reading session as I audit the HSK 3.0 list we're working on for Skritter.

Reviewed and improved readings of 《月下獨酌》and 《望天門山》for one Focus Keeper session, and spent the next session working on my lecture by recording the first section and listening back for areas of improvements.

Continued working on 《月下獨酌》today and spent most of my time mimicking and shadowing additional sources of YouTube.

Studied the poem 《月下獨酌》(Drinking Alone With the Moon) working on pronunciation and overall delivery. Had a good time watching and mimicking this video along the way: https://youtu.be/dO9GLno4TdY

I did a total of eight Pomodoro sessions (200 minutes) focusing on my lecture today. However, some of that time was spent typing notes and doing a bit of research. Feeling good about next week and calling it quits for today!

Short poetry practice session today.

Mindful Skritter session this morning. Lots of extra attention to pronunciation and flow of words/example sentences. Thankful to have such great audio to mimic and can't wait to actually increase the amount of level-approriate example sentences in the future :)

10 minutes of mindful Skritter studying, 45 minutes of lecture prep practice 35 minutes of class time spent working on reading aloud from 望天門山的詩詞賞析 and working through the first 10(ish) minutes of my lecture (自我介紹與學習背景的部分）. My teacher was extra brutal today, and it was great. Haha

Reading aloud from my 《ACC K-12 暑期中文教師培訓項目教材》and extracting some high-frequency phrases and concepts for my lecture next week. The session consisted of two phases. Phase one involved reading (aloud) select chapters of the textbook and looking up a few words I didn't recognize anymore. Phase two was focused on the delivery and execution of the key phrases I'll need for my lecture (mostly translations of ACTFL guidelines and goals for FLL).

Did a mindful Skritter review session making sure to really focus on the pronunciation of each word I was reviewing. After that, I did a 30(ish) minute live study session on Instagram to properly kick things off. It was fun, and I look forward to doing more.

Today I worked on the poem and supporting text for 《望天門山》 by 李白.

Video is shared on my IGTV and in my feed as well for anyone interested in checking it out.