It's mid-June and almost 6 months since we started our home school. So, it's a perfect time to revisit the goals we set back in January. Back then, we thought that we would have achieved three goals in six months:
- Learning Characters: She should be able to recognize at least 200 characters out of the most-frequently-used 500.
- Pronunciation: She should have a marked, recognizable improvement in her pronunciations.
- Talking: She should start to speak Chinese in some simply, daily conversations. She may be able to speak comprehensible Chinese mixed with English words where her Chinese vocabulary is lacking.
202! Just two characters above our preset goal! So, check that one up!!
As she was working through the list, I could easily see that she had missed a few characters she had recently learned, partly due to the missing context and partly due to her mood. Anyhow, I also felt that she had learned quite a few more characters that were not in the 500 most-frequently-used list at all. But we were happy that we achieved the goal, even just so barely.
The second goal was not as easy to measure. But through her reading of the lessons and reading materials in the book, I felt that her pronunciation had indeed improved a great deal. She is much more aware of the tones in Chinese sentences and is developing a nice tempo in her reading. Obviously, however, we still got a lot of work to do in this area.
Unfortunately, we had to chalk up the #3 goal as a miss. With the emphasize in character recognition and reading for the past half year, we did not do much in the daily conversation area. As a result, she is still not speaking Chinese at all, other than a few phrases here and there. It's something we will have to work on going forward.
