Total Hours: 30 hours

This was my main activity for my language development as it was both easily accessible for me and my mentor to check up on progress and verify work. While I do admit that this was often very monotonous work consisting of drilling the characters into my head, I would often utilize a English-Chinese dictionary to help me better understand the context of some worksheets. I did not have a lot of trouble with finishing these worksheets, but there were Chinese characters that I had difficulty remembering. Some worksheets included filling in the right Chinese characters into sentences, which also helped me to improve my reading proficiency at the same time as my writing skills. There were also parts where I would need to create my own sentences with words/phrases already provided to me. These parts of the worksheets improved my writing proficiency the most as I learned to develop understanding of context and reading interpretation/comprehension. I also did have some difficulty learning the correct characters to use in a sentence because there are different forms of characters depending on the gender of a person and if it is an object. Overall, these worksheets and exams that I worked through will not only help me with improving my own reading/writing skills but also deem useful in my future career where I may need to read notes/letters in Chinese.

Total Hours: 10 hours

This activity took place while I was attending my English Teaching Volunteer Service Program in Taiwan. I volunteered to act as a translator for my group for the whole month, which not only improved my Chinese oral fluency and comprehension, but also helped me better connect both the Chinese comprehending side of my brain and the English comprehending side of my brain. When teaching classes to the students at YongKang elementary, I was the only Chinese speaking teacher in my group, so the other students would help to facilitate activities and keep them under control, while I would introduce the activities and help students when they had questions. Each of the fourteen days at the elementary school consisted of 8 hours of school. Although I put 10 total hours, I actually surpassed this amount during my time there, but instead put 10 hours because that was the remaining amount left after totaling the hours of my other activities. This was the sole activity that helped me to improve my oral comprehension and proficiency. I was able to learn a lot more about local dialects and understand much more commonly used phrases. 

Total Hours: 6 hours

I did not continuously work on Duolingo throughout my self-study because I felt like it wasn't as helpful in improving my language skills. The coursework offered by Duolingo did help me to review a lot of previous knowledge and basic phrases/sentences, but I found it unhelpful when wanting to expand on my knowledge. The way Duolingo is set up requires the user to complete a certain amount in one section before moving onto the next section, which I found redundant and unnecessary for my situation. As it took a long time to get each section done even though I was already proficient in the terms, I would often take a proficiency test offered at the end of each section in order to just jump to the next section. The proficiency test is available even if you're on the first part of a section, so I found myself taking multiple proficiency tests in a row and ended up in the second to last section of the entire Chinese module. Thus, I decided to not pursue continuing this throughout my self-study and decided to maximize my time by focusing more on materials/activities that would help me to expand my knowledge. Despite that, I feel that if I ever wanted to refresh my memory, I would definitely utilize Duolingo to help me review the terms/characters. 

Total Hours: 5

During the second half of my language development where I was nearing the end of the fifty hours, I decided to spend that time consuming Chinese media through the form of watching television shows in Chinese. This activity helped me to improve both my listening comprehension and also visual recognition of different characters/phrases. When watching shows, I would turn on Chinese captions in order to train myself to recognize any terms/words I had learned. This helped a lot because the two shows I watched, "“我們這一家” (wo men zhe yi jia) and "“櫻桃小丸子” (yin tao xiao wan zi) were on the easier side to understand. These two shows are regularly enjoyed by those of all ages in Taiwan so it wasn't extremely for me to understand. It was a bit hard in the beginning to recognize a lot of words, so I would also slow down the shows to 0.75 speed in order to read the words/characters at a comfortable speed. While I was able to review and actually see/understand the words I had learned, this was also a very fun activity that helped to balance the worksheets and other more intensive work I had done during my language development. I would definitely use this as an activity outside of language development in order to retain the information I've learned and get used to reading in Mandarin Chinese.