I have been learning mandarin for almost a year now, and still genuinely feel like I have only scratched the surface. I can have basic conversations, and like most people my passive vocabulary far exceeds my active. I have tried balancing out speaking, listening and reading as well as I can, also doing shadowing to practice my pronunciation. I feel like I´m doing all the right things. I am literally pouring 6+ hours into learning chinese everyday until my head hurts. Probably studying too much, but I am obsessed with reaching fluency and I am enjoying the journey. I would say I am probably at around 5k passive vocab currently, but I still feel like I get tripped up all the time. Suddenly a word I thought I knew is used in a completely different way, and I can´t connect the dots. I´ve discovered many words are extremely versatile and I feel kind of helpless at times. I am wondering if vocab count should only be measured by 100% unique words? For example these words:
- 电影票 — movie ticket
- 飞机票 — plane ticket
- 火车票 — train ticket
- 公交票 — bus ticket
- 门票 — entrance ticket
Are they considered 5 unique words, or not because they are inherently very simple to understand, considering you just add 票 at the back of the word to indicate it is a ticket of some sort.
I still feel very very far from comfortable with my chinese listening comprehension, especially in real life I feel completely useless and can barely understand anything. To those who are intermediate: How long did it take you to feel pretty confident in your listening ability? I am mostly focusing on improving my listening comprehension right now. If I can solidify that, surely I will be able to improve my output skills slowly, but surely.
加油！