Andys October Language Challenge Week 1

Andys October Language Challenge Week 1 Andy is our new UX Designer and recently joined the italki team in September.  One of the first things he did was join the italki October Language Challenge as he really needs to improve his Chinese as you can tell from his Public Video Pledge.  Hes graciously offered to blog about his experiences and how he is going to conquer the Challenge!  Take it away Andy Wow, this has been an awesome week! Here in China we were quite lucky to begin the month of October with 7 days of holidays! In fact from October the first to October the seventh, China celebrated with seven days of national holidays the 65th birthday of the Peoples Republic of China, established the 1 October 1949. I took advantage of the break to kickstart my chinese and i took 6 classes already with the awesome chinese teacher Elena Ann during this 7 days. Actually I practiced Chinese much more than just those 6 hours, it usually take me between 30 minutes to one hour to prepare for a class. By reviewing the previous lesson by myself I can be much more efficient during the class and take the chance to talk more to the teacher instead of just getting stuck for seconds to try to remember a word. Another trick I use with my teacher is to try to write to her on the SKYPE  chat (while we have a lesson) every new word that we encounter or that I have issue to remember so whenever I have time during the day I can just pick up the SKYPE  chat on my phone and flip through those words to practice.  I find this technique quite handy! Here a snapshot of how i usually take a class: On one side i have the textbook that Elena sent me, on the other side the video and the chat where i write in Pinyin (next years goal is written chinese!) Screenshot of Andys class with Elena Ann This week I think I will take only  one or two more classes, and will focus on consolidate what I have learned until now. How is your challenge going? Let us know! Just in case you are dont remember how bad my chinese is,  take a look at my video pledge! See you soon guys! Andrea