#inconsistent capitalization

I’m at the point in learning Chinese (speaking Mandarin, reading simplified) where I’m decent at reading fantasy romance specifically (as well as hong lou meng lol), somewhat decent at reading other fiction, good at understanding daily-life speech, and can follow along/guess at more elevated and specialized speech. I’m mostly understandable when I type out diary-type essays.

(when I write it out like that, I realize I’m good at the things I’ve spent time on doing over the last two or three years. genuinely a shocked pikachu moment.)

I’m really slow at reading news articles, Wikipedia/Baidu pages, formal communications, instruction manuals…basically anything that isn’t a story with characters and dialogue. my ability to generate real-time speech varies *severely* depending on how much sleep I’ve been getting, but even on my best days I have moments where I use Mandarin words to generate English-style sentences. my passive vocab has been in the HSK5-6 range since forever. my active vocab is tiny.

I would really, really like to sound fluent when I speak. to not stumble across simple phrases and sentence structures I should know. to use 着 and 得 and 的 in the right places. but it seems like my speaking ability is a black hole no matter how much practice I throw at it. in particular, real-time sessions with native mandarin speakers don’t particularly seem to help at all. or only minimally. it always feels like a test, not learning. I’d love to figure out a form of practice that actually does help. I’ve tried shadowing. I’ve tried writing. writing does not help because inevitably what teachers want from a written thing is 书面语 and not colloquial speech. speaking out loud has always been my weakest point in learning any language, and I bet it doesn’t help that I don’t even like and feel clumsy talking in english, which is my native language. well. at least my mandarin tones are fine.

I’m working on learning handwriting right now, and the learning curve is steep where I’m at. there’s a lot of marginal return for my time, so that’s one of the things I’ll prioritize.

I took an online group class through orangeblossom (they’re great, plus they donate their profits to palestinian families affected by the war) over the winter, and I felt like I did get better at both conversation and reading over the course of that class, plus I got exposed to useful new vocabulary. so yeah. I guess a group class did push my boundaries. maybe I should consider taking the same class again, bc I don't think I'm ready for the most advanced class yet

I listen to a disgusting amount of mandarin audio -- audiobooks/dramas plus a mandarin podcast called 声东击西, which is made for chinese people and about politics and culture in the west, especially the usa -- and…hmm. it’s all entertaining, but I’m not sure how much language learning I’m getting out of it. I’m guessing at the meanings of a lot of words a lot of the time. I worry that my brain has just learned to optimize for the specific things I do all the time, including learning to rely on shortcuts (here, guessing fuzzy meanings for words and being happy with that level of understanding).

Over the course of my time on FR, I’ve seen countless threads posing the question “What are the players in universe?” Here’s my answer. (I think about this a lot.)

At the end of the second age when all of everything was blown to dust, lots and lots of people were instantly obliterated, leaving nothing but a small physical imprint much like the nuclear shadows in Hiroshima. At the same time, those who were magically adept left a similar magical imprint which included small traces of their consciousness. 

This magical shadow would strengthen over the course of the third age via feeding off residual magical energies to form fully sapient beings who are bound to a particular location (The place where they died) which I call Lair Spirits. This is us. 

Once the pillar was shattered and the eleven claimed their territories, those beings took on the element of the land by absorbing magic like they had before Which is why you pick an element before anything else. 

The elemental energy lair spirits give off is extremely attractive to dragons on a subconscious level, meaning dragon lairs will always have one nearby whether the lair’s inhabitants are aware of it or not. Lair spirits then, either directly or indirectly influence the decisions of clan members in an attempt to prevent the same fate they suffered from happening again.

Because Lair spirits are bound to the land and an element, it takes a deity’s help to move one, which is why flight changes are such an ordeal. The dragons can pick up and move however they want, but it takes some doing to change the spirit’s element.

The only one’s who can see or interact directly with lair spirits are other lair spirits (forums), Deities (flight changes), those extremely in tune with their elements and magic, and the couriers (Notice they always address you by your username and not by the name of one of your dragons.)