Updates and Chinese New Year

February 21, 2008

Originally Written on Saturday the 16th 0f Feb, 2007

Ah, Saturday morning and I don’t have to go to work. I love life. ^_^

This week I made a (very) little bit of money from my gaming blog which has given me a solid perspective at what numbers I need to aim for to make a solid, weekend job filling pay packet. I have a long way to go, thats for sure. But I know that I can make it.

It also makes me more excited about this upcoming site that I have in the works much more exciting. Unfortunately It looks like it will take a bit longer to be released yet. I need my brother to adapt a new custom coded backend to it. He should finish all current projects in 2 weeks or so and from there it will take maybe 2 months. I dunno.

Anyways, I feel as though I have been neglecting DP.com for the past week (date today being the 16th). I’ve been out almost every day this week and I was busy near the end of last week as well. When I have been at home though I’ve been writing and editing a new guest post for RacketBoy’s Retro Gaming blog. I haven’t felt like writing anything else really and have been doing that as well as plenty of Chinese study.

I’m moving into some much more interesting study mediums in Chinese. I’ve wanted to quickly improve my listening ability so I have been listening to more chinese podcasts and I’ve starting learning from a few movies as well as well as the usual articles. Oh, this week I also started reading news from Xin Hua Net as well.

Over the holidays I started by reviewing the past years work, so I did a lot of focused writing using important grammar, then I moved onto applying that into essays which I wrote about 4/5 of. From 500-2000 characters each. This finished up sometime in December, when I started going thru all of the texts in last years text book as well as some news articles. From it building lists of vocab, grammar and general language quirks that I didn’t understand and now I’m working on full news articles, podcasts and movies. Oh, I’m also onto the stage where I am looking into problems with my own translation techniques because sometimes I feel restricted during conversation; its not that I don’t know how to say the sentence in Chinese but rather it is something in english which is upsetting the translation. They are really simple problems that really are doing me up the arse. So I want to iron those out this week. And then before you know it it will be a new year of Chinese at Uni. I won’t be able to complete all of last years additional texts which is a little is disheartening but it is not too bad.

The reason why I have quickly decided to start focusing on my listening is because of two reasons, my speaking does not match my listening skills which is murdering my conversations skills and secondly back when I decided this it was Chinese new year. Well just about Chinese new year.

As you’d expect Chinese New Year is the biggest celebration on the Lunar calender. That week I was invited to two new year celebrations. You know, I’ve lost contact with one of my good Chinese mates and I don’t know if he has had to return back to China or not. Argh this is terrible.

Anyways I was invited to two different dinners, unfortunately I could only go to one because I don’t think that my friend really thought about it when she asked me if I wanted to come along as it was a part of a community group thing and I was out booked. But that was fine. That weekend she did a cool little celebration dance in China town which was great.

Also today is her 22nd birthday party (and I am the only non Asian person attending, so yeah plenty of practice). So there has been numerous opportunities in which I would need to utilize my listening skills, so I figured that it’d be worth catching up.

What else has been going down. Umm been practicing my driving skills. Playing some Sonic Gems Collection which I might post impressions of on DP.com. I recorded an advertisement with Matty Jay to feature in a podcast. We’ve also been tossing up other ideas. I’ve got a list of articles and ideas that I am looking to put into action for DP.com as well. They’ll just take a lot of work..

Can’t really think of anything else that has been going down. Went on a short photography trip the other weekend, networking with more bloggers, working thru DKC 2 with my brother on co-op. Oh and slowly working on this new site and promotion Daniel Primed.com. I’m looking forward to getting back on track with the quality of articles as well. So sorry for the recent, slight dip.

Anyways thats it, you probably won’t read this until at least a week for now as I normally forget about updating this blog. Thanks for reading if you got this far.

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