My efforts with the free Mandarin Blueprint Challenge! ran into problems early on.

For one thing we're engaged in all this stuff around selling our house, which has been pretty distracting.

But the bigger reason is twofold:

  1. The free course is a very high-pressure sales funnel to the expensive course. Such high pressure is something I do not respond well to.
  2. The method demands extensive visualisation to help with learning the Chinese characters: create a scene, a person who does something, props they use, an action. These all connect to the Chinese character as an aide memoire.
Sample script for a visualisation movie for the character for the word Person: Ringo Starr is trying to figure out the origin of HUMANS, so he starts giving an ape-like creature banana after banana by cutting them off their bunches one-by-one with a samurai sword. As the ape-like creature keeps eating the bananas, he evolves slowly into a HUMAN.
Sample script for a visualisation movie for the character for the word Person.

I'm sure that technique works well for lots of people, but I just can't visualise things: people, places, scenery, things.

You know when you've had a dream and you can sort of remember it in the morning — but not quite? That's what my visualisations are like. Asking me to recall my childhood home, or imagine Sean Connery standing in my kitchen with a stick : nope. "See" a samurai chopping the top off a vegetable with a sword : nope.

So, I've reverted to the Udemy course I signed up for at the same time, and the Learn A Chinese Word A Day website.

We'll see how that goes …