hello, world!

So March! The full moon is in two days, which means the lantern festival and the year of the horse starts for real. This is definitely going to be the year I practice speaking!

I took the SuperChinese placement test, and here is how I interpreted my results.
Pronunciation: good
Vocabulary: okay
Reading speed: okay
Grammar: poor, very poor

A basic level of grammar is necessary to make sentences that communicate meaning, and I think I got that far and then stopped paying attention, or focused on other things, like comprehension. If I can use SuperChinese to improve my grammar, I'm in. I want to share abstract stories, not only communicate about tangible experiences.

It's funny that speaking practice is both so encouraging and so humbling: my sentences are certainly understandable (yay!) but they aren't correct (...yeah).

It appears that tomorrow is the last day of February. What were my goals this month? Am I still working on goals for the year? (The fact that I don't know seems to indicate either I am not yet successful, or I am already so successful I don't even think about it.) (I'm sure it's the latter, right?)

I haven't finished my Grade 1 Chinese textbooks, but in my defense I added math, so it's four textbooks per grade instead of two. They're really fun. I remember that reading them the first time is how I learned the word for "equals". (In that I still remember it, rather than just seeing it and forgetting it, which is apparently what I did with "greater than" and "less than".)

I've been in the 75fluent discord a bit, and a lot of people are using the SuperChinese app. I looked back through the scores of Chinese learning apps I've tried, and that's not one of them, so I feel like I should check it out. (My Chinese learning app knowledge is now, after just a few years, completely outdated. That's pretty neat.)

2024 was the year it got easier to listen, and 2025 was the year it got easier to write. Dare I decide that 2026 will be the year it gets easier to speak?

Last night I saw a video about how, when reading a book, the first chapter is the hardest and it gets immediately easier after that. So I started reading the first Chinese book I found in my kindle library that was A) new to me, and B) not a graded reader. (I love graded readers, but after you've read hundreds of them, they're a bit repetitive. By design, of course.) It seems to be about good study habits for high schoolers. I don't remember how this is in my library, but the first chapter was pretty interesting, so I assume that's why.)

I did not diamond paint except to start the irises, but I did photograph a bunch of legos, make some graphics, and handwrite some cool zines for beagoldfish. Plus wrote stories for chenqing_100!

I also sowed a bunch of seeds in containers now covered by snow, and looked at enough of my tubers to determine that 1) the dahlias look largely viable, and 2) there was probably some layering of cold in my canna storage, because the ones in the top box are trying to sprout while the ones in the bottom box are soundly asleep. (That's reasonable; they were by the back door where the floor is pretty cold, but the pipes above the floor run warm for the dog's comfort.)

Maybe I could make a handwritten Chinese zine that I record myself reading aloud to a bunch of seeds.

This is gonna be my day. Or I'll take a nap. Still hard to say which way it will go.

Also I can't believe I haven't posted any pictures of Daphne in a year. I just spent an hour looking at photos, so I can't make up for it now short of sharing my entire library. But here's a particularly funny sequence from last spring, when her friends came to the back door looking for her.

( Daphne and friends )

Right now everything is covered in snow and ice, except the back patio, so that's nice. I still go out and sit in my rocking chair and look out over where the gardens will be in the spring, and admire the sparkly beauty of a frozen river.

Luckily the dogs love the frozen river, so now the play groups look more like this.

( Daphne and snow )