Our comment is a bit late. We can say that we have reached our goal. It wasn’t easy at the end, due to holidays. You try to stay focus, but we all know it’s not that easy. Still we are happy with our result. So for now we just continue with the next face of our learning progress. Of course we look forward to future challenges.
We hope to win this fantastic poster next time…. 😉

Hm… well, the challenge just ended (June 30th) and there were only two days left when you left your comment. There will be more challenges in the future, don’t worry!

Can I be added to the list?

There will be other challenges, but I think I will focus on other areas since we’ve done characters now for three months! I don’t think it’s strictly necessary to know how many characters you know, you could just measure how many new characters you learn.

Regarding this challenge… I find it very appealing. The idea of being publicly accountable to a group of other learners is great. I know that that works well for me. I’d love to join, but I think I really want to use Skritter so I can do it right. (I want the instant handwriting feedback that it provides.) But Skritter isn’t available for Android! I plan to finally give in and buy an iPad (just for this one app!) when I’m back in the US this summer. For now, I’m getting by with Anki and Pleco.

Here’s my request/question:

Do you plan to run another sensible character-learning challenge starting sometime after this summer (2014)? I imagine that by then I should have a better handle on the software and a stronger foundation of the simpler characters. Right now I don’t even know how to figure out how many characters I can write! So, I don’t even know my starting point, much less how I would assess my progress.

Any pointers or advice on how to measure how many characters I can {recognize, write, etc.} without an app like Skritter?

Here I am again to say that despite the challenge being finished I continued and succeed, turns out that there was only two sounds that slowed me down, “e” and aspirated sounds, I changed my approach towards those ones and the problem was gone. That’s correspond with my previous experience with tones, where careful analyse and search for more intuitive ways of pronunciation gave faster and better results than mechanical repetition.

Personally, it fells awesome to pronounce full phrases with right pronounce and tones especially considering that I was a raw beginner about a month and half ago. The better feeling is to know you are in control, no guessing, no gimmicks, you can feel each tone in your mouth and you know if it’s right or not.

I completely stopped adding new words between Milestone #2 and #3. This is not voluntary, it’s more a decrease in motivation! It became even hard to continue reviewing the previous learned stuff (I did it once or twice a week instead of every day, so sometimes I had 250 words to write instead of just 30).

I will try to come back!
Milestone #3 (May 31st): +350 planned, 0 reached
End of challenge (June 30th): +350 (TOCFL B1 in progress)