This is a one year blog, starting on my 40th birthday and ending on my 41st birthday. I quit my job of 10 years and will go back to becoming a fulltime student & musician. I also moved out of the USA and will be living in Taiwan and France for the next year. I honestly don't know where or what I'll be doing a year from now...but life's about the journey and not the destination...so ready or not, here we go.
Two years ago when I first started experimenting with making my own Chinese flash cards, I realized that the only way I was going to quickly re-learn the 300 or so characters I learned from my last class was to make some more flash cards (I left my old flash cards from my previous class back in the USA). After going through the entire Practical Audio-Visual Chinese #1 book again and creating the new flash cards, I was surprised that it was only 310 unique characters. I guess the reason they say there are about 500 characters to learn is that many characters used are combined to give a brand new unique word.
small + heart = be careful...makes perfect sense to me, and who said Chinese wasn't easy?
I only put one character on each card. On the front, the Chinese character; on the back, the Pinyin Chinese pronunciation on top, and the English translation on the bottom.
Before I had used 3"x5" cards, but this time I ended up using some smaller flash cards with a hole inside that Charlene got me. They are more difficult to write on because they are smaller (1.5"x3.5") but I was able to melt three of their plastic ring binders together with a lighter (each plastic loop is only designed hold 100 cards) and made one giant loop that snaps and closes together to hold them all. It ain't pretty, but it works, and that's what I'm all about.
