Neodosa

I started my third playthrough of Cyberpunk a couple days ago, playing it with the Chinese dub, and I have to say that it has worked really well as an immersion resource! You can enable the Chinese audio dub by right clicking on the game on steam, then click 'properties', then under 'general' there will be a 'language' option where you can choose a number of languages.

I don't know about the Witcher 3 since I haven't played it, but Cyberpunk is really dialogue heavy, so there is seriously like hundreds of hours of dialogue to go through (and then there's also the shards to read). The game makes heavy use of poetic language as well as highly informal language, which has really put strain on my current abilities, so I'm having to jot down new words all the time.

While the marketing and release of this game was scummy to say the least, there is actually quite a good game here if you just try to take in the story, the scenery, as well as delve into the sidequests (the sidequests are honestly a lot more interesting than the main story). One of my favorite moments I've had while playing any video game has to be when I accidentally fell into the 'hidden' park that's hidden 'underneath' the city center, subsequently going for a calm walk, being amazed by the scenery, and then stumbling upon a buddhist monk who gives a short guided meditation.

Even though I have 140 hours on this game, there are still so many sidequest lines to go through. Since I'm using the game as an immersion resource now, I'm definitely going to be replaying the game.

Many have the impression that China is a very car-polluted country with heavy traffic and wide streets occupying much of the cities. I think this impression mostly comes from the fact that much of the imagery one sees while hearing news about China is that of multi-lane streets going through cities. What you don't see in these shots however, are the enormous blocks that lie in between these streets. You can look at the map of any Chinese city, and you will see that the blocks are usually around 500x500 meters. In Soviet fashion, these blocks are big enough to have all of the services one would need during the day, as well as green space. At the same time, there are usually larger parks in the vicinity as well hosting various community activities. All of this is reflected in the fact that China has a very low motorization rate.

If you're wondering about why these wide streets exist in the first place, one has to understand that these cities are big, and these wide streets are kind of a rare sight when looking at the cities as a whole (although they are very much necessary for car traffic). I would much rather like to see wider streets at a lower cadence than frequently having to wait at shorter crossings. Here in Stockholm, crossings feel like such a headache since they're so frequent.

These green space developments are most obvious when you go just outside the city center. Here, you will usually find very high density tall housing as seen in the picture above. Having these tall buildings then leaves good amount of space for greenery.

This is a picture of Shijiazhuang, which is far from a tier-one city, and it is also far from being known as a city with greenery (it is stereotypically a polluted city). After looking around a bit in the city center, this was pretty much the most concrete-looking part I could find. You can still see, however, that each block has some amount of green space, and besides, there are big parks just outside of this frame. Shijiazhuang is the city which I will be living in during the coming year due to my upcoming exchange year.

As for public transport, I think we all have an idea of what the situation looks like.

Hi everyone! For the past two years I've been studying mandarin intensively pretty much every day (544 day Anki streak at least). I've reached the point where I can talk about most topics without much issue (that includes more advanced topics like AI or general geopolitics), and I can also consume news and social media.

I followed the Refold method, since it's by far the most fool-proof and efficient way to learn a language in my opinion.

I started out immersing in gaming content, since it's very visual and you don't really have to understand what's being said in order to follow along. Some popular gaming channels on Bilibili include: 中国BOY, 徐大虾, and 老番茄. It is during these beginning stages where I would say learning Chinese is the hardest, because you will have a very hard time hearing the tones and you will also likely have a hard time hearing the difference between for example 'xiang' and 'shang', or 'chi' and 'zhi'. In order to be able to hear these sounds, your only option is just to bash your head against the content until your brain magically figures it out at some point or another. As long as you keep immersing and don't get too upset at yourself for not hearing the difference, your brain will kind of magically sort it out eventually.

The same thing is true for the speed at which you can comprehend words. At first you will have to seriously make an effort to decode all of the sounds and convert them to meaning, and so you will feel that they are talking way too fast for you to comprehend. Eventually however, your brain will start to do this conversion from sound to meaning automatically and consuming content will feel more effortless. This is why it's important in the first couple of months to just have some 自律 and push through the immersion and trust the process.

Once I started to feel quite comfortable with gaming content, I started moving towards consuming dating shows like 新相亲大会 and 非诚勿扰 (these can be found on youtube). These shows are seriously great sources of immersion for three reasons:

1. The shows are very predictable so it's easy to follow what's going on even if you've missed multiple sentences.
2. There are hours upon hours of content for you to consume, and I would even recommend you to rewatch episodes.
3. The shows are seriously fun to watch! There are some really great moments from these shows and you usually don't need very advanced vocabulary to follow along. I would say that 新相亲大会 was *the *show which improved my Chinese the most. Watching through all the seasons let me get a natural sense of Chinese grammar, it propelled me to conversational fluency, and I finally felt comfortable with all of the sounds of the Chinese language.

The next step of my immersion journey involved watching the news as well as consuming political and educational content on Bilibili. I'm still at this stage today and so I'm just slowly widening my vocabulary and building more of a cultural understanding of things.

To give some more general tips on language learning, I'll start by saying that the most important thing to do is to build a language learning habit. You should worry less about progress or if you're doing it "right", because if you do immersion for long enough coupled with some speaking practice later down the line you are guaranteed to reach the level of fluency you want to be at. In order to build a habit, you need to do what is fun for you and worry less about if it's the right level of difficulty or if your study method is correct. I'm also sorry to say that if you can't build the habit of immersion, then you aren't going to reach fluency as there are no shortcuts to this process. You simply have to put in thousands of hours if you want to reach fluency, and for most of those hours you are going to be seriously doubting yourself if it's even possible to reach fluency in the first place.

I would also recommend everyone to learn more about the science of language learning. There are tonnes of great Youtube channels which talk about the science of immersion learning, but a classic is of course Matt vs Japan and also the Refold Youtube channel. Also, it can't hurt to watch some Xiaoma for inspiration. I kind of cringe watching his videos nowadays but back in the day Xiaoma was really the person who got me on the path to learn Chinese in the first place, so I'm still very thankful that his channel exists.