This has been a very long month, and I intend to keep this reflection short (for a change).
In hindsight, I think a whole month language challenge may have been a bit too ambitious, but I ended up completing the challenge without many issues. On a few occasions I did accidentally start to read/watch something in English, forgetting about the challenge, but I caught myself. I also often found myself preferring to sit in my room in silence rather than watching something in Chinese, since watching something in a foreign language requires concentration and can make me feel exhausted.
Over the last month, I watched around 10 movies in Chinese, and 13 episodes of a Taiwanese TV series. I didn’t do much reading, aside from maybe a total of 20-30 pages of some Chinese-language books (because I generally don’t like reading Chinese).
It is hard to say if this challenge has provided any significant benefit. My Chinese was already advanced level prior to starting the challenge so it’s difficult to ‘feel’ any change. For example, learning 200 new words when you only know 100 words would be a massive improvement, but learning 200 new words when you know 6000 words may not even be noticeable. I’m sure I learned more words than I would have otherwise, and gained a lot of additional exposure to the language, which are certainly beneficial, but it’s difficult to say anything beyond this vague assumption.
One positive thing is that I no longer have the assumption that every Chinese-language TV series is terrible to watch. In the past I did not like any Chinese-language movie or TV show that I’ve seen, so I never gave any others a chance. After this challenge I discovered that some of them may be tolerable, so maybe I’ll at least try to watch them in the future.
Austin Barton 
Has your confidence level increased in speaking to others out in public or to friends?
I would say it hasn’t increased in any noticeable way because I was already in the habit of speaking Chinese with people pretty often. I can get my paint across on most things without difficulty, but I’m sure my wording may have errors or isn’t the way a native speaker would say it. I definitely gained some new vocabulary, which has been helpful, but I don’t think the improvement has been drastic enough to give me a noticeable increase in confidence haha
Nice post. I know the feeling when I was learning Spanish and that is a lot easier than Chinese.
Sent from my iPhone
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