About this blog

I'm 纪东. I've studied Mandarin on and off for a couple of years and stalled somewhere around HSK 2. I can limp through some speaking, but reading is where I fall apart — and the moment pinyin appears, I read that instead of the characters and learn nothing.

So this blog has one rule: characters come first, pinyin hides until you ask for it. Tap a word to check yourself. That's the whole trick. It keeps me actually reading instead of cheating.

What I'm aiming for

Nothing dramatic. I want to order food without pointing and panicking, handle a basic conversation, and slowly get to where I can hold a real exchange with the Mandarin speakers in my life instead of smiling and nodding. No deadline. Just consistency.

How it works here

Posts are short on purpose. Frequency beats length — a finished small thing every few days will teach me more than a perfect essay I never publish. There's no separate flashcard app to abandon; the review is built in, because old posts use the same words again, and re-reading them is the practice.

If my writing here is clumsy, that's the point. I'm a learner writing in public. Watching someone go from bad to less-bad is more useful than watching an expert who never struggled.