Back from hiatus It's been a while since I've wrote an entry. Since that time, I've spent 5 weeks in Xi'an learning Mandarin at a homestay - 7 hours a day. It was really intense and I managed to learn a lot very quickly. However, since I've returned to Melbourne in January, I've only had a couple of lessons. I think the biggest problem is remembering all the new vocabulary which I seldom use in day-to-day conversations. If you are like me and have trouble remembering 汉字, the best advice I received was to just write in it. You'll start to remember a lot more characters that way. The other big problem I have is there's no environment to really immerse myself for Chinese speaking unlike in China where very few people on the street actually speak English. There you're forced to on a daily basis while over here, it's quite rare when no one speaks any English (except in the beginner classes).