Hi, For those studying Mandarin, what routines/habits/paradigms/thinking have you found has really slowed down your learning, and what has accelerated your learning? For me slowing down learning: trying to be too systematic about the studying finding "the way". For accelerating learning: I am now preferring to study just outside the comfort zone with pronunciation (tones and syllables) by listening to random words I don't know and repeating them. Also with character recognition I try to decipher the radical to a certain degree and make an educated guess on the definition. Lastly, just interpreting the world with Chinese and not English allows me to think in Chinese (instead of think in English and translate to Chinese). It also shows how much I can express myself and where to target time spent for language acquisition. Look forward to your responses!