i'm 3-4 hours into learning mandarin from "Domino Chinese". they claim that after 22 hours you'll understand around 75% of all mandarin. one lady studied (new material) for 2 hours a day, 10 hours a week, and got to HSK 4 (a feat normally taking 2 years) in 9 weeks. if you study on the weekends and do 14 hours a week instead, that's about 6 weeks. on their official site you can pay as low as $2 USD a month to have access to all their materials, which can at the moment get you up to HSK 5 (=able to read newspapers).

well. i was thinking, i can certainly put in more than 10 hours a week. i can do a little in the morning as i cook breakfast, some at school on long school days, some at home every day — and you can also speed up the videos (which i do on the english but not on the chinese). they've specifically designed their "lessons" to constantly reuse the old stuff so you don't have to actually take notes or really study, you can just breeze through it, so this is a kind of test to see if i really CAN just breeze through all the videos without anki, memrise etc.

why learn mandarin?? aren't i taking the japanese proficiency exam next month?? well:

• just 2 hours of mandarin already taught me kanji in japanese that i hadn't know the precise meanings of, and grammar to figure out kanji compound words

• my exchange year in japan ends next month and for the whole time i've been hanging out with people who speak chinese but haven't been able to understand a word of it — what if, in 4 weeks of constantly taking these lessons, i could actually hold a decent conversation with these guys in their own language? just 2 hours of study and i already started recognizing some words that the exchange students are saying all the time!!

• if i do happen to get pretty fluent in mandarin i can make a buttload of money being a translator... probably