i'm now supposedly at HSK 2 in chinese, working on 3. learning some good stuff, like how to say "it's hard to (eat/look at/whatever)", and "everyone, everywhere". the guy said there's not much grammar left in chinese at all and the rest is basically vocab, but i don't know if he just meant "for conversational chinese" or not.

chinese grammar is, so far, basically ALL either the same as english (ex. word order) or japanese (ex. literal way they say things) so it's proving pretty easy. but understanding the chinese-only instructions (which have just started) is really hard, my brain just doesn't want to recognize chinese as an actual language yet.

i'm slowly figuring out memory aids for stuff like the tones, for example:

flat tone: imagine the word on a road
rising tone: imagine the word on mount olympus or with zeus
falling tone: imagine the word underwater (at the ocean floor on the sand)
rising-falling tone: imagine the word with the letter å which i mispronounce in swedish and end up giving a rising-falling tone

so like 谁 / 誰 ("who" - i already know the meaning so no aid for that is necessary) is a birdhouse with a little "i" symbol on it, on mount olympus. then i remember it's the rising tone super easily.

but i still have to figure out memory aids for all the SOUNDS. i'm trying to do the thing where ex. "shi" is just an image and "zhi" is the same image with ice/honey/whatever around it, but it's proving pretty difficult so far. i think i should revisit a bunch of memory aid tutorials, or maybe search for other people's that are specifically for chinese. when i can make a mental image, even if it's really crappy (like i imagined zeus fanning himself with the letter 単 because it looks like a japanese fan), i have zero problem remembering that part of the word afterwards.