I set myself some goals at the beginning of this summer, and they served as a good motivating factor over the course of my vacation. I'm now replicating this pattern with the fall season and some of the winter one - setting myself goals I hope to have completed by the end of 2021. There are a total of 122 days in this block.

The goals are somewhat more relaxed as I'm entering the IB, which is supposed to be quite time-consuming. They mostly revolve around Chinese learning, though the last one (which I'd be happy to hear any feedback on!) is about building a language-learning related web app.

Goals

• Read 300k characters of webnovel content. This summer, I read about 75% of that, so this is an achievable goal. I have no specific books to read in mind apart from the highly recommended 《许三观卖血记》and 《活着》.
• Finish the HSK 5 course - I'm already 2/3 of the way through it thanks to progress in the summer.
• 70 LangCorrect entries. I've been in discussion with a member of the LangCorrect team, and they'll likely either implement a calendar feature or create an API endpoint that I can use to programmatically access my journals to check whether this goal has been accomplished.
• Shadow the entire Mandarin Bean HSK 5 library. The HSK 4 "episodes" - though really more like short articles with audio - are about 120 in number, so at my current rate of 3 a day (just finished the HSK 4 library today), this shouldn't be a problem.
• This one's harder to keep track of: at least 3 hours of audiovisual immersion a week (including XYY). This means Mandarin Corner, Douyin, and dramas in Chinese. This goal is only for after I finish HSK 5.

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• (Coding Project) - release at least a beta version of the website I've been working on to help language learners. In a nutshell, it's Goodreads for language learners - a place where learners can track, rate, and get recommendations for books - but taking into account book difficulty (crowdsourced by users) and language, not just genre. Apart from this, I'm planning on implementing book charts, reading stats, book clubs, etc.
• (cont.) Really excited about this, since I think it will solve a problem that I've personally been encountering - finding both comprehensible and interesting books - as well as motivating users to read with goals, articles, and a social aspect, among other things. If this is something that you'd like to hear more about, please let me know and I'll message you when it's done; equally, I'd love to hear ideas for how it could be made to be the most useful tool possible for fellow learners.