u/Krypticmaniac

Arrived in North cyprus 4 days ago, and went to 4 of my favorite restaurants. It seems every place the quantity and quality has decreased and the prices are through the roof. Considering my country’s currency has gained 20%+ purchasing power against TL I was assuming prices might even be cheaper than last year. To my surprise, it is significantly more expensive than last year. Every meal I ate so far has come out to more than 2000TL, and most of the time I leave the restaurant not even feeling stuffed, craving for another meal.

Pretty sad to see this trend, getting more expensive to eat out than in my own country at this point, which is already a very expensive country to live in.

I have been learning mandarin for almost a year now, and still genuinely feel like I have only scratched the surface. I can have basic conversations, and like most people my passive vocabulary far exceeds my active. I have tried balancing out speaking, listening and reading as well as I can, also doing shadowing to practice my pronunciation. I feel like I´m doing all the right things. I am literally pouring 6+ hours into learning chinese everyday until my head hurts. Probably studying too much, but I am obsessed with reaching fluency and I am enjoying the journey. I would say I am probably at around 5k passive vocab currently, but I still feel like I get tripped up all the time. Suddenly a word I thought I knew is used in a completely different way, and I can´t connect the dots. I´ve discovered many words are extremely versatile and I feel kind of helpless at times. I am wondering if vocab count should only be measured by 100% unique words? For example these words:

• 电影票 — movie ticket
• 飞机票 — plane ticket
• 火车票 — train ticket
• 公交票 — bus ticket
• 门票 — entrance ticket

Are they considered 5 unique words, or not because they are inherently very simple to understand, considering you just add 票 at the back of the word to indicate it is a ticket of some sort.

I still feel very very far from comfortable with my chinese listening comprehension, especially in real life I feel completely useless and can barely understand anything. To those who are intermediate: How long did it take you to feel pretty confident in your listening ability? I am mostly focusing on improving my listening comprehension right now. If I can solidify that, surely I will be able to improve my output skills slowly, but surely.

加油！