Student Case: 30 sessions and first diary in Chinese

Background:

Darina is young Vietnamese woman residing in the Czech Republic. She began her Mandarin learning journey with me in February 2025. Starting from complete beginner level (HSK Standard Course 1, Lesson 1), she committed to regular study with two 45-minute lessons per week.

Progress:

By May 15th (after approximately 3.5 months and 30 lessons), she had consistently progressed to HSK1 Lesson 12

The Breakthrough Moment:

On May 15th, she experienced a beautiful language acquisition milestone - while performing the routine activity of brushing her teeth, Chinese phrases naturally came to mind. This organic thought process in Mandarin led her to compose her first Chinese diary entry independently.

(Enlish translation: Today is May 17th, Saturday. I am now in Czech. Weather in Czech is very good, not cold not hot. Today I ate my breakfasteight at 8:00, and studied Chinese at 10:00. I drank Coffee at 11:30. I really like to drink Coffee. Yesterday was my brother’s birthday. I made a cake. The cake is very delicious.)

The things she does outside of our online class:

She listens to musics, watches movies/dramas (like all Chinese movie lovers do!) and is trying to re-write the vocabs and make sentences out of it as much as possible. She also watches travelling Youtube videos, but she believes that doesn't count as learning as they mainly speak other languages that are not Chinese.

Current feelings:

(She wrote to me) I am very happy that you joined with me on my Chinese learning journey, it's definitely not easy for starters to start to speak and you made it easy for me to do so. I remember my English learning journey, it took me years before i was able to feel comfortable to speak. It's not the same this time, i am only 3 months into the journey and yet i managed to talk with my sister in Chinese to show her my progress.