Four years in and I still don't have a clean answer to question one, which is its own kind of answer, I guess. Reading is genuinely the stronger side for me, like I can sit with a short text and work through it slowly and feel okay about what I'm getting, but the moment someone speaks at normal speed I lose the thread almost immediately and have to ask them to repeat, which gets embarrassing after the second or third time. My friend's grandmother in Chiang Mai is incredibly patient and will slow down when I ask her to, but even then I'm catching maybe 70% and filling in the rest with context and guessing. On the phone it's basically hopeless. So reading: functional but slow. Speaking and listening: inconsistent in a way I find hard to describe accurately. The reading thing I think came from learning script fairly early and leaning on it too hard, so my brain wants to see a word written before it trusts that the word exists (that might just be a me thing, I'm not sure). I can read and write, yes, though my writing is slower than my reading and I make a lot of tone-mark errors when I'm rushing. How long? four years, though there have been stretches of several months where I was barely doing anything and then a cramming week that accomplished less than I thought it would, so I'm not sure how to count that honestly. The Anki guilt is real. My deck has been inconsistent for a while and I know it. How I learned: a mix of Anki when I'm actually keeping up with it, YouTube, a couple of textbooks, and two trips to Chiang Mai where I was around my friend's extended family and had actual reasons to try. The family context is the part that matters most to me, even when it's also the most stressful, because I really do want to be able to talk to her grandmother properly before I lose the chance. And on the falling tone thing, I had exactly that problem for a long time, collapsing it into a mid tone whenever I was under any conversational pressure at all. It did eventually become less wrong, but gradually and not in a satisfying way. 😅
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