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What a block of thirteen lessons was for
This is a consolidation lesson, so it is worth saying plainly what Block A was doing, and what it leaves you with. The grammar was one thing above all: the complement system. Year 1 gave you the whole tense and aspect apparatus, both kinds of 了, 过, 着, the modals and a long list of paired conjunctions — and it never once told you how to say found rather than looked for, or can't understand rather than don't understand. That is the gap Block A closed. Directional complements in lessons 53 and 60, resultative in 55, potential in 56, degree in 57, with 把 in 54 and the passive family in 61 as the two constructions that depend on them. If you take one thing from thirteen lessons, it is that a Chinese verb usually needs a second syllable to say how it turned out. The content was doing something else, and it was deliberate. Every lesson in this block contradicted something the learner believed because they learned Chinese in Beijing: that Chinese is one spoken language, that a plaque can be read by anybody who reads Mandarin, that Chinese cities look like Beijing, that the climate is dry, that old housing means a 胡同. Alex's 两边差异比我想的大 is the block's thesis in eight characters, and the two examples he reaches for — the speech and the housing — are lessons 56 and 57. On your Chinese at this point. You have HSK 4's grammar nearly complete and a working vocabulary somewhere over a thousand words. What you can do is hold a real conversation about something you care about, complain fluently, ask for help precisely, and follow a patient speaker without much strain. What you cannot yet do is follow two locals talking to each other at speed, read a newspaper without a dictionary, or produce the 成语 and set phrases that make educated Chinese sound educated. Blocks B, C and D are aimed at exactly those. One suggestion before moving on, and it is the same one the Spanish course made at this point. Go back to lesson 53 and read the dialogue out loud, then read lesson 1. The distance between them is the honest measure of what eighteen months has done — more honest than any exercise score, because it is the thing you will actually be doing in Sichuan.