The story of the cover: just a normal daytime in Brisbane City.

I have been here for almost a year, so it seems a good time to do an annual summary, but this post is not a post for that. I haven’t decided on the plan for next year, and don’t know how to evaluate this year either because I cannot compare this year with my previous years directly. At such a meaningful time point, I think it’s better to write something down.

# Following the plan

Almost all people around me have a unified impression of me, which is that I am a hard-working guy. They always tell me “Don’t study too much” with a kidding tone, but I am the guy who knows myself best, and I think their impression does not reflect the truth. To be honest, I have to admit that I indeed value the grade in the university, and also spend a lot of time on it. However, compared to what I have given up, I think the reward is too low. I think I have problems with time and energy management, which makes the efficiency and actual working time lower than I expected. For example, I usually stay in the library for more than 6 hours, trying to finish my assignment or take a review. Since I have no entertainment event, theoretically I should have adequate time for job-seeking preparation. My tutor provided me with some materials to help me improve my technical ability in October, including AWS education, principles of some known open-source projects, etc. Unfortunately, I haven’t glanced at them for even a page.

To verify why my time flies away, I decided to split my schedule into smaller chunks using Pomodoro and observe the outcome without any additional intervention. I found that I could not keep concentration. Maybe the efficiency of the first two chunks (50 minutes working time) is good, but then I would interrupt myself to watch something irrelevant to my target, like YouTube videos, or e-sport matches. As time goes on, the self-interruption will become increasingly frequent, and finally, there will be no working progress. The same problem happened when I was in the vocational college, but I haven’t noticed it since I thought I was good at that time. Hence, I realize that real diligence is always to follow a plan: you need to have a plan first and follow its instructions. How much time you spend on your work never gonna be a metric of the degree of your effort. I need to regain my ability to keep focus, so I decrease the workload for each day, forcing myself to finish them within a specific period, and then the remaining of the day will be my relaxing time.

# zh-CN is getting worse

I have a bold viewpoint, zh-CN (the primary language in Mainland China) is on the way to death. It sounds exaggeratedly horrible, but I am serious about this because a vicious circle has been formed and hard to revert. As a native Chinese speaker and English learner, I’m better at my primary language without any doubt, but using keywords in English can always provide me with more accurate results. There are many causes of that, I will figure some of them out below.

# Scam

Maybe Chinese people are more likely to be cheated, the proportion of scams in simplified Chinese is overwhelming, especially for scam phone calls. Many of my classmates and I have received this kind of phone call, even though we cannot understand what the scammers are saying, we still can confirm that was a Chinese accent from the mainland. No one likes annoying scams, and I have to turn on anonymous phone call blocking to avoid their disturbance. Imagine you always receive scam phone calls every day from a country that you don’t know much about, and you know where they come from but cannot understand what they are saying. Will they leave you a good impression? I guess not. Furthermore, since more scam information in the language, it’s harder to get real valuable knowledge. For people whose primary language is zh-CN, they must stand the low quality of information, at least for when they are young. As I indicated in previous posts, “garbage in, garbage out”, which means the quality of created information in this language will also be affected.

# Closed Platforms

All media platforms are isolated from each other, and all of them are unfriendly to SEO. I found it is a phenomenon only in China. For example, you can only browse the content from a specific APP or mini program except a webpage, and they integrate many functions in the same app, trying to build an ecosystem because they all want to be the rules makers. Then, to gain information, you have to search in their search function instead of any kind of general search engine like Baidu/google. None of them collaborate, no concern for the quality of content in the ecosystem, only desiring to hold the whole market share. No one can benefit in this mode: user cannot find their interest, jumping between different platforms to waste their time; no platform can occupy the market share firmly since no one can provide all things users need; platforms know users cannot leave them away, ignoring the user experience to maximum their benefits (e.g., adding more advertisement, collecting more user info).

# Keywords Blocking

People who are familiar with China knows that there are many advanced keywords censorship and blocking system. If sensitive keywords are detected, your post or comment will be deleted. To express the idea, people would avoid using them and they have to find replacements. The sensitive keywords library updates continuously, and people create new varieties to resist censorship. Search engines cannot catch the speed of creating new varieties (of course not, otherwise they would be blocked), so new keywords are invisible to people who don’t know the meaning behind them, which restricts the spread of information.

zh-CN is a language filled with many scams, closed ecosystems and censorships, so I feel pessimistic about it.

# Is studying abroad correct for me?

I deeply recognise that studying abroad brings a high expenditure to my family for sure, and my parents downgraded their life quality to send me here because of my strong request, which makes me consider if coming to Australia to study abroad is a good decision. Maybe 20 years ago, it might have been a good investment since degrees were valuable at that time point. Nowadays, graduates or even masters are no longer rare, and also society has more metrics to measure whether a person is successful. Yes, the value of a degree has been overestimated. If the only outcome of my journey of study abroad is the master’s degree, then it’s a bad decision. Experience is not always related to one’s age, just like cognition is the thing changing your life rather than knowledge. Is studying abroad correct for me? the result has not been set yet, and it depends on my performance. Haha, nothing good comes easily.