45 Days of Learning and focusing on one subject. Intense Immersion.

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I've been wanting to do something like this for a long time, but just never had the time. Now I have to much time and just curious how much you can learn, and become proficient on a particular skill with zero expierance before. If you apply yourself to learning Mandarin how much can you learn in a month and a half. If you were teleported to Shenzhen i'm sure that you would be able to get quite proficient very quickly, but for whatever reason with all of the information, and teaching aids that we have still don't utilize them in away. I've seen many youtube/bloggers who applied themselves learn very quickly by bypassing standard education methods, and figure why not. Plus, Steem provides an interesting platform because I'm very new to it (even thought i've been working with Solidity and other things for quite awhile) but I really like the concept and want to support it. 

My struggle has always been discipline. I know a little about allot, and know allot of surface level stuff, but just never had the discipline to  stay focused to get into the underlying mechanics. That is unless I had something to work for. Examples learning Python for an immersion course to test in, I became very competant in both Math, and the Language very quickly. When going for stuff to progress in a job, I was able to focus. Photography, I learned allot by following Dave Dugdale (who went from no even knowing how to turn on a Camera and 2 years later is keynote speaker at color grading conferances and one of my main influences for doing this). I have allot of interests. Cuda/OpenCL, Functional Programming, playing the violin, completing an ironman, on and on and all over the place in both complexity and categories. When looking at these things the biggest problem is just starting them out and usually defeated before I even try them. 

My focus will be on learning Mandarin first because I don't need a Nvidia card, or a bike, or anything to accomplish it. There are more than enough resources online to I feel accomplish a mid level competency in the language. Everything i've read says it takes 2 years to get to this level, I want to try in 45 days. It's something i've always wanted to do, and the basis of a project that I have always wanted to do. I also want to be able to test and see where I stand on a standardized test after the 45 days. I know exactly 3 Hanzi Characters and less than 5 words so my starting point is next to nothing. How I feel I want to try and accomplish this is just put an immense amount of time into it. My thoughts are: 

• Learn the most basic words and Hanzi first to the point of advanced proficiency. Zero prompting, thinking.  (much like out multiplication tables in elementary school) and build off that. 
• Track by Sentiment daily. So I can have a dataset that I can parse and plot out in Python. This is pretty simple and doubt i'll do anything crazy with it at first except plot it, but something to measure. Hopefully, I think that like most immersion type of classes, the first parts of it will be very hard but be the easiest most common problems. Then will progressively get easier to learn, but be the harder phrases and characters and just build off that.
• Learn by videos, and reference material will be: (Chineasy, Flashcards, Audiobooks at work and a few other beginner level books) I'm not going to do a Mooc, or Udemy. I want to develop on my own. Plus, I haven't had allot of luck with MOOC's in other avenues. 
• After the 45 days I will take the HSK Test at our local University in Mid March. (Subject to test but looks as if they have one March 22nd)
• I'll use tag zeroket

I've seen many, many, many transformations over the internet. People losing weight, running marathons, on and on. Lets see what happens. Start Tommorrow // Day 0.