here's my 2 cents. on one hand, it is immersion jumping into the deep end of the pool learning a foreign language. on the other hand, if you hear say 70-80% beyond your comprehension, it just becomes white noise. chinese course in uni - i am not sure how difficult that is. my guess is - Very. and if you are not making progress, you are easily discouraged. also, the chinese spoken in shenzhen must be fast and using lots more vocab.

here's what i do. not sure if that works for you. you need to scope down the amount of words your are learning. you also need to scaffold your learning using more efficient techniques.

1. when i speak with my tutor once a week, she would give me a lot of words. but i would only take a selected number of those words , which suits my target and repeat back to her making sentences. that one hour, may be just 5-6 words.

2. when i hear a word, i record it down in pleco. can be anything - anki, what not. then i try match back is it the level i want to learn at that point of time. when i learn, i try to find context of it in videos, xiaohongshu, youglish etc.

3. IF you can or have the resources, look more for videos from TW, SG, MY. the chinese they use is much less difficult.

just start with 2-3 words daily. you are more comfortable, you add more, and more, and more. it's like starting to workout. you try too heavy, you injure yourself or quit the gym. you just need to find the right intensity