One year

Me and my girlfriend went to a concert. I wonder if they though:
"Hmm, where to hold this concert... let's occupy the road!"

Wow, one year away from home (except from a couple of weeks in March). My Chinese is still not perfect, but there's no doubt it has improved a lot. The amount of time spent on practising, reviewing homework and so on varies from time to time, but the time is usually spent on something good. The last weeks I've spent a lot of time with my girlfriend, and even though we do speak a lot of English together, she still teaches me a lot of Chinese, Taiwanese and Taiwanese culture. When I compare to Norway, the difference in culture is big. I've mentioned it before, but every now and then when I walk the streets and meet people, I get reminded of it again and agin. Sometimes I try to adapt, but quite often I just do things the way I'm used to. People in Taiwan are generally speaking very careful. It's often heavy rain on the island, but today we were also told there would be no classes due to the rain. Nothing wrong about that, and I believe there is good reasons for this carefulness if you look at history and earlier experiences with bad weather. Edit: A few hours after they announced school is closed, it's not even raining anymore. I see why you should avoid driving in the mountains during heavy rain, but what is the danger in a city? If you can explain this to me, this fear of rain, please leave a comment.

Mudslides is one of the reasons why offices and schools close during heavy rain. (thehindu.com)

Nice lady repaired my pants in no-time, 50NTD

A few someone came to see Metallica.. ;)

Last week I suddenly discovered a hole in my pants. Luckily, the same day I'd noticed a place where they repaired clothes. So I went there and the lady fixed my pants in no-time, she also lended me a towel because of the heavy rain outside. Things like this makes me aware of how my Chinese has improved during the year. I would never dare to go to a place like this and try to explain my problem in Chinese half a year ago.

When my friend did a stopover in Taipei last week, I decided to go with him to Singapore and see Metallica. A cool experience, and after approximately 24 hours I was back in Taiwan. (Due to no taxies, I was a little nervous about making it to the airport after the concert, but we made it..!)

Where I have Taiwanese-class and where I usually do homework. Why? #1: It has air condition :D

Next week is final exams, and then it's two weeks of vacation. Next term I'll start in E-class, and during October we'll begin book number 4 out of a total of 5 books.

Halfway through 4th term!

To learn Chinese is really interesting. After starting the third book in june, the new vocabulary every week has increased a lot, usually between 40 and 50 if I'm not wrong.. Although it might seem impossible to remember this amount of new vocabulary and characters every week, the actual new characters are usually less than or around 20, same as in the first and second book. Moreover, because the characters is usually put together in different kinds of logical ways, with radicals, pictographs, similar sounds and so on, I feel it becomes easier and easier to remember them. I recall when I started to learn Chinese one year ago, I had to repeat the characters like 15 times or so, while I now usually only repeats them three or four times before I remember them. Of course some will be forgotten the next day or next week, however I remember more and more in less and less amount of time, and characters that I struggled to remember a long time ago, suddenly sticks to mind.

I just finished mid-term exam, and after preparing by reviewing characters from the last four chapters, it went quite well on the test. We have started chapter eight of the third book, and will finish chapter twelve in the beginning of September.

Went to this concert a couple of weeks ago, with a great singer and band.
Songs mostly in Taiwanese, and a good ambience.

Taiwanese

A couple of weeks into this term, I started to learn Taiwanese twice every week. A lot of people speak the language in Taiwan, and especially in the south. Taiwanese use sounds that you don't find in Chinese, and the romanization of the sounds is not as standardised as pinyin for Chinese. The language has seven or eight tones, depending on how you see it, and most of the words will be spoken with two different tones and might also have several slightly different pronunciations. When reading the romanization of Taiwanese, the letters and symbols used for tones might be the same as in pinyin for Chinese, but they are to be read and pronounced in a different way. It's hard, it's difficult, but it's amazing to experience how the brain can learn languages and different systems of romanizations and stuff.. My Taiwanese improves slowly, very slowly, but it's improving.

Close to one year

It's August, again. August 25th last year was my arrival in Taiwan. I couldn't speak any Chinese, and I could hardly imagine it was possible to learn such a language. Time proves it's possible, and time flies.

So long...!