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...!