2 months of study

They say winter is coming, but I haven't seen signs of it yet!

Progress

After two months of study, I do know more Chinese than I did before I started (of course..). It's not much, but what should I expect? Every week I find my self saying a new Chinese phrase, and now and then new words suddenly stick to my mind. I try to speak simple Chinese to my Taiwanese friends, and they give me constructive feedback, making me improve little by little.

When I walk to bus or subway, I often meet a security guard on my way. Occasionally we have a little conversation together, and every time we get to know eachother a little bit more. We only speak Chinese.

I've studied more than 200 characters, and I often recognize them on streetsigns, brochures and more. Because the characters can form a different meaning when put in pairs, it's not always easy to understand them even though I recognize them individually. But it's getting better ;) When we went to a concert last friday, I was able to locate the position in the lyrics, and that's for sure something I couldn't do last summer!

Pictures from last week

This is in a shop for calligraphy equipment.
The pencils were made with different kind of hair, like hair from inside the cows ear (!).

We usually use this board for writing Chinese characters,
but this day we were told to draw  what's on our mind, and then use it as subject for conversation.

Our teacher explaining some grammar, I think I understand... some of it... :p

Todays trip to Yangminshan. Because of bad weather in the mountain,
we didn't do much more than eating breakfast and taking the public transportation together.
Nice people though!

Bus heading for the mountain :)

8th week abroad

Well, as I wrote in my last post, I was frustrated in the beginning  of this week. My frustration is like a rollercoaster though, and thursday evening it turned for the better again. I had went to my weekly private class, and there I asked my teacher one of the questions that started this weeks frustration. The thing is that in Chinese, a verb usually consists of a verb and an object. (Please be aware I might not be 100% correct on this, but let me give it a try). If you want to describe an action, like how I'm driving, the Chinese verb for driving is "drive car". In English you could say "You drive slowly", now in Chinese I think you could say "你的車，開得很慢", which directly translated becomes something like "Your car, drive slow". Even though it's ok to say it like this in many occasions, it's not a rule without exceptions. There's exceptions for "ride horse", or "fish fish" (fishing) etc, because horse and fish are living creatures, and also with "dive water" (diving), "slide ice" iceskating), because the objects; water and ice, are to general.. And finally, after all, this might not be a common way of describing the action at all.. but what do I know.. I'm still not 100% sure about this grammar, but the private class on thursdays really helps a lot.

Saturday we had a party in our appartment. Several Norwegians came together to talk, eat dinner and listen to a speach by a man from The Norwegian Church Abroad (Seamans Church). After doing preparations all saturday morning, we enjoyed the evening in a more or less Norwegian atmosphere.

Today I've tried to study next weeks chapter (chapter 8), with all it's words and grammar. Tomorrow we'll see if I've prepared enough, or if I'll have another round of frustration :)

oh.. almost forgot pictures...

This is my class, in the karaoke room, prepared for a couple of Chinese songs.
Teacher to the left.

There's always something to balance.. :)

Facial change

Monday night I decided to watch Felix Baumgartners jump live. He jumped in the middle of the night, around 2:30am Taiwan time, and now I really regret staying up that late.. I was so tired in class Monday, and we started a new chapter with new words, characters and some difficult grammar. I was really tired and frustrated after school, so I went strait to my bed and slept for a couple of hours. I guess I learned a lesson I should have learned already, not to watch live streams in the middle of the night ;) Anyway, as a break in my homework that evening, I shaved my beard. My dad helped me taking some pictures, and we made the animation you see below. Then I went to bed earlier to be prepared for a fresh start Tuesday morning. 

Today's class was fun. I was awake and we had an auction and bought stuff from our teacher with fake money. We also got to see our mid-term exam results, and I'd actually done better than I expected :) It also felt good to walk around campus without beard. Oh Happy day!

7 weeks, halfway through first first term

Tuesday - They needed a teacher at a junior highschool, so I volountered. We played some games to get to know eachother, and then I introduced myself, and they asked me questions about me and Norway. It was fun and challenging, and even though it was an English-class, I got to practise my 中文 (Chinese) a little bit as well. Like when one of the pupils asked me if I could speak some Chinese, and spoke a little. It wasn't perfect, so they corrected some of my tones before we moved on ;)

Wednesday - October 10th, National holiday! We didn't have class, so I got up late in the morning. Then I walked to a small restaurant and bought breakfast. The empolyees at this restaurant is so nice, so I've already been there a couple of times. They serve good food and let me practise my Chinese with them (because they don't speak English ;)) This time I told them stuff like my age and that I had family in both Norway and Taiwan. Simple stuff, but still, I am able to speak more and more Chinese everytime I go there. Who knows what subject we'll talk about next time..? It depends on our Chinese text-book I guess. After breakfast I tried to prepare for the mid-term exam. I tested my self and found out I could write 62% of all the characters we've learned so far perfectly. I'd forgotten some completely, and some of them I did with mistakes. I made myself flashcards and practised the ones I'd forgotten.

Spongebob! I might send this hat to my nephue. I hope he likes it!

Thursday - Mid-term exam, written test!
Our written mid-term exam wasn't too difficult. It was actually easier than I expected. We needed to read sentences and find out if the grammar was correct or not, then answer some questions. Later we read some other simple sentences and put tone-marks above the character. I did a few mistakes here, but nothing too serious. One other task was to look at some graphics and put in the correct measure word. Luckily all the measure words were written just above, so if it was to words we didn't know for sure we could make a guess (but this time I knew them all :)) I scored more than 94 points out of 100.

Friday - Mid-term exam, oral test
I still find listening as the most difficult part of Chinese-learning. Our teacher said some words, and we needed to check the correct one in our test-papers. Then we had prepared a speach and spoke in front of the class for 4 minutes. I had prepared more than 4 minutes of speach, but I accidentaly forgot to say some of it =/ In the end we should "buy" something from the teacher, like food or clothing, and of course use our Chinese. When everything was over I didn't feel I did very well, but I'm looking forward to get the results next week. The result of the mid-term exam will count 20% of our final score this term.

After the exam we went to a pineapple cake factory and made our own cakes. The factory also had a museum with some cake-culture history, like how they did Chinese weddings in the past, and how the cake was a part of this tradition.

Later on I went to a Swedish restaurant together with some Swedish friends of mine. It was expensive compared to regular Taiwan food, but it was a nice place and we had a lot of fun. Afterwards we went to a cool nightclub, a fancy club with a lot of people. The entrance fee was 300NT, and that included two bottles of beer. When I later wanted some water they wanted me to pay 150NT.. Well, I said no and bought it at 7Eleven for one tenth of the prize. That night I took a taxi back home. It wasn't easy to explain to the taxidriver where I wanted to go, but I made it in the end and got home safely.


Sunday I went to a place called Wulai together with some Taiwanese friends. We had dinner together and took a cable car up in the mountainside. The weather was nice and we had a lot of fun. Pictures below :)

Arrived the waterfall

The parrot said something... Maybe the Chinese version of Polly wants cracker?

This shop sold souvenirs and aboriginal rice-beer.
They collected recomondations in diffrerent languages, so I wrote one in Norwegian! :)

At the endstation of the cablecar

6th week in 台灣

大家好！
我喜歡台灣，可是我想念挪威！

Hello everyone!
I like Taiwan, but I miss Norway

This has been an interesting week. After I paid for the winterterm last friday, I recieved my enrollment certificate this monday. I was told I now had everything I needed to extend my ARC. Then I went to the imigration office to apply for ARC-extension. When I finally got to the service encounter, they told me I couldn't apply yet, and that I should come back after October 30th (1 month prior to my ARC expire date). I guess they wanted to see more than one third of my attendance record, but I'm a little bit disappointed anyway, as I expected to get it extended.

Japanese restaurant this week

Tuesday I went with some friends to a Japanese restaurant at lunchtime. We had to wait outside for 15-20 minutes, as all the tables were taken. It was so hot in the sun, but the waitress came outside to serve us icetea while we waited. When we finally got in to the restaurant we sat down and had a nice time with interesting dishes. There's so many places to eat in Taiwan, and if you want you can try something new every day, every meal.
In the evening the NCCU's magic club presented a magicshow at campus. A great performance with cardtricks, pigeons and more..

View from a Taiwanese bus :)

 I try to use some Chinese everyday, but it's not always easy as my vocabulary is very limited.. Every now and then I learn some new words outside class, and one of this weeks new words is "zui4", which I learned in the private class on thursday. It means "most", as in "what do you like most about Taiwan". 你最喜歡台灣的東西？ I've actually used it several times already ^^

Last friday every scholarship recipients in Taiwan (ministry of education-scholarships) where invited to a welcome party. There were speaches held by the ministry of education, diplomats and prior scholarship recipients. They told us about the scholarship, their experiences in Taiwan, and gave us their advices for our stay in the country. What to see and what to do. We got served a variety of Taiwanese food, dessert, snacks and drinks. Bubble tea were placed on every table for us to enjoy. The recipients from each country got together and got to know eachother and exchange experiences so far. I talked to other beginner-students from other universities, and some of them told me they where only 4 students in their class and that they had already reached lesson 9 in our textbook. We are 9 students in my class, and we've just finished chapter 5. If this is a good or bad thing I'm not sure. We might spend more time on each lesson and so learn the content even better, but we might as well progress slowly because we are more than twice as many in class.. I'm afraid my language center had more applicants than they expected, and therefore put more students together in every class.

This is the appartment building where I live now, 21st floor and a nice view :)

October 10th is a national holiday, so there's no class. There will be some happenings in Taipei during the day which would be fun to see. The problem is that we have mid-term exam the day after, so I guess I'll rather stay home or at the library to study. After the exam I plan to explore some of the available cinemas in Taipei, and hopefully find a good movie. Friday afternoon our class plan to go to a mooncake-factory, and there we'll try make some moon cake ourself. Looking forward to another challenging and fun week.