I’ve been in China for just over 24 hours and I wanted to jot down my thoughts so far. I had a loooong journey from the US. I was in transit for over 24 hours and I only slept two or three hours over the course of those hours. While I was en route, I…
Category: Academics
A lot has happened since I last wrote a blog post. It’s been a really great two months, but I thought it was about time I caught up on the blog about what I’ve been up to and upcoming adventures.After leaving Switzerland, which is where I last left off on this blog, I went back…
I think I’ve written before about how I study at university, but I wanted to go in depth about my system for studying Chinese characters, because I’ve been really enjoying it and I think it’s been working really well. I kind of figured out this system through trial and error, so there is kind of…
After a long semester (read more here), I thought it’d be nice to take a break. I made some money from my jobs, and I knew I needed a break before studying for final exams, so I looked for cheap flights. Barcelona fit the bill at the cheapest flight (that didn’t go to Poland), a…
At the beginning of this year, I was reflecting on where I wanted to go with language learning. I decided I didn’t want to take on any new languages and I wanted to focus on the ones I’ve already started. That’s not at all how this year turned out. At the end of 2014, I…
This whole summer I told myself I would review everything I learned in my first year of Chinese classes and that I would get ahead so coming back after summer wouldn’t be hard. I never managed get myself to open a book about Chinese, so I was really nervous about coming back to it. I…
One of the many festivals that comes to Edinburgh in August is the International Book Festival. The only event I got to go to was a talk by David Crystal. He was talking about his two latest books, one of which talked about dialects, and the other accents (which he co-wrote with his son). I…
Today I’m really excited to have my first guest post on this blog! My friend James, who went with me on my recent trip to Finland had some thoughts about bilingualism, so I asked him to write about it for my blog and he wrote a lovely reflection on his experience in Finland. It’s weird…
Back in February, I made a video of my presentation for my last Chinese oral exam (watch here), and I decided to do that again. This is my presentation for the oral component of my final exam for Chinese 1. I’m fairly content with my progress, but I wish we had learned a little more….
I read mostly non-fiction books in my own time, and most of them are language-learning or linguistics books, so I was thinking about writing about the ones I read. I should come up with a catchy name for this series, but first we’ll see if I actually get around to making a second post. The…