All posts tagged: chinese

You can speak Chinese?

If you already don’t know by now, I have learned Chinese back when I studied in China. But let’s get real here; At that time, my main goal wasn’t really to learn Chinese. I went there to get an experience and that’s exactly what I got. Yeah of course “I learned Chinese”, but it wasn’t till I got to Taiwan where I would say my Chinese has massively improved. I can speak sentences fluidly without stopping, give directions-ish, have conversations (to some extent), order food, open a bank account, communicate to delivery guys on the phone (while my mind goes blank), listen to stories-ish, all in Chinese. But how? From Roommates to Close Friends The first apartment I lived in was a sharehouse, with a mix of both foreigners and Taiwanese people. But let me just say, most of the people that lived there were weird and unsocial, which made no sense or purpose of living in a shared house but… There were these two people I befriended that helped me improve and learn many everyday words and …

9 Months Of Studying Chinese in Review

Studying at one of the most prestigious universities in Taiwan, NTNU aka National Taiwan Normal University helped me level my Chinese up to a higher degree. I had the opportunity to learn Chinese from well-taught and talented Chinese teachers from September 2018 till May 2019 and in turn, truly improved and understood the true meaning of struggle as an adult living abroad in a foreign country where English isn’t commonly spoken. I have shared my first impressions of the school itself here, but now that I have fully finished and exhausted what the program has to offer, I share with you today more details. Let’s just get right into it.  First Semester This semester was a great starting point in getting back into learning Chinese. Because I have studied it before, getting back into it was a bit of a hurdle. For one, I have never learned traditional characters, so I had to pretty much retrain my brain to read and WRITE (omg WRITE) traditional characters. Compared to simplified characters, traditional characters have many more strokes. …