Friday, February 29, 2008

Mandarin Level 3 -here we go!

Oh the memories.. back at level 1 my class looked like this...

Yey yey yey!

I’m glad to tell you that A. I’ve found a great tutor, and B. I made it into Mandarin Level 3 at my new university! Fair enough, I mean, I have already done level 2 at old uni, however, u never know if the universities have the same level. And you do need to take a placement test (consisting of one reading&writing part and one speaking part) if you're a new student.

Even though I was a complete mess at the written test, I managed to convince the two Chinese women who interviewed me as part of the speaking test that I can manage the level 3 standard. (I’m the same in every language I suppose: bad at spelling but good at speaking).

The first thing I did when I got my new level 3 books was to see how hard the texts were, meaning: how many characters I didn’t know. And it wasn’t too bad. Sure, about 50% are new ones but it feels soooooooooo nice that I at least now read a little bit better. When I started doing level 2 (I had then had an 11 months break since I did level 1) I was a complete mess.

I suppose one reason why my Chinese has improved is because I (during level 2) was in a class that consisted of only Korean and Japanese students. Seeing that most of them already know a lot of characters, they were almost fluent in reading and writing and that triggered me to study like a mad woman in order to keep up. A good tip for anyone who wants to learn Chinese is to study together with other Asians. It'll definitely speed up your learning!

1 comment:

Lullun said...

Jag tycker du är så flitig. Och här klagar jag över att jag måste lära mig danska (som jag väl kan säga mig ha avklarat mer eller mindre nu) och grönländska. Grönländskan är iofs svår (närmast besläktad med mongoliska...), men de använder i alla fall vårt gamla hederliga alfabet. Det gör en stor skillnad ändå!
Stå på dig! Håller tummarna för dig och nivå 3! :-)