My arrival to Shanghai & plans for the next four months

China. Shanghai for four and half months.

Is it even allowed to post on a blog after a hiatus of five years (ironically, it’s exactly five years today)?  I am not sure, but indulge me.

Five years ago, I announced I’m gonna do a Chinese mission. The execution of this one was very different from my previous language missions. Reasons? COVID, finances and trying to do several things at once. I studied at home while focusing on my career as well. I commuted to Vienna every day for work, spending four hours daily travelling, which often left me exhausted. On the top of that, in those five years, I unsuccessfully tried to kickstart two startups and one less “startupy” company. I was co-organizing a bi-weekly IT meetup. There is no way around the fact that for a European, Chinese requires more hours put in than let’s say, Spanish (especially if you have prior experience with other romance languages, which was my case). And because I didn’t set any deadlines for myself, I learned only now and then. I didn’t touch Chinese for about four years of those five. Well, at least I know I’m not that immune to the student syndrome as I thought. Being thrown in the water is definitely a good motivator to learn to swim and I am currently trying to make use of that.

Of course, COVID was another reason. Spring 2023 is the first semester China is opening up. I also got a full remote job now, which helps a bit. I came to Shanghai on the 9th of February 2023 and will stay till July. I enrolled in one-semester course at Fudan University.

What level is my Chinese now? I am almost an absolute beginner. I know tens of most common characters, but can’t make a conversation and don’t understand what people are saying. I believe it is possible to rapidly progress in Chinese, given enough effort and time, but four and half months are not enough to reach fluency, especially if one has to work full-time. So my goal is to progress as much as possible so that I can continue learning back home.

Here, a video of me speaking so that you know what I mean. The mistakes I made are marked and kept in on purpose. Make sure to turn on the subtitles.

Head kept down and ready to work. Let the fun begin.

Chinese mission

As promised—an entry to my new language adventure. I am going to learn Mandarin Chinese. It has always been one of the languages that I wanted to learn. If you are curious about the details, check out the video below.

End of my French Mission

I am writing this post from Hamburg again. Do you want to know how my French mission ended up? Watch the video ;) (French and English subtitles available)

France was an interesting experience. New friendships, some cultural shocks, a bunch of places checked on my "to visit" list. Hard beginnings that turned into another place where I feel at home. Many stories to tell and I will tell them when I meet you (yes you!). I am happy I went there and I left with precious memories. So many people I miss (you guys know who I am talking about :) ).

By the way, I did not say goodbye to la francophonie altogether, I keep reading books (also) in French, my best mate here in Hamburg is from Paris, so there is no way this "mission end" would be a total break up with the French language. Aaand, traditionally, here is a map of the countries in which I can, after the last year, make myself understood.

French-speaking world

Au revoir ! ;)

Video: Me Speaking Spanish

So here it is, my first short and embarassing video in Spanish. Sorry for the bad quality, my webcam was really trying her best. There are subtitles in English and Spanish, My mistakes are marked in the Spanish subtitles with brackets "[]".

End of my Portuguese Mission

I realized I don't have a video in Portuguese, so let me speak about it like this (Subtitles in Portuguese and English available):

And if I think I would pass C1? With little preparation for the test, yes, I am confident. I did this test for myself: http://www.ilearnportuguese.com/index.php/en/test-your-portuguese and I got right 53/60. Reading is ok, I read couple of books. But I would still have to practice writing, speaking and listening more. I am pretty confident when it comes to vocabulary, but the Portuguese pronunciation is sometimes so hard to decode, that after one year of studying Portuguese and one month studying Spanish, I understand both at the same level (when listening).

I am happy though how significantly I improved. I can sustain a discussion about such things as politics and corruption. And thus I managed to "unlock" theses countries as my potential home, or at least, a very pleasant touristic destination:

Lusofoníc World

Keep in touch Portuguese, our relationship isn't over yet.

Good bye Atlantic. I'll see you again!

DE Video 2

Happy New Year to everybody, whom I did not have the opportunity to meet and reads these lines. The second video of the German mission is out. Have fun :)

DE Video 1

One week ago, we had a Christmas party. My colleagues and me were invited by our bosses to a stand up comedy club. We had a nice dinner and then the show started. There were 5 comedians and I understood like 70 % of what they were saying (except for one annoying guy from Berlin who read really fast some story from a paper). But even though I got the point, my brain, being busy recognizing the words, kind of had no time also for laughter :) But it was a really nice exercise. Then we drank and spoke until late. A really nice evening.

However, the main point of this post is my first German video. I made it 4 weeks ago, but because of, first lack of internet connection and then laziness, I am uploading it now. It was made really spontaneously, without any preparation whatsoever. I dare say my speaking abilities got better in the meantime. So enjoy.

My Progress in Romanian After a Month + Video

So it is more than a month. If I am serious with my C2 goal at the end of summer, there should be already some progress visible. I have not mentioned it before, but a huge inspiration for this blog was the blog of Benny, the Irish Polyglot: http://www.fluentin3months.com/. One of his advices for language learners is to make videos. So I made one. I know I did not post a video in the beginning of my trip, so you cannot really compare, but still, here you are. A video of me speaking Romanian:

I can hear how many mistakes I made. Mistakes are good, because I can learn from them. There are English and Romanian subtitles available. In Romanian subtitles, some of the mistakes are pointed out.

In what state was my Romanian one month ago and how is it now? Before, I would describe my level as being able to make myself understood. I had problems with grammar (personal pronouns in dative and accusative, for example), plurals. My vocabulary was not something fancy either. The area in which I improved after this month is vocabulary. On the other hand, I did not advance in grammar almost at all. I did not put much time into it. There are things like Romanian imperfect or past conditional that I want to get better at.

There is also a big difference in the quality of my speech, depending on if I speak in the aquapark, or talk to somebody above a beer. In the park, there is a loud music and if somebody jumps at me and starts speaking Romanian with a strong Italian accent, it is hard to catch everything at the first time. On the other hand, if I can speak for longer intervals of time, in a dialogue, my Romanian sounds much better. I go into a more advanced vocabulary and there I get a little stuck, but it is still better than exchanging a few sentences over the loud music in the park.

I know I need a bigger vocabulary, so that I can catch more keywords when listening to somebody, which will, in turn, lead to less requests to repeat the sentence for me. So I read and look up words I do not know. I feel that I am missing longer dialogues, as the work in the park takes a lot of my time and I have to decide between reading, revising the vocabulary, or going to talk to somebody. And I think that watching more TV in Romanian, or listening radio in Romanian would help. I will try to find a balance between these sources of language training.

And at the end, a song, which I usually put in the beginning, but now I put there my video. This lyrics of this song I learned by heart. Another excellent way of learning vocab. But more about that in one of my next posts.