Finnish parliamentary election a slight disappointment
Photo by Daniel Mohr Finland had the parliamentary election a week ago and it have been all over the news. I don’t mean just national papers, but also abroad. The third biggest party is now the True Finns and even I am truly a Finnish person, I can’t agree with some of the party’s values. I believe in multicultural and tolerant Finland. From what I have read True Finns are too conservative and narrow-minded for me. They want strict limits on humanitarian immigration and object gender-neutral marriage. Last Monday, just after counting the votes, my Facebook News Feed was full of status updates from my friends who also weren’t too…
Trying to grade my Chinese
One of my favourite blogs Confused LaoWai wrote about his Chinese proficiency according to Lingomi’s PRG scorecard for Mandarin Chinese. Looks like Neil is doing very well! Even though my Chinese isn’t quite there yet and it’s hard to rate one’s own progress, I wanted to try too. Writing Characters I have learned about 500 characters with Skritter now, but maybe have forgotten something and haven’t added something I already know. Maybe my writing by hand is somewhere between level 3 (250 characters) and level 4 (500). With computer I think my level is 4. Reading Characters I have read Graded Chinese Reader 1 with 2000 characters and started book…
Why did I come to Cantonese Guangzhou to study Mandarin Chinese?
Update from 2019: I’ve now been living in China for 9 years. I started teaching Chinese in 2014 and in 2017 I opened my own language center called Expat Chinese. We Specialize in teaching Chinese the Western way. If you are interested in learning Chinese, check out our website: http://expatchinese.com Many foreigners don’t like Guangzhou. Many Chinese learners think there is no point to study Mandarin Chinese in Cantonese Guangzhou. It does make more sense to study Cantonese in Guangzhou (which I’m doing by the way), but Guangzhou isn’t a bad city to study Mandarin either. I can answer in a simple way that in the first place I came…