def Arne.blog

It’s been almost six months since I’ve started learning mandarin Chinese. I’m really surprised at how well it’s going. When I was in my last year of high school I was already considering sinology as a carreer option, but after getting my audio engineering diploma I chose computer science. I didn’t have much background in languages, always been more oriented towards mathematics and science, so it seemed the more reasonable choice. Now I have the chance to combine those two interests, and I’m always happy when I’m able to do that. My mind tends to wander in all possible (and impossible) directions if it gets the chance to, so fusing some of my very different interests is a nice way to keep the overall complexity down.

Last week while checking out the various links at the “Learning Chinese on-line page I stumbled upon ChinesePod. I just love this site. It’s a podcast made almost daily from Shanghai with simple chinese dialogues which are than explained in english. The membership which gives you access to transcriptions of the dialogues plus some other nifty features is quite expensive, but the pods itself are free to download, and you can get a free registration for one week, enough time to save a gazillion pdf’s to your hard drive.

Everybody said I was crazy taking up chinese, ’cause if I flunk, which many do, I don’t get my CS diploma. So I’ve been studing like hell, but have been neglecting my thesis, and no thesis, no shiny paper with my name on it. So time to get busy on that thesis and with a little luck I’ll have it finished by august.

Luckily Flowability is working out great. Three more weeks to go, and we got beautiful posters and flyers being hung around flandres. This is probably the main reason I’m a bit behind on the thesis and so, but it’s worth it. Nothing beats organising your own festival.

Technorati Tags: Flowability, Mandarin, Thesis, Studying, Music