The winter has arrived in Linköping and has brought snowfall and icy roads, and the morning bike rides to the University become very interesting in terms of not slipping. The days are getting very much darker as well; after 5 PM total darkness resides. Only recently I got my bike lights fixed after the front light was stolen outside the central station, so until now I had to have an extra lookout for those sneaky cops in hoping to avoid paying hefty fines. Rumor has it that the police in Linköping is very strict about the lights and fine you several hundred SEK for anything that is missing.

In school the Calculus I course has been progressing fast. We are finished with the limits of functions and are now focusing on derivatives. I have now put up a goal to finish all the extra assignments in addition to the compulsory to improve my skills and get more involved in the complicated math. The other math course, Linear Algebra, is more fun than the calculus especially since I am making such good progress in that course. Linear transformations is a field of the algebra that I actually have found quite easy, and for the first time I have today finished the daily compulsory assignments even before the lesson was over.

Now for the fun!
The last months I have wanted to start learning a new language. My German skills have improved enough for me to start focusing on something new, but I was not sure on what. The candidates have been either to improve my junior high French, or to learn Russian, Chinese or Japanese from scratch. I was studying math with a few friends of mine this Sunday. When we got all fed up with vectors and derivates we sat down at a coffeeshop and talked about languages. In my class everybody studies some kind of language in addition to their M.Sc. studies, so this is a very common topic among us.

We talked a while about China and its language and the possibilities, and during that time I became sure that if I ever wanted to learn a new language, Mandarin would be the way to go. The currently expansive state of China and the vast amount of people speaking the language, this decision felt more and more right. Coming home, I went online and started the path towards fluency

Several people in my class study Mandarin as their profile language and they have been instructing me all week. The four tones, pinyin, stroke order and pronunciation rules, over and over again. I bought a small study book in English to get a good method of learning. Now I can say and write 你好 and 我喜欢 中国菜, among other things.

What seems really easy is the grammar. Being an advanced German student, it relieves me to know that you just put words on top of each other without having to care about declinations and verb forms. The “only” thing that appears difficult is the fact that you need to learn a few thousand characters. Shoudn’t be any problem at all.

To be honest I have no real idea of what I have gotten into yet, I’ll see how much I’ll manage to learn.

再见!

EDIT: Seems like if you are running Internet Explorer or Windows, you most likely only see the boxes instead of the Chinese signs I wrote in the above post.