First Post

Hello, dear classmates, dear teacher, and anyone who reads this blog!

Since there are students in our class that wanted to share our discussion in public (it was not me!), but we cannot make our mailing list public because of privacy concerns, I have created this blog for those who want to share things with the public.

To make the things interesting for the reader, I suggest to start from sharing our motivation.

So, this entry will be about my own motivation for learning Chinese language. I suggest you posting here your entry about your motivation, so we can all enjoy understanding each other better, as well as making the reading more interesting. (Later we could write about our studies - for example, studying methods that we use, and all the fun that we have in more detail.)

Anyway, what is my motivation for learning Chinese? Well, I have many reasons for learning Chinese, including the reason that my fiancee is a Chinese! Other main reasons are self-improvement, communication and self-improvement.

Self-improvement: By learning many new characters it is possible to improve memory for new words, in a sense that knowing thousands of characters, most words become very short (mostly composed only of 2 characters, according to http://www.rosettaproject.org "In modern Mandarin, the average length of a word has been shown to be almost exactly two syllables.") and easy to learn compared with long alphabetical words (which statistically have about 5 characters).

Communication: I had many Chinese classmates when I was abroad as an exchange student, and I was in this situation, when I felt that I want to understand what they speak, because I am keen in participating in any forum that looks interesting!

Self-improvement: Most Europeans learn to read pronuncing sounds letter-by-letter at the schools, and the habit to pronunce words silently in one's head while reading a text (which slows down the reading speed considerbly!) is very hard to overcome. I also have this bad habit, which I think learning Chinese text visually will help to overcome, and I can read much faster.

Anyhow, the main reasons is that my fiancee is a Chinese!

By learning Chinese language I want to make a surprise for her, and to make it easier for us to be together. :-)

From now on, I will be writing about what I have learned, what new words understood, what try forming new sentences, learning to write Chinese with my PC, and other interesting things I'll come accross.