Phil's Worldwide travel in 2023/2024

Starting week 2 intensive Mandarin. Although I am still plowing away at memorizing words and characters, I am becoming more familiar with more complex words, they are starting to roll off the tongue. Like Bianlishandian - which is convenience store. Today is Tuesday and I did my second group class. I have decided to go back to group classes when week, although it is a lot more intensive, I think this makes sense until I can get to a more conversational level.  There are loads of apps, write now I am working with Pleco (an amazing dictionary), Skritter, a great about for learning characters, Chinese Class 101 -  a good course to supplement my in classroom learning. I also did my first language exchange from someone I met in one of the language exchange events. Most days there are opportunities to practice Mandarin but with limited words. When learning Mandarin, most people outside of Taiwan will learn Pinyin, it uses the English alphabet to guide pronunciation, and then will have tones

 Today is Friday April 26th, and I have finished my first week! It's been tough but my experience with learning Spanish and beginner Japanese has definitely been helpful. I actually find quite a few similarities between Mandarin and Japanese which makes the grammar a lot easier to accept. For example, the idea of something existing when wanting to ask someone if they carry or have it, i.e. instead of "do you guys have a washroom" they would say "does a washroom exist". I have been pretty sick the whole week other than today which did make things rough, waking up at strange hours, unable to sleep, coughing throughout class. However, I also had nothing to do but study which is good. My studying consists of: 1. vocab building, I have a great app (Pleco) which allows me to do flashcards in all sorts of fashion.  2. Pronunciation,  listen and repeat exercises, watching youtube videos on how to pronounce. 3. Listening, an app that says a word and you have to guess its

Welcome to Taipei. I'm staying in Xinyi, a pretty popping area (this was recommended by a friend JY who loves Taipei). My airbnb is ok but I have to walk up stairs to the bed and the ceiling low. I did get sick as I was leaving Japan which was almost certainly from this women in my class that was coughing, sneezing and claiming how sick her kids was... grrrr I have an anytime fitness near me which is great and I plan on continuing with early morning workouts. Like Japan, convenient stores in Taiwan are pretty magical and contain everything. I did sign up for a night market food tour which was pretty good, nothing blew me away but I also didn't have their pork dishes.  Despite feeling pretty sick, I showed up for class. I am at ShuoHao Language center. The school itself was not very impressive inside, especially compared to Coto where I was taking lessons in Japan. Like a lot of schools in South America, this teacher was outsourced, which I don't like because in that case th

Over the last week I have been enjoying Japanese classes at Coto. Initially it was a bit difficult because my reading and writing ability is quite limited, I never really paid attention to reading Kanji (the Japanese characters borrowed from China). However, having started it I see why it can give you a much deeper understanding. I was under the impression that most of my classmates started Japanese a few months ago, but now I find out some of them have been living in japan for 5 years, or have been taking lessons for many years... so I can't really understand why they are at such a low level still. However, I feel I am one of the only students actually studying after class. Although we have 8 people in the class, class would usually be around 3-5 people, high no show rate which means more attention. The class starts with new Kanji characters, reviewing new vocab, a mini quiz we do as a group, and then learning new grammar concepts (my fav part). I was already pretty familiar with

So far my Japan trip has been going amazingly. With so much planning, I feel there was mainly only a few hiccups. I have felt as though I have explored so much, but still left so much to see or do. The trip definitely prioritized food and doing stuff. I am now at Coto Japanese school studying Japanese, I am beginner 1 level 3. I feel like we are able to have basic conversation but enough to make the class a fun and conversational. Teachers seem a bit limited with English but it also forces us to use more Japanese to ask questions. The school is beautiful with as much roasted tea as a I want, but the class size was up to 8 one day, but it seems people miss often, today we had 3 people... I am family with most of the grammar, but I am way behind on the Kanji. I have avoided learning this as I was worried it would slow down my speaking, but now the time has come. It is extremely logical and kinda fun, but I suspect it takes a bit before it's really helping. However, as I am going to T