Hello, こんばんは, 你好, welcome to the first post of my new blog! In this blog I will discuss interesting things that have come up in my life (inside and outside of university), submit art and writing, and also post my opinions to articles or pieces that catch my interest.
So, in short, I’m a 19 year old second year university student living on his own in Melbourne.
It may seem silly and counter-productive to start a blog before my university examinations (oh, my god, halp!), but my life has been a bit of a wreck lately and I need something besides university to work on. Something that will motivate my ass into gear.
So, basically, being a university student, this is the very definition of my life at the moment (it could also be defined in pasta and toast, and fumbling through my dalek money bank to find coins to do my laundry).
Oh, and I’m fairly certain in a weeks time, this will be me (if I actually put my head down and studied NOW – then it won’t be as bad as me one time leaving that 2,000 word essay on Chinese and Japanese politeness to the last 6 hours)
But anyway, lately I’ve been starting to teach myself Mandarin outside of my university subjects. I thought I would start learning the language because I have friends at university who speak it, and also, I want to teach English in China some time in the future. So I’ve purchased the textbooks.
(Pictures make my blog posts look bigger – yaayeeee #hack)
If anyone has used these textbooks before, I’d like to know their opinion on them. But either way, I have friends who can help me through any errors anyway, and the fact that I accidentally sneezed over one of the pages (imeanwot) when I was studying last week certainly won’t make these refundable.
But so far, I’ve found the red books (New Practical Chinese Reader) good for questions, but bad for explaining grammar and vocabulary, but the blue book makes up for that, and has a cute handy phonetics section at the start (if you know your IPA).
Buying classics at my university campus bookstore is also a good thing – because they’re always so cheap! I mean, I go to the bookstore at my university lots to browse the interesting stuff, such as a card game where you can become some Marijuana drug lord.
But anyway, I ended up getting this book:
I have heard that this book is a good read for political theory, and I have heard the name of the book pop up from people at random intervals for the past couple of years. So I’m going to read it alongside the revision I have to do for my exams.
But thank you for reading through my first post. The braindead tone of this blog post may be explained by the fact that it’s midnight. Recipes for my Green Tea Frappuccinos and my Pesto Sauce are coming soon though! #unistudentbudget
thommy dee 