初学者

[David Hallgren]

你好。我叫大卫。我是瑞典人。可是，现在在日本学习日语。也想学习中文。

I everyone, just wanted to say hello and say that I really think this forum will be helpful in my studies. As I wrote above (I hope), my name is David and I'm currently living in Japan to study Japanese at Tokyo Gakugei Daigaku for a year. Since I've wanted to learn Chinese as well for some time now I took the opportunity to join a Chinese class once a week. It's me and ~20 japanese student and lessons and textbooks are naturally in Japanese so I guess I will have to put in some extra effort but I think it's doable. They've had about 10 lessons already and just finished pinyin and pronunciation but since I luckily bought some books with CDs back in Sweden during the summer and have used them to learn pinyin an tones for a while it didn't seem like I've missed that much. I've tried to practice with a few really helpful Chinese exchange students here and it seems like those books/CDs was worth their money, as far as pronunciation in concerned at least. (Or I'm just lucky to that Swedish has quite a lot of sounds and even two tones )

Hopefully the fact that I know at least the meaning of quite a few characters from Japanese will help in my studies as well. I mean, if I was able to learn a couple of readings for each character just for Japanese, one more for Chinese shouldn't be impossible. Chinese really seems more practical in that way, lots of readings can be really confusing at times...

I will try to use the same methods as I did when I began learning Japanese, a flashcard-like system on the computer for Vocab, Wakan for keeping track of learned characters and Skype/MSN for language exchange.

Once again, thanks for an interesting forum and I'm looking forward to learn this interesting language together with the rest of you, 加油！

(Please excuse any mistakes in my English, it's starting to get crowded up there )

[gougou]

Chinese really seems more practical in that way, lots of readings can be really confusing at times...

Err, this is not to discourage you, but there might be bad news in store for you...

But don't worry, we're all putting up with it, and you already are used to it from studying Japanese!

[sky888]

Hi Dave,

I went to a college in Niigata-ken. You made me recall when I visited Tokyo one weekend, I stayed at a friends house in Gakugeidiagaku in Meguro. We had a set amount of money that we brought with us for partying that weekend. Well, we were deciding whether or not to stay another day and we decided to go home because we wanted to save some funds. The next day, the train line was gassed by that Aum cult. Don't know if we would have been on that train due to aggressive partying we did. But, I remember the police was aggressively singling out foreigners when it happened only to turn out to be one of their own. At any rate, I really like that little Gakugeidiagaku township though.