They say the first day of September is the true “New Year’s Day”, when it comes to work and projects.
It might well be.
It’s certainly true for me – autumn is always a highly-charged time of the year, as far as I’m concerned.
Pity it’s not the same for my country – so, while I’m still sending out CVs and running around looking for a new job, I look around and I keep busy.
And that’s the reason why, in two weeks, I’m starting a course of Chinese.
As you probably guessed, I love the Orient and its cultures and peoples, and history.
Learning the language sounds like a good idea.
I already have a smattering of Japanese, so why not add Chinese*?
I’ve found a nice 7-weeks course on Coursera – it’s a free, basic spoken Chinese course by the Peking University.
In case you missed it, Coursera is a web provider of MOOCs – that’s Massivo Open Online Courses: university-level instruction, through the web.
There’s a lot of courses out there, and really, it requires some discipline – I’d just go and enroll in fifteen different courses, and spend the rest of my days learning.
Yeah, I like learning.
Also, I’m seriously thinking about setting up an online course – it would solve the problem I have, living as I do in the backwaters of the backwaters. I could meet my students online.
I already did it once, and it was a small-scale but highly satisfactory success.
Anyway – in two weeks time, I’ll be learning Chinese.
The course covers personal information, time, daily life, food, shopping, urban essentials, weather and hobbies.
The basics – and no, there will be no reading and writing.
But for starters, it suits me fine.
And then, they say it’s a good thing, knowing the language of the conquerors…
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* so yes, ok, I’m a Browncoat, too – so sue me…
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Karavansara 
1 September 2014 at 14:18
Enjoy the massive task! No new languages for me this year but a deep brush-up of what I (think I) already know is heavily necessary,
Can’t wait to hear about your progress 😉
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