Iv'e been on quite a long hiatus since I just started university two weeks ago. I'm studying Chinese & Linguistics and hopefully Japanese as an outside course although that still has yet to be fully confirmed. I'm probably going to be taking a 4 year long hiatus with Portuguese although hopefully listening to songs in Portuguese will still keep the very basics logged in my brain. So from here onwards, if you happen to stumble upon my extremely boring progress site then you'll find Chinese & Japanese in it a lot.
University semester 1 week 1 - Linguistics
On Monday I got a very basic introduction on the main principals we'll be focusing on in Linguistics 1A - Phonetics, Morphology, Semantics and a few other things I now forget. On the second class we started learning about different languages with different linguistic typologies aka. languages which have OSV structure as opposed to English which has an SVO structure - S being Subject, V being verb and O being object. Then on Thursday we started learning the basics of phonetics which is a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. On Fridays we have extra lectures not related to the main syllabus which focus on different linguistics related topics each week. Last friday we were made to think about what we define as communication and communication between animals.
Chinese
From day one we've been encouraged to speak out loud and say things like 我们是爱丁堡大学学生 - We are students at Edinburgh University. If I were to only go away learning one thing from Chinese, that sentence would be it after saying it 15 times in a row. In the second class, we started learning the very basics such as 你好 -hello, 我叫。。。 - My name is..., 我是苏格兰人 - I'm Scottish. We learnt quite a few nationalities which I later expanded by myself and then we started learning how to properly write some of the characters by stroke order. On Thursday we started learning some food and how to say what we like 我喜欢。。。 and don't like 我不喜欢。。。
Japanese
Did a placement test to see whether I'd be put in the Beginner's tutorial and speaking class or not. I'm hoping to maybe have gotten around 50-60% but it was a good chance to recall what I've learnt through studying on and off throughout the last few years.
