Chinese Background

Until not so long ago, about six years ago, I used to hate the sound of Chinese and just ignored most of the Chinese people I met or crossed. However after studying Japanese and Korean, my interest in this other language started. In August 2012, I started taking up Mandarin on my own slowly but surely. At that time I already had quite a few Chinese friends and even had had two relationships with some Chinese. All those contacts made me realize that despite what I thought before, this language was indeed beautiful and could offer an opening and deeper understanding of the "Asian Culture" and, of course, even more of Chinese culture. I studied first through the Assimil book and did all the passive phase but stopped the active wave soon after. After that, I almost stopped studying Chinese but kept practicing my listening skills on many movies, TV shows and some times even tried talking to friends in Mandarin. I saw both seasons of 中国好声音 (China's version of The Voice) without any subtitles and could follow quite a bit on the second one. I believe my knowledge of Japanese's Kanjis (ie. Chinese Characters) helped a lot in that sense. I also read a few easy readers (汉语风) and went on to start reading 2 volumes of Tintin (丁丁). During all that time, I kept reviewing the HSK3 vocabulary list on Anki but did no active study of grammar. In November 2013, I started practicing my active Mandarin skills and thanks to the Interpals website found 2 people with whom I talk mostly in Chinese. One being from Taiwan and one originally from Shanghai, I have the opportunity to use both simplified and traditional characters and have seen my active skills skyrocket.

In January 2014, I got an internship in Shanghai and will start soon. As a result, I have decided to force all that grammar into my head by pure reading and analyzing all the patterns and trying to find them everywhere. 

Here is my Chinese Journey in preparation of my Internship but also much more.