This is me, in Chinese.

By:  September 11, 2021 Categories: 

Two and a half years of learnings. I started in November 2018, but I took a half-year break in 2019 (I should not have done that). In two and a half years, I took 500 class hours, and around a dozen of books. I’m both proud and encouraged by my Chinese progress. By no means it has been easy, but persistent progress accumulates, and after two and a half years, I’m at an upper intermediate level of Chinese.

And of course, the teachers at GoEast Mandarin are fantastic: https://goeastmandarin.com/

I learned:
HSK1, HSK2, GoEast’s Hanzi course, HSK3, HSK4上, HSK4下, GoEast’s China Today Spoken Chinese language course, 发展汉语中级 I, and 发展汉语中级 II.

Latest

Torrential rain and colorful umbrellas

Torrential rain and colorful umbrellas

I was planning a bike ride, but then saw it was drizzling, so I carried Hasse outside — underneath an umbrella — to go get a coffee. Yet the rain was so heavy we just hid underneath the canopy in front of a supermarket to see some of the chaos unfold. I’ll miss these streets […]
May 25, 2026
Streetside in the AI Park

Streetside in the AI Park

Be skeptical of sweeping stories about China, regardless of how good or bad they portray things. The technological advancements mentioned in the news may be even more profound in reality, but not as widespread as shown. The GDP growth has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, but real wealth is mostly concentrated in coastal […]
May 16, 2026
Clothes Making Clouds

Clothes Making Clouds

There are so many ways to define Shanghai, yet a few popular icons do a lot of the talking. As the international metropolis and a symbol of China’s rising economic power, there’s the Lujiazui (陆家嘴) skyline — with the Oriental Pearl Tower (东方明珠) and high offices of Chinese and multinational corporations. There’s the Maglev train […]
May 5, 2026
Passing on the Baton

Passing on the Baton

Day 2876 in Shanghai and I’m walking with Hasse on Dongdaming Road (东大名路) in the Hongkou district. In 2018, I lived next to this road; here I registered my first Chinese bank account, bought my first baozi in a FamilyMart, and it’s here that I photographed so many random things because Shanghai was all new […]
April 13, 2026