- Ancient Voices concert went really well. It was the best we'd sung the pieces. After my 10-minute test on Wednesday, that'll be one subject down!
- Hung out with my friend afterwards and went for a long walk to the art museum & back. We admired the cherry blossoms there and on campus (and also the squirrels. always squirrels.). It was so energising! And a GLORIOUS day. Again. Sunshine and 27 degrees celsius (Hello, NZ summer!) with a warm breeze.
- Got a reply from the guy who gave the talk a couple weeks back about how digital tools can help bootstrap Chinese learning. He gave some really helpful suggestions and kindly offered to help me with the process and invited me to stay in touch! I'm actually pretty excited about this now, and I've realised that it's all about making learning personally meaningful by getting down to the why of why you want to develop a skill, and the specific content that is interesting and useful for you. I'm glad that digital tools can bypass a lot of boring stuff and help me get straight to translating stuff about positive psychology and mindfulness back and forth from Chinese & English. This is another thing I have gained from Penn - just by going to this talk, I got inspired to improve my Chinese - and I had no strong intentions of doing so prior to that! Interconnectedness is an amazing thing. If this didn't happen, then that wouldn't have happened...etc.
- Got another 1600 words on the page for my Buddhism paper.
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| Crazy selfie |
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| Wind |
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| Sunshine! I look ridiculously happy in this photo. |
What did I learn?
- This choir can pull it together really well. I think in the end, singing is a lot to do with attention. We often made mistakes during rehearsals, but were great in concert, and I think it is to do with the fact that we were all on the ball today.
- My level of Chinese has a term - "kitchen Chinese" - "i.e. a good basic mastery of the language and good pronunciation and tones, but just lacking a lot of specialized and "adult" vocabulary".
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