Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes

Holy cow, I've got a job!

I haven't had a job for a long time, for so long I'm not gonna tell you how long it's been. :P Anyway it's a big deal for me, even if it's only a temporary one as a seasonal help.

And that's not all, it seems I'll also be moving pretty soon, so I'm a bit overwhelmed. Not in a bad way, but I'm slightly afraid I'm gonna mess things up somehow. I might get ill, get the date or time wrong, lose my memory, get kidnapped by the UFOs...

Well, you never know what's going to happen, but I should be okay. Blogging might not be a priority in the near future, but we'll see.

My post on Katherine Mansfield's short story "At the Bay" is here.

Finnish language

If you want to learn Finnish :), or maybe just know little something about it, go to The Finnish language, a great place to start your journey.

Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family, and it's rather different from Indo-European languages like English or German. If I was asked to describe it, I'd tell people that there is no grammatical gender or articles, and that words can be pretty long:

Finnish is a synthetic language: it uses suffixes to express grammatical relations and also to derive new words. To take a simple example, the single Finnish word talossanikin corresponds to the English phrase in my house, too.

I could also tell you that sauna is a Finnish word.

Stroke Order for Chinese Characters

When you learn to write Chinese, it's important to learn to write the strokes for characters in a certain order. It makes the drawing easier, and the rules usually make perfect sense; you draw from left to right, top to bottom etc.

You can find the basic rules presented in a clear way here. You also find what types of strokes there are, and what they are called (which you really most likely don't need to know even if you're learning Chinese).

When I've looked at different Chinese textbooks, I've noticed that the stroke order in characters is not always the same - or at least in one Finnish textbook they are trying to teach us wrong ways of writing the characters. :/ I guess it doesn't make that much difference in practice if you write some individual characters in "your own way", but usually it's better to stick to the prescribed order. In calligraphy the stroke order is more important naturally.