Sofie to Korea

Happy October everyone! I can’t believe we’re already far into fall. It’s been a while since my last update and the headline should give you some idea as to the reason why.

I spent the first week of September in Canada together with my husband where we attended a friend’s wedding. The weather in Calgary was still very hot – over 30 degrees Celcius, so that was a lovely way of extending the summer before returning to the Danish fall.

The Canadian landscape was just breathtaking and we enjoyed some beautiful hikes together with our Canadian friends among mountains, lakes, and waterfalls. The pictures below are taken at Kananaskis, Emerald Lake, and Yoho National Park.

The wedding itself was held on top of a mountain that could only be accessed by a cable car. It was less scary than I had feared but unsettling nonetheless.

It was fun to attend a wedding in a foreign country and if it hadn’t been for that I would most likely never have visited this part of the world.

However, in the age of covid, no one is ever completely safe from becoming infected and that’s just what happened to us. My husband started to develop symptoms three days after the wedding and mine started right after we were back home. Luckily none of us were hit particularly hard, but it’s been three weeks now and we still feel that we’re more tired than we usually are. I guess it just takes some time before the virus is 100% out of your system.

Since the JLPT exam is only two months away, I’ve dived into full study mode with a very detailed plan of what to study/review in October. Then in November, I’ll mainly be focusing on solving mock exams and previous JLPT sets.

I had a 1-hour long conversation strictly in Japanese with my tutor last week, and she mentioned that my speaking has become much more fluent recently. It’s always motivating to feel that you’re making progress.

In case you’re wondering, I’m also still studying Korean, although I had to take a break while I was recovering from covid. Now that I’m feeling better, Korean has moved up on my list of priorities. After an italki lesson with my Korean tutor the other day I got to thinking about how incredibly easy it is to become complacent in language learning. I realize that I had booked the lesson right after a period of very limited exposure to Korean, but I was still surprised to find that so many words seemed to escape me – words that I know I have learned but somehow seemed to have forgotten. I have therefore made up my mind to spend at least 45 minutes on Korean every day to stay sharp. Maybe I’ll even write another blog post about language maintenance and retention.

Anyway, it’s Sunday afternoon, and according to my JLPT study plan, I now have to review a chapter in my Quartet 1 book and read a new text in Quartet 2.