大家好！哦叫Joel，我的中文名字是大周。
Hi everyone! My name is Joel, my Chinese name is dazhou.
I’m from a medium-sized city in America called Milwaukee. My city is famous for brewing beer, so we have the nickname BrewCity. Our professional baseball team is even called the Brewers! We are about an hour north of Chicago. It gets super cold here during the winter.
I’ve wanted to learn Chinese basically all my life, but when I met some friends from China at my university, I though if they are speaking English with me, I wanted try to speak Chinese with them. I think Chinese culture has many good things to teach and that learning Mandarin is a way to dive in, so I started my Mandarin learning journey.
I’ve been studying Chinese for about 4 years now. I started by auditing one year at a college. For the past 3 years, I’ve been self-studying with ChinesePod. I started using ChinesePod as a newbie. I’m currently an elementary level student.
In my daily life I like to take walks and have coffee. I put on some headphones and put on a random elementary lesson as a walk and drink coffee. I’ll listen to 2-3 episodes in one session a few times per week. My other favs are enjoying random Qing Wen or Beijing Standard TIme lessons.
My language learning goal is to be able to have unlimited daily life-style conversations, as well as be able to read a Chinese newspaper. The road is long and super interesting. 慢慢来。