Aberame A/P Suseenthiran, A174059, 29/7/2022

 I’ve been doing more experiments with my baking and I baked two different types of brownies. One of it was a classic crunchy top and the other was a softer, denser brownie. I experimented with the second brownie to make it fit my preference and I thoroughly enjoyed making alterations as it helped me understand the significance of each ingredient in the already given recipe.

 Brownies are not the same as cakes. Brownies require minimal skills as it doesn’t require fancy equipments and has a fixed list of ingredients. Brownies are also easy to improve to our taste. We can add caramel, nuts or even chocolate chunks to make it chewy if that’s what we prefer. 

After going through various recipes, I understood that dense brownies require more liquid ingredients like evaporated milk meanwhile crispier brownies rely on dry ingredients especially sugar. I also learnt that brownies aren’t supposed to mixed thoroughly using a beater as incorporating air will make it fluffy and cake-like.

 I feel ecstatic because I experimented with a recipe and yielded a successful final product

 Following the instructions completely the first time before making any alterations to avoid any confusion

 Fortunately, I made good progress this week and hadn’t met any major bumps. I am thankful for that.

For next week I am planning to make only pound cake

A173642

30/7/2022

 

This week, I have started learning about numbers in Mandarin. I learned how to write and pronounced the numbers in Mandarin. Other than that, I have also learned a simple conversation dialogue on how to tell and ask others about phone numbers in Mandarin Chinese. Besides that, they also taught us how to read and pronounce date and time in Mandarin. 

 

Points to remember in week 2 are in Mandarin, they use the “year + month + date” formula to write their date and if we want to say the year in mandarin, we need to read out each digit and add the word “nián” at the end of it. For example, 2022 will be read as “èr líng èr èr nián” which literally translates into “two zero two two year”.

 

In my opinion, learning Mandarin is easier than I thought as the pronunciation is quite simple. However, the Chinese number characters took quite some time to memorise.

 

One thing that I learned and can be practised now is that writing the Chinese characters in a book makes it a lot easier to be memorised.

 

So far I have not faced any difficulties as the learning points for this week were not too heavy for beginners just like myself. 

 

My plan for the 3rd week is that I want to try and make a simple dictionary so that I can jot down new words which will help to expand my vocabulary. 

My feelings and thoughts

There’s this new wave of excitement I feel as I’ve completed the practice rounds when following the course. Now that I’m done learning the basics, I’m able to pick new projects to start on and basically crochet whatever I wanted. I’m also curious on how many pieces of creations I can make throughout this elective posting. Will I able to crochet faster? Neater? Recreate more advanced patterns? When creating the bandana and drawstring pouch, I’ve found rhythm and it was great able to repeat the same movement and stitches until suddenly a completed project is done, that definitely helped me to get my mind off other things and had placed me in a better state of mind.

One good thing I can put to practice

I’m able to read written patterns now! That itself opened a new, bigger realm of possibilities of creations I can make. This is because there are much more written patterns than youtube or video tutorials on the net. So being able to read these written patterns have given me more options to create in the future!

Difficulties/ concerns and how I coped

Like I’ve mentioned above, the bigger projects are sometimes not the difficult ones, the sneaky little flower coaster had me questioning everything I practiced before this. It took many different stitches to create that tiny little flower, basically that coaster took a lot of technique to create. In addition to that, I wasn’t referencing a video, I was crocheting it based on a written pattern, so I had no idea if I was actually doing the right thing. However with crochet, when you feel something looks odd, there’s a simple option of untying it and redoing it. So that’s what I did until I completed my first more advanced coaster!

My plans for week 3

I plan to finish my drawstring pouch and start on other projects to fill up my posting time. Hopefully I can start on my character creation as I’m just currently waiting for the materials to arrive. I also plan to attempt the flower coaster again to see if there’s any improvement in the outcome. In a nutshell, my plan is to crochet and crochet some more!

3. Points to remember from week 2!
Pronunciation is very important because the same word has different meanings with different pronunciations.

I learnt that when I put myself in awkward situations, I learn the best. For example talking to my friend in the language that i have very little knowledge about actually made me braver and more confident. I also got the feedback that i needed.

Writing out the Chinese characters helped in remembering and identifying them

4. Your feelings & thoughts
I'm feeling happy and excited with my progress. It is a small progress but I really do hope to come out of my elective posting  being able to have longer conversations with my friends

5. ONE good thing from what you did that you can practice now!
Practice makes perfect and spacing out my learning really helped

6. Any difficulties/concerns? How did you cope?
I realized that I have begun to forget some of the words and characters that I have learnt from the week before so I had to revisit those videos.
I also need to work more on my pronunciation, I had the chance to have a short conversation with my friend and I was told that my pronunciation isn't proper so that is my main focus.

7. Your plan for next week (Week 3)
More focus and my pronunciation, continue to have more conversations because only with practice will my pronunciations get better