Dear School,

Thank you for this opportunity of sharing my Mandarin study experience with other students and possibly teachers.

As long as I remember, I did like studying languages (and did not like mathematics or physics, just for the record). As a little boy in Finland I started to learn first English, when being 9 years old and then Swedish at the age of 12. English we felt we have to study, since Finland is a small country of about 5 million people and we depend on our foreign trade. Swedish we have to learn, because it is our second official language and we used to be part of Sweden for 700 years in the past. English I liked a lot, with Swedish for some reason I struggled as much as I liked English.

My summers, when studying Economics at the University of  Vaasa took me to Sweden and to Germany, where I worked in the summer time, got some practise on the languages (yes, also on German language) and made some money for the long Finnish winter.

After the University studies I spent 6 years working for wholesales trade in Finland for Finnish companies. I used most of the time English, German and Swedish in my work. Then I moved to work in Italy for nine (9) years for the Italian industry and today I am truly fluent in Italian, possibly speaking it better than I do speak English.

My Italian employer sent me to work in Prague in the Czech Republic. I worked there also for the Finnish government and for one Finnish company supplying industrial services and me being their operating company managing director. When being in Prague, I studied the Czech language, which is much harder one to master than for example the Russian language even though they both belong to Slavonic language family.

Many years of working abroad and international jobs at the industry and working also for the Finnish government made me master seven (7) languages, when I came to Shanghai in the summer 2011.

When in Shanghai, it felt perfectly natural to learn mandarin language and I asked our Finchi softlanding platform (www.finchi.cn) to recommend me a good language school, where to start working on the eight of the languages I master. They recommended me to start the studies at your school, which I did.

I started to study in August 2011 with Xiaoyi Wu, who has been a very patient teacher and has given me lot of support also in the moments of doubt and tiredness. I have studied several books, repeated lot of the learnings, every now and then forgetting a lot and then again repeating the very same things! I feel I am and I have never been talented on the languages, but I do like to communicate with people and I do like working hard.

In the Czech Republic they have a saying: ”you are so many times a human being, how many languages you know” meaning that each language teaches you not only to communicate, but to understand better a new nation and its people. Hence, I am very curious to ”become Chinese”, too.

I still feel to be in the beginning of my studies even though I do it already over two (2) years. I remember of having studied the Czech language for five (5) years, before I could start using it at my work, when working in Prague, ”the Golden City” in the Central Europe. I do not know, how many years it will take to master Chinese, but I believe today I will never give it up!

Right now I have started to prepare myself for HSK 3 (oral test), which I hope to pass in April 2014. It will be tough run uphill, but should I fail, at least I will do it by trying to run to the goal. I know I can count with support of your school and with Xiaoyi Wu – wo hui nuli de!

In Shanghai, January 5, 2014

Jari Makkonen

Consul (Commercial)

Consulate General of Finland in Shanghai