A post from my Medium Profile, which I used for a short time to get rid of excess creativity and an urge to write during a less inspirational phase of my studies. As the new year approaches, we create resolutions to improve this or that aspect of our life—or we decide to finally learn this new language after having put it off for months or even years on end. If I were to start learning a new language from scratch in 2023, these are the steps I would personally take, and which you can use for your own studies. They are based both on my personal experiences as a language learner and teacher and are anchored in pedagogical research.

What should our readers know about you? Hmm difficult to say, but I guess I should start by saying that I am originally from Switzerland, however I have lived in Norway for the past three years to study. I really love languages, so in addition to speaking German (my mother tongue), English and Norwegian, I also have varying degrees of fluency in French, Russian and Polish. I can also hold a basic conversation in Italian, which is useful.

I thought I would end up writing a lot more on this website before handing in my thesis. I also thought once handed in, my thesis would be online much sooner so I can share it with all of you. Well, both assumptions turned out to be false... But anyway, you can now read and download my master's thesis with the pretentious-sounding title "Epistemological (Un)certainties: The Literary Journalism of William T. Vollmann and Johny Pitts as a Challenge to Objective Journalism" on NTNU Open by clicking this link, or read the abstract below

In my last post, I introduced standpoint epistemology and mentioned how all kinds of knowledge have to be socially situated. The examples I used came mostly from a scientific field, as they were meant to show how scientists can be oblivious of their own biases. It is a common fallacy to assume that one’s knowledge claims are free of one’s positionality and that, like a God, one sees “everything from nowhere.”