About

Hi! I’m Jessica. I am Singaporean, born and raised on that lovely island at the convergence of East and West. I moved to the US in 2012 for university and have been primarily living here since. I also hope to spend some extended time living in Germany or Scandinavia at some point.

I am an artist, designer, coder, product person, UX enthusiast. I have a lot of interests. (I gave a talk about it, too!)

Here’s my real website.

I started this blog in anticipation of living in Mannheim, Germany, from June to August 2014. My goals were to chronicle my preparations for the trip and the summer experience itself. I didn’t do a great job of that, but here is my first post. These days I just use this as a regular catch-all blog, part personal, part professional. Should I separate the two? Probably. Do I care? Do you care? Is anyone even reading this blog? No.

Elsewhere

I’m pretty active on Twitter, and I post stuff on Instagram but don’t actually use the service. You can find me on both sites as @krysjez

Progress Tracking

• German: I started a halfhearted attempt at teaching myself German in late May 2014. I then spent two months living in a small German city with no instruction. As of 13/8/14, my German was at 86% of A1 and 64% of A2, according to the self-assessment tool on the Deutsche Welle website. I then took a semester (3 months) of German at university, took a break of 9 months because I didn’t like the teaching style, and finally had another two semesters. Since 2015 I have been using the DIALANG test to measure my progress on European languages. I take it cold, with no preparation.
  • Mid-Dec 2015: Placement: 345 / Writing: A2 / Reading: B1 / Structures: A2 / Vocab: B1 / Listening: B1
  • Early May 2016: Placement: 541 / Writing: B1 / Reading: B2 / Structures: B1 / Vocab: B1 / Listening: B1
• Spanish: I started learning Spanish using the Mango Languages app in August 2019.
• Danish: I gave up on reaching verbal/listening fluency after a month, but can read simple sentences.
• Amoy (Hokkien): On the to-do list.