The majority of my time has been focused on class… and class is what I expected it to be… tough.  It’s all very interesting but definitely intense. We FLY in class. And I have to say, Chinese is pretty difficult (what a surprise).  It’s not like it is so overwhelmingly complicated to understand, it’s just challenging.  I need to hear something (a word, grammatical rule, concept, whatever)  about 1000 times before I remember it.  I think it is mainly an issue of adapting to something that’s [at first] very different than anything I’ve ever studied and finding/developing a method of attack to study it.  Like I said, it’s really hard to just ‘pick up’ words.  The majority of them are very foreign sounding.  There’s a system that makes it somewhat easier, but the words still remain a bit slippery and difficult to hold on to.  And the school wastes no time in throwing you right into middle of it either.  Class has been taught in about 95% Chinese from day 1.

And what is class like?  Well, I actually have 3 classes.  3 hours of class per day and a different teacher every hour.  It’s nice, having the different teachers breaks up what could be a grueling 3 hour chunk of Mandarin and makes it a bit more digestible.  Classmates:  a guy from Idaho, 3 Vietnamese girls, and 1 girl from Thailand.   And we’re all at different levels.  When I say different levels… different levels.  To my right:  He’s reading the majority of the lesson in Chinese.  To his right:  She’s basically fluent beside the fact that she can’t read or write.  To her right:  They’re conversational but find learning Mandarin using an English/Chinese textbook a bit difficult… especially since they don’t understand either language.  So ya, different levels.  Not too much room for slacking here…  It’s either keep UP or get totally left BEHIND.

Fortunately, I managed to hold my own during the summer semester.  I obviously still found myself near the lower end of the class … which had been clearly established and claimed by the lone Thai girl.  Presented with a book that lacked her own native language, she took quite a different approach than the 3 Vietnamese and decided early on to forgo the whole “studying” part of studying Mandarin.  Instead, she pushed the limits of the of the few words she had managed to pick up.  The “Gongche” (bus) became the setting for countless examples of ”Kan shu” (reading a book) and “Chi miembow” (eating bread).  She found a way to squeeze these basic building blocks into every chapter and almost every grammatical example being taught.  Our chapters are based on typical situations and places, meaning that the bus somehow found it’s way into the post office, the supermarket, and the bank.  Eating bread and reading a book became obsessively habitual actions.  And when the bus, bread, and books failed to do the job, “Wo bu dong” (I don’t understand) sufficed and lead the teacher with no other choice but to skip her.

Summer Vocab

Anyhow, I’m slowly finding my way out of the dark.  2 months of turbocharged summer classes have left me with a pretty decent vocab.  I now feel like I am nearing the end of the ‘totally confused stage’ and am transitioning into ‘kindergarten stage’.  Right near the end of my summer classes, I began having a few Mandarin breakthrough moments in everyday life.  All of a sudden, buying something at the hardware store or interacting with the lady at laundry place has become surprisingly rewarding.  These few, short moments of semi-”conversation” have made all of the studying feel like it is going towards something and slowly paying off.

Yidian dian (little by little)

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