"About Classes" email

Hey everyone,

I started class June 1st, Mon-Fri, 8:10-10:00. My section has ten students. There are two Koreans, two Vietnamese, three Japanese, one Omani, and one American. Turns out the American is Adam, from my Chinese class at Rutgers. He's the other one from my class that applied for the scholarship.

Unlike 101 and 102 at Rutgers, the class is taught all in Chinese, and my teacher often speaks very fast. The first day I had a headache after trying to understand two straight hours of speaking, but after a few days I was able to get used to it. I find I can understand what she says, even if I miss a few words in between.

It helps that sometimes she interjects some english words in her explanations. That helps Adam, me, and a couple others, but half the class really doesn't understand any english. It doesn't make that much difference during class, because within the context of everything else they can figure it out, but our textbook is only Chinese/English, no Korean or Japanese, so I don't know how they manage with that. I've seen some Japanese students using little electronic dictionaries, but it must be no fun to translate your textbook from a third language into something you can understand. With so many Japanese and Korean students at the school, I wonder why something isn't done about that.

During class time the focus is on speaking. We do a lot of reading aloud, repeating after the teacher, and going around the table, everyone making their own sentences using the grammar pattern. At Rutgers the focus was more on English to Chinese translation. Without the english and with the smaller class size, here things feel more intense.

We have homework every night. It can be a lot, though usually not something hard. We really don't do any writing in class, so homework's when we practice on that. I have to get familiar with the traditional Chinese characters. My other book only taught the simplified character set used on mainland China. The traditional characters often have a lot more strokes to them, but they also retain more of the meaning and you can see the relationships between characters better, so it's not that hard to learn except that I have to play catch-up for all the lessons we've skipped in this book.

We got placed in this class from a placement test during registration. It was really awful. With the traditional characters I couldn't recognize and the audio section where we had to answer questions based on a taped conversation that we could only listen to once, it was really hard.

I'm starting in lesson eleven of the first book, so about the same as starting in 102. Though technically I've gone over the grammar I'm learning now, I do need to go over it again to really get it. I also need to practice speaking, traditional characters, and the new characters that are there just because of the arrangement of the new textbook. When I skip to the end of the book, the differences are so great that I can't read it. The third scholarship recipient here from Rutgers, Ryan, finished 202 (in traditional), but he only placed into lesson thirteen.

I also signed up for Calligraphy, a Culture Class which meets once a week. There, without a textbook and board, I have no idea what the teacher is saying. I can only pick out a few words. It's okay though because the rest of the class is American, mostly at high levels, so they'll translate for me.

Though it usually takes me a while to get the jokes, our teacher's funny and we like him. Our class is 10:10-12:00, so I go with some of the class for lunch. Then after lunch the calligraphy teacher teaches Chinese Painting and we come back for that. He told our class that he'll let us attend without registering or paying. There are other classes like Chinese Cooking, Chinese Folktales or Karaoke, but the Culture Classes are relatively expensive, and many would use too much advanced Chinese for me to get much out of them.

Have some more interesting stuff to tell later,

love,
laszlo