It’s official. For the past, oh, three weeks or so, I have been preparing for and then taking a week-long Chinese exam. This included tests for my writing skills, reading comprehension, listening comprehension, oral conversation skills, grammar and vocab, and translation. Hmm, have I left anything out? Does that fill out a week’s worth of [...]
Semester 2 - Chinese Really Begins to Kick My Proverbial Ass
Well - we began our second semester last Tuesday. In the first hour, I realized that the game has been upped considerably. Last term, I sat complaisantly by as other students struggled to form simple sentences, listened as the fellow housewives/students made the same pronunciation mistakes for the umpteenth time, stared at the blackboard as [...]
Hallelujah
Today, for the first time since I began 6 weeks ago, I understood something in our listening comprehension class. This is akin to asking directions at the Tower of Babel and figuring out that you need to turn left outside the gate to get to Sodom. It’s like a flash of revelation. A moment in [...]
Old School
Classes began two weeks ago, which adequately explains the dearth of entries to anyone who has ever been involved in a postgraduate program. Tie in to this the fact that I am at a University where I am at a serious lingual disadvantage, and you’ll more clearly see my point. Basically, I am getting my [...]
It’s All Chinese to Me . . .
In the fall, beginning in September, I will be entering the University of Hong Kong for a degree in Chinese (Putonghua). Last week, I finished my private writing tutoring sessions and tonight I am off to my weekly group lesson. I thought I would pay homage here to the journey of foreign languages by detailing [...]
