Mandarin Chinese Weblog

I’m back/我回来了/Wǒ huí lai le！

I guess things got a little busy for me around the turn of the new year. In spite of some good ideas/好主意/hǎo zhǔ yi/ I got off track with my studies. I’m still “busy” these days and I don’t have the energy to pay attention to being diligent, so I decided to take a class.

The class

Well, it was Day 1 of Chinese 220. In some ways 220 will be easy, but in a lot of ways it will be hard. Why?

1. Traditional characters. The 老师 said that we can write in 简体字 but the book is 繁体字.
2. I haven’t studied characters in a long time. I can recognize some (500?) but can’t write that many.
3. Lots of 人 from different places (well, mostly 香港).

So why is #3 on my list? Well, I lived in China for a while and had a wonderful environment. But in class there will be a lot of different accents. Get this, the class demographic breaks down something like this: 85% from Hong Kong, 5% from Taiwan, 2% from mainland China, 2% from Korea, 2% from the US, 4% other. So when others speak, I won’t have the pleasure of hearing “correct/native” accents. In other ways, though I think my listening will improve more because I’ll be more focused on the context of what’s being said. I’ve talked about context before.

Anyway back to the point of this post. I’m taking this class for 2 reasons. One is to give me a schedule to follow, and 2 to approach this class form a language acquisition point of view. I want to comment throughout the semester on what works, what doesn’t and what to do when something’s not working the way you think it should be working. Remember this, though:

When you are your own teacher, the world is your classroom.