December 13 - Chinese Lessons

I've started taking Chinese lessons on Wednesdays and Thursdays. I only get 4 hours of instruction per week, but it's much better than nothing. Plus, it's all free! I couldn't ask for a better benefit of being a foreign teacher here. I have two different classes. One class is for grammar and reading, the other is for speaking. Each class is two hours long. My teachers are very nice young ladies who are fun to talk with. They're serious about teaching me and they prefer that I speak only in Chinese with them, but they also like to chat and experiment in Chinese conversations rather than just stick with the textbook all the time as I have seen some other Chinese teachers do.

Right away after meeting the first teacher, I felt really comfortable and I feel that I will be able to learn quite well from her. Her name is 英英 (ying ying; a character often used in 英语 ying yu or 英国 ying guo which means English and England, respectively, which is a little bit ironic because she really wants to improve her English as she is not very skilled at speaking it). She is 29 years old, so very close in age to me but, like everyone else also seems to believe, she thought I was about 20. Ying Ying speaks very clear, precise and slow Mandarin so I can easily understand what she is saying. That's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I am learning standard pronunciation, which will allow me to be understood by any Chinese person. On the other hand, I've already memorized all possible standard pronunciations of Mandarin words, but I only understand minute amounts of any Chinese dialect. The sounds, the lack of enunciation and the completely different words in local dialects makes listening to an ordinary Chinese person on the street extremely different from listening to standard Mandarin. It's like a born and bred Frenchman trying to understand British cockney - only more difficult.

The class got off to a little bit of a rocky start, not because of any friction between us but because she has yet to completely gauge my Chinese skills. I completely understand her difficulties, because I have been studying Chinese on my own. Thus, I know some really advanced grammar rules, but I'm also missing some basic grammar rules. I know some really advanced 汉字 (han zi; Chinese characters), but I also balk at words that any third-grader should know. It's a good thing that my classes are one-on-one! Yeah, I forgot to mention that above: not only do I have free classes, but I am the only foreign teacher who signed up, so it's more like free tutoring with a textbook than an actual class. Both my teachers said that the current textbook is below my level, which I agree with for the most part, but I told them to teach me the latter half of the book anyway, in case there were anything I didn't know, and also to give me a chance to develop my speaking confidence. I asked them for a systematic approach to learning, even if I already know things. I want them to teach me pretending as if I didn't know anything. My reason for wanting this teaching method is that I'm not fluent and I speak really slowly, so it's very difficult for me to feel confident when I communicate orally. My goal is to feel more comfortable speaking in Chinese. I feel that once I am more confident, I'll be able to learn faster. My first couple of classes last week really helped me to feel a lot more confident than previously, so I have high hopes.

About midway through the Chinese class, my teacher told me it was time for a ten minute break. The words were barely out of her mouth when three young people (who I guess had been waiting impatiently for the break) came barging into the room, full of laughter and excitement to meet me, the new foreign student. There were two girls and one guy. One of the girls was a teacher at the foreign school. Her name is 郭 (guo), which is her family name. She didn't give a first name. She is absolutely hysterical. She is always joking and she never stops laughing. Lots of fun. The guy is from Denmark. His name is Peter (though I am sure I am spelling that wrongly) and he's on a volleyball team at the school. The third person was a Korean girl and I completely forget her name, which makes me feel bad, because she was very nice. The other two kept teasing her because she was an English major during her bachelor's degree and she couldn't figure out how to communicate well with me. Her Chinese is really good though - I mistook her for a native Chinese, for which I apologized profusely. After the break, as they were leaving, Peter and 郭老师 (guo lao shi; guo teacher) both waved goodbye to me, but the Korean girl did some kind of crazy heavy metal devil horns with her tongue sticking out at me. I asked about it and Peter told me, conspiratorially, that he was doing a good job at corrupting her to the darkside. It was weird, incongruous and funny all at the same time. I guess that is one way to make an impression on someone you just met (although this is debatable since I don't remember her name). 

The next day, I arrived for my second class with a beautiful young teacher named 葛老师 (ge lao shi; ge teacher). She is 24 years old and married to a handsome young guy in this city. She had planned to be a TV hostess in her hometown in nearby 山东 (shan dong) province, but her husband was already well-established here, so she sacrificed her career in order to live with her husband in Zhengzhou. As you can tell, we spent most of the class asking each other personal questions. She was attempting to figure out my level of spoken Chinese, although I'm not sure why she felt it necessary to tell me that she thinks she will be really fat within a couple of years. It seems like the taboos against talking about a woman's weight do not exist here. Anyway, she told me my abilities range from B-D levels on a scale of A-E, where A is the lowest and E is the highest. I told her it was probably best to start at B level so we could work things through systematically. She agreed. I'm looking forward to my next class, which takes place in a couple of days.