This is going to be a short post because I haven't really started my homework for tomorrow yet (oops). I figure if I'm going to work so hard during the week I might as well take the weekend to relax and just learn the words that come up during daily conversation. I can now quite confidently describe someone as the Chinese equivalent of 'hot' depending on if they're male or female, tell someone in Cantonese slang that they will "die on the street", as well as understand several other unpostable but useful phrases. That's still learning, right?
This is the view from my 10th story room - what I'll be looking at for several more hours as I finish my essay. (Depending on how difficult this turns out to be, may end up using some of my newly learned phrases...). Coming from Illinois I really appreciate how Taipei is basically a city in the mountains. Humidity is terrible but it's so beautiful!
It's been two weeks and I still haven't really figured out how to approach my classes. The book I'm supposed to be focusing on is way too easy. It is the book used in my one-on-one and core class and contains a lot of important vocabularly, but I know most of the vocab and the sentence structures are way easy. Furthermore, the class doesn't test us on reading/writing at all and the speaking/listening level of some of the other students in the class is relatively low. Finally, I had to switch one-on-one teachers because someone else had a scheduling conflict, and my new teacher is super nice and cool but 1) does not strike the fear of God in me as the last one did 2) unlike the other teacher who forced me to use the vocab in meaningful ways, teaches class by saying really long sentences and having me repeat them. Nearly the entire class is me repeating sentences that she thinks up. It not only does not feel very helpful but also makes it very hard to concentrate for the entire hour. By the end of class I doubt I could accurately repeat an English sentence.
Anyway I'm still confused as to why this is my core class when the other book is much much more interesting. The other book has more difficult vocab ('plastic surgery' instead of 'pineapple', 'fellowship' instead of 'soap') and more interesting sentence patterns that I haven't seen before. I want to spend most of my time on this book, especially since the only other student in the class is much better than me (already speaks Cantonese and has been going to Chinese school since he was little) and the teacher came into the class with a new faster-paced syllabus. But I'm supposed to spend most of it on the core class? Or something. And end up feeling pretty bored in my core class and like I'm drowning in my other class.
Anyway I have no clue why I'm supposed to be spending most of my time on the easy and slow moving class and not the challenging and interesting one. It makes sense to me to build a base but the very low expectations of listening/speaking in this class are not helping me improve very quickly. I've tried to talk to the teachers about it but my Chinese isn't good enough to explain my confusion. Or rather, it is but it's not good enough to pursue the issue after they blow me off once...
Anyway off to study until I feel like these poor fish:
Hope everyone had a happy July 4th! Some Yale kids and I had a successful America Day complete with bacon and salad, but I missed the fireworks :(
Post about frequent weekend activities, favorite foods, and Cool Asians coming up soon.
It's been two weeks and I still haven't really figured out how to approach my classes. The book I'm supposed to be focusing on is way too easy. It is the book used in my one-on-one and core class and contains a lot of important vocabularly, but I know most of the vocab and the sentence structures are way easy. Furthermore, the class doesn't test us on reading/writing at all and the speaking/listening level of some of the other students in the class is relatively low. Finally, I had to switch one-on-one teachers because someone else had a scheduling conflict, and my new teacher is super nice and cool but 1) does not strike the fear of God in me as the last one did 2) unlike the other teacher who forced me to use the vocab in meaningful ways, teaches class by saying really long sentences and having me repeat them. Nearly the entire class is me repeating sentences that she thinks up. It not only does not feel very helpful but also makes it very hard to concentrate for the entire hour. By the end of class I doubt I could accurately repeat an English sentence.
Anyway I'm still confused as to why this is my core class when the other book is much much more interesting. The other book has more difficult vocab ('plastic surgery' instead of 'pineapple', 'fellowship' instead of 'soap') and more interesting sentence patterns that I haven't seen before. I want to spend most of my time on this book, especially since the only other student in the class is much better than me (already speaks Cantonese and has been going to Chinese school since he was little) and the teacher came into the class with a new faster-paced syllabus. But I'm supposed to spend most of it on the core class? Or something. And end up feeling pretty bored in my core class and like I'm drowning in my other class.
Anyway I have no clue why I'm supposed to be spending most of my time on the easy and slow moving class and not the challenging and interesting one. It makes sense to me to build a base but the very low expectations of listening/speaking in this class are not helping me improve very quickly. I've tried to talk to the teachers about it but my Chinese isn't good enough to explain my confusion. Or rather, it is but it's not good enough to pursue the issue after they blow me off once...
Anyway off to study until I feel like these poor fish:
Hope everyone had a happy July 4th! Some Yale kids and I had a successful America Day complete with bacon and salad, but I missed the fireworks :(
Post about frequent weekend activities, favorite foods, and Cool Asians coming up soon.
Te amo. Volo te mecum adesse =(.
ReplyDeleteHmmm, good luck with the classes. Maybe they'll adjust if you ask?
ReplyDelete