A Day in the Life 1: Friday (morning)

High time for an update, again. I think I'll tell you what my day was like today. It was very uneventful, which makes it great to write about, right?

I woke up just before 9 o'clock, and rushed into the bathroom to get the last of the hot water to wash up a bit (no time for a shower). I usually have oral Chinese class at 9 on Friday mornings, but my teacher had to go out of town this week, so painfully squeezed extra classes in last week. This morning I was thankful. I heated up water for my morning green tea, and made up some oatmeal with honey. Chinese milk is a strange beast. You can buy it in little one-serving bags which keep for 30 days. I dont know what they've done to the milk so that it will last that long, but it's not fresh, and inevitably has flavor. It's usually not a bad flavor, but still, I like my plain milk to taste like milk. Sometimes milk brands admit to actually flavoring their product, which is a pretty popular commodity. Since unflavored milk is flavored too, it sometimes feels good not to be lied to and I too occasionally buy walnut or peanut or wheat flavored milk. Generally not for my oatmeal though.

So I sat at my desk and had my breakfast, putting on a TED talk. I don't know what I'd do without TED and BBC documentaries. Chinese is stimulating to study, of course, but there's some kinds of challenges that it just can't provide. For instance, I just can't think complex things in Chinese, and as noted before, I can't read what's around me, and media in English is sparse to say the least. So, I rely heavily on online news, BBC documentaries (I'm almost done with 'Days that Shook the World') and TED talks. The TED talks (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design) are from an annual conference which invites really interesting people working in any field that touches even remotely on those topics to give a 20 minute talk or performance. Speakers have included Al Gore and Richard Dawkins, but most of them are people doing really cool stuff I've never heard about. Today I watched a biology professor at Berkeley talk about designing robotic feet from a combination of strategy ideas inspired by, among others, octupi, spiders, crabs, and geckos especially. Yesterday, I watched a mathemetician who talked about his project to study the way African villages were often constructed in the form of fractals. Anyway, site is highly recommended (www.ted.com).

Breakfast over, I started to preview a bit for my 11:00 listening class. I find I have to be careful with the previewing. I like to look up the characters I don't know ahead of time so that I won't waste my time listening to a whole discussion featuring one or a few words I don't understand, when if I'd just looked them up before I'd have been able to follow the whole thing. But, if I preview too thoroughly, class can get really boring. The biggest complaint I have about my classes here is that they all strictly follow a book. Honestly, the teachers are just there guide you through the book. They don't come up with exercises or activities, they rarely assign or look at homework, and every single unit of the books takes the exact same form, as does the way the teacher goes through them. Personally, I learned how to read and do exercises in a textbook by myself a long time ago, what I want is a teacher who is able to get me to use what I'm reading, able to explain it orally in a way that a book can't, and answer my questions about the language. There is time for questions, but I tend to either have none, or have too many, because I haven't understood anything we've just done. Plus, since the classes are all in Chinese, it's hard for the teacher to give an explanation for something we don't understand that's simple enough for us to understand...it's very easy for the explanation to turn out to be harder to understand than the original concept.

Back to listening class. I particularly dislike this class. First of all, I feel like most of my life here is a listening class, so it's not very useful. We've recently changed teachers, but I don't find either of them particularly inspiring. The first teacher used to talk unbearably slowly. Many of my classmates didn't mind, but I was particularly frustrated by this. We all spoke faster than him. How could he possibly not notice this? Finally we (I) were sort of complaining to another teacher about this and she told him. After that it got a bit better. Still, he struck me as condescending to us, and treated everything as if we didn't know. Every other sentence was 'do you understand?,' he'd even ask us silly things like, 'do you know what 'time' means?.' I just really didn't understand - we were studying difficult words too like how to say the nape of your neck and latitude. Last week he announced that something had come up and he wouldn't be able to teach us anymore.

I was apprehensive about what the new teacher would be like, and rightly so. I mean, she's ok, but again it goes back to the point that I don't really need a teacher if all she's going to do is read the book to me. Basically she just tells us which exerciese to do in the book, turns the tape recordings on and off and goes over the answers (which are in the back anyway). At least she speaks quickly, but she has a habit of translating words absolutely unnecessarily into English. I wouldn't mind if she were translating words that I didn't know, but she's not. She'll translate 'heart,' for example, or 'baby'. I'm the only one in my class who's first language is English, and though some of them speak quite well, nearly all speak better Chinese than English. Plus, I'm not very patient.

This makes me think of another issue which has been something to deal with - how do I want to be treated in conversation with a Chinese person? Ideally, of course, the answer is that I would like to spoken to the same way as if I were a native speaker. I do hope to get there, but at this point that's not necessarily the best scenario, because I'm likely to miss things and not understand at points. I have some friends who do this, and I like them for it. Sometimes I just have to let things slide by that they say, but I learn the most from them. I have always thought this was important when speaking to foreigners in the US or in England -- not to dumb down the language at all because hearing it the way it is spoken is why they came, and is essential for improvement. There is also the case of Chinese who want to speak to me in English, of course. I am generally strongly against this -- I came to China to study Chinese. If you, friend, want to learn English then why don't you displace yourself and go to the US? The argument doesn't work as well here as in Europe per se, because it's not so easy for my peers to go abroad, even if they do want to. So I occasionally tolerate it, but my response is always in Chinese. Most Chinese students my age have studied English for many years, but can hardly speak. They're mostly happy to slip into Chinese then and have some discussion. Their vocabulary is extensive, but are uncomfortable with conversation.

So I sat through my Chinese listening class, which involved listening with lots of numbers, and writing them accurantly in the blanks in the book, distinguishing between similar sounding sentences, and deciding on the 'mood/tone' of a sequence of statements. Oh, and there was also a dialogue about the growing elderly population in various countries in the world, following by questions to check comprehension. The class is an hour and forty minutes long, as are all my classes. Afterwards, I went to have dumplings for lunch with some classmates. I don't eat dumplings very often, but I like them a lot because they're good, and because they change things up from the usual rice or pulled noodles. We went to a chain this time, and each ordered about 20. I had a combination of lamb and turnip, three mushroom, and a toufu/vegetable mix. Dipped in a mixture of vinegar and hot sauce, they're quite tasty.

I apologize for only getting through the morning, but that's a lot to read already. Maybe next week you'll get to hear about Friday afternoon :)