Chinese Class

Every day I take four straight hours of Chinese. I was able to test into the 320 level, which I think is just where I should be. I am able to understand everything the teacher is saying and at the same time I am learning new vocab and grammar. However the three other students in my class are students who were here last semester and it doesn’t seem as if they really understand everything that goes on. But I can’t say that I am attentive to everything that occurs during class. Sitting for four hours is a very difficult and it is easy to get distracted, unfortunately if you do zone out (even for a few seconds) you instantly become lost and worst of all the teacher know it and calls on you. Thus my attention span as been put to work. I don’t think I have ever had to concentrate this hard for so long. This is an intense ordeal but I am told it will become easier as I get used to it. For the first day of class I spent 4+ hours memorizing 60 new characters, read through a dialogue and learn 10 or so grammatical structures. As the weeks have gone luckily I have been able to cut this time to about 3 hours. We start the class of with the quiz, then move through all the grammatical structures. The last half hour of class or so my class of four divides up into two and we have two students to a teacher, here we are able to read through all the characters with the teacher making sure all of our tones are correct. On the first day of class I discovered that all this time I have been doing my tones incorrect. I am very pleased to have discovered this early and the next day I was not corrected at all on my third tone.

 

The way we are learning Chinese is by topic, some of the topics we have covered have been globalization, unemployment, cultural preservation and traditional habits, traffic issues, the preservation of the environment, poverty and social welfare, and the legal system. These lessons very interesting but at the same time very difficult. Often I find myself trying to express my true opinion but lacking the proper vocabulary to say what I want. Instead we are forced to fall back into sentence patterns and examples that the teacher gives us. We often compare America and China, which is fine because the Chinese teachers want to know more about America, but it really annoys me when they make sweeping statements about the way the US is or the way China is, disallowing any room for nuanced thought. To give one example, just yesterday we were talking about intellectual property rights (知识产权 zhi1shi2chan3quan2 for those interested) and got on the topic of downloading music. I couldn’t quite express that I believe we shouldn’t pay Itunes for them to just pay record companies who then give a fraction of what they earn to the artists. I would rather just have the artists gain all the profits of a song bought online, but since record companies are the ones pulling so much of the profit from music sales I just download music here illegally (which by the way in China is completely legal, in fact their version of Google [Baidu] and Google.cn both have a section [like Google maps or Google translate] that links you directly to mp3s to download). Since I can’t elegantly explain this in Chinese I am just forced to say that I support downloading all music illegally and care nothing for the livelihood of the hardworking musicians.