I'm not planning on posting every day, but I'm at the internet cafe attempting to solve my computer programs, so here I am anyway. If my laptop ever gets fixed who knows how much I'll be posting, and maybe even with pictures! for now...
times change fast around here. The two biggest changes are pretty obvious: I can only speak chinese for the next nine weeks, barring emergencies and the present situation of heckling dell into giving me a new hard drive. The second is that classes started! I was planning to talk more about the former until I actually went to my first class today - and actually, I think I'm still going to do that, with a brief mention of how class went.
So, since I thought the language pledge was already in effect when I got here, it's not like all that much changed in my interactions with china, really. The difference is talking to other folks who I'd spent the last couple of days chatting to in english, suddenly only able to have stumbling conversations with each other. Yesterday when everyone signed the pledge, they all walked out and started giggling to each other and trying their first stumbling chinese sentences. and for some reason, I was frustrated. I'm not usually this grumpy, but the thing is that you're here to master chinese. you're supposed to be able to speak it - it shouldn't tickle you that you can say five words. I don't know why it bothered me - maybe I was the one taking it too seriously.
Most of the folks I've been hanging out with are better speakers than I am. A lot of them are people I already knew by some way or another - a high school buddy at harvard and a couple of friends from yale. I wouldn't say that it's a deliberate strategy, but I've really enjoyed talking to people who are better speakers than I am so far. They're not so much better that I can't keep up with them, but I feel like I learn a lot from them just in passing, even in the manner of discourse. You might wonder if it's the blind leading the blind, but a fourth year student is probably closing on fluency. It's remarkable how much everyday stuff I've learned, even as I start forgetting stuff. Think of a pot of water boiling over.
The most interesting thing I was planning to write about is what I'm planning to do about my Scrabbling. For those of you who don't know, I like Scrabble. A lot. And while I spent the last semester essentially Scrabbleless as I struggled to get my act together and graduate, when I got back to Boston the last couple of weeks before coming here I suddenly started playing a lot of Scrabble. It didn't take too long for the urge to get rekindled, to the point that I promised myself I was going to get serious and try to learn all the words over the course of this next year. My method - going through the dictionary page by page, crossing out the words I know and then going back through and making a flashcard for every two pages, one a day, and then putting them into a study program (zyzzyva, for those in the know). The thing is that with the language pledge, I wonder how kosher it is to be doing it - and more importantly, whether it ultimately hurts my Chinese to be doing such a thing. I'm inclined to say no, except that I'm learning so much every day that adding 25 new english words is a legitimate burden. I'm sort of trapped between my two interests. I feel similarly about ultimate - it's certainly less obvious, but in ultimate you're always talking on the field, and english is the lingua franca. is that violating the pledge? should I care?
I don't think I'll be happy negating scrabble and ultimate for a year, so I guess it's a matter of finding a balance. as always.
tutorial time! more later.
"You might wonder if it's the blind leading the blind..."
ReplyDeleteGood comment. Actually, THE most important thing at your level is to get over the worry of speaking correctly and simply become more and more comfortable speaking - until, eventually, it feels like second nature. Quantity trumps quality at this point, so trust it!
"I wonder how kosher it is to be doing it..."
Research in the field is pretty clear that students who decompress in small ways like that are both far less likely to burn out and often come away with a more balanced view of the experience overall.