Written on Friday, October 12

Apologies for not updating any earlier. It had been my hope to get some pictures out with this update, but the camera seems to be having problems connecting to my laptop. I'll continue working on that.

This update's pretty much about my current class schedule. I have four hours of classes Monday to Friday from 8:00 AM to noon, and all classes are in Chinese. The first two hours on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and the last two hours on Tuesday and Thursday are the main class, General Chinese. This is the class that mainly focuses on grammar, diction and common usage. Primarily this is a lecture class, although it also has a fair amount of memorizing and reciting the lessons (a common practice in China, from elementary all the way to high school). The teacher for most of the classes is awesome - major poetry geek (like me), also greatly interested in history, especially ancient military history, which is part of what got me interested in learning Chinese initially (the books "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" are a realistic fiction version of the events after the fall of the Han Dynasty in China).

Monday and Wednesday are Listening Comprehension classes. These are tough. Imagine trying to listen to a conversation through a bad speaker. Now imagine that it's the recording that the flaw and not the people speaking or the machines you're using to listen to it, and that mishearing one syllable will cause you to miss the answer. That's Listening Comprehension. Fortunately, it's not a very fast-paced class despite this.

Tuesday and Thursday are Reading Comprehension, which is tough because it's fast-paced and taught by another teacher who I'm not as good as tracking, but it is quite interesting despite that. We cover about thirty characters every day in this in addition to what's covered in our daily class, and learn the stroke order for newer characters. Sometimes discussion starts on what we've been reading about; one of the assignments this weekend is to visit the Summer Palace, which I intend to do Saturday. The teacher for this class is a bit more serious-minded, but still very cool and quite understanding.

Fridays are Speaking classes. This is mainly just adlibbing a conversation, which I can usually manage to do even if I manage to mangle sentence structure a bit - if I don't remember how to format something, I revert to a basic Chinese sentence instead of an English format, so it's usually at least comprehendable. It would be nice to have this more than once a week, but not much I can do there.

All the classes also have a lot of homework assigned, so it tends to be more like six to eight hours a day of study, which is about the same as at home. The primary difference is that there tend to be practical exams every time I leave campus.

All in all, quite fun; I'll try and get pictures of the places I've seen up by next week!

-Tom