End of Week One

Today I had my first test, thus ending my first week of classes. Tests are divided into two parts: a written exam and an oral exam. The written exam is 2 hours long and consists of translations, multiple choice, and reading comprehension questions. For the oral exam, we need to recite a short essay we wrote and memorized earlier in the week. The whole affair is pretty stressful. Since every night we have so much work, we don't really have time to review previous lessons. The week's lessons add up to a couple hundred characters and several dozen sentence structures, that we have to cram in in addition to our regular homework. As a result, I don't think anyone got much sleep last night. The test itself is not terribly difficult, just enormously frustrating when there is one character out of hundreds you studied that you can't remember. The oral exam was much easier than I thought it would be. After speaking only Chinese for the past week, memorizing 2 paragraphs of Chinese that I wrote took only 20 minutes. I'll soon know if it was as simple as I thought.

After the exam, we had a Chinese Class lunch. Every Tuesday and Friday, the teachers take their classes out to lunch. It is a good opportunity to practice Chinese with the teachers in an informal setting. The teachers also know what to order so lunch is much better than when we order on our own. Everyone is in good spirits because the week is over. It's a win-win. After lunch, everyone is exhausted and passes out in their room.

Even though we've only been here for a week, already everyone walks around the campus and surrounding area like they own the place, recommending restaurants to teachers and strangers and talking loudly in mediocre Chinese. We get some bemused looks, but in general the people on the campus are now accustomed to our presence. Our Chinese has gotten much more fluid, not necessarily much better grammatically, but we can definitely communicate our ideas and thoughts a lot faster, at least to each other. We still have to sidestep around words or sentence structures we don't know, but in general we can carry a conversation.

Talking with the teachers is definitely an ego check, since they correct every mistake we make. However I try to talk to the teachers as much as possible, because it's the only way my Chinese will improve in its accuracy. Every school night the teachers have office hours in our dorm building for several hours. I try to go every night because it not only improves my Chinese but it also increases my homework scores. It can get frustrating talking to the teachers for long periods of time, but every night it becomes easier to understand what they are saying the first time they say it.

Tomorrow we were supposed to go to the Great Wall, but because of recent bad weather, we are rescheduling. Apparently there is a backup activity planned, but for now it is a secret. I hope you're as excited as I am.

MS