2015/07/04

Let the Brutality Begin

First day of classes. My language partner brought me breakfast! Just want to mention again, the language partners are doing this on a volunteer basis just after finishing their summer classes. He walked me and my roommate to class so we knew where we were going. Breakfast was a really tasty pork sandwich with some veggies on it and black tea, which unfortunately I ate while walking, so didn't get a picture.























Some sights while walking to class

8 people in my class including me and my roommate, I really should have gotten a picture of the teacher, she's straight out of a comic book. She jumps around, sings, makes cool gestures and noises lol, and admitted she was 36, but easily looks 10 years younger. Pic will come on the next blog or so.

Class is.... hard.... It's over my head, but does feel within reach so I wouldn't want to drop a level. I just truly realized how bad my listening skills are. My Chinese isn't bad when writing because I get to take my time and look stuff up haha, but listening (which admittedly is the whole reason for language) is quite poor. We received two homework assignments, one of which I understood the instructions, but the second I was so lost on. Thankfully I found out the next day the assignment was to get familiar with the vocabulary because we used it to ask other students questions. Our teacher is seriously wonderful though. She speaks at just the right pace, and enunciates  everything so clearly that I can catch all the words she's saying, I just don't understand what all of them mean. So many things are quite fundamental too that I just forgot or didn't learn. The problem there being 1000+ things may be fundamental to a language so learning them all just takes time and practice. I was pretty good at Chinese in Arkansas, but it was child's play compared to this level of integration. A couple of the people in my class have already spent time in the People's Republic of China in Shanghai and Beijing, so are kinda tearing it up, but aren't like way out of the ballpark of our class skill level, I'm just definitely on the lower end of it. Next blog post I really start to get discouraged though... 


Some shots from the school

2 hour classes, but we do take a water break in the middle which is nice

So for lunch Felix and Chad took my dorm-mate and myself to a cafeteria on the lower floor of the 成功大學 Hospital on campus. It was a little bit strange walking through a hospital to go get lunch as I'm sure you can imagine. 
Payed less than $2 USD for this, and it was quite good. The cafeteria was set up like a Subway or something so you pick out 6 things you want along with rice or noodles. I only know how to order tofu, so just kinda pointed at the rest and even if it wasn't exactly what I thought I was pointing at, I just kinda nodded haha. It ended up being quite tasty though, so it all worked out. 

First culture class, taught but this professor from the University of Hawaii. It was about how integrated Daoism is into Taiwanese culture from the beggar to the elite and how the practices from several hundreds of years are still in play even in a large metropolitan area such as Tainan which is the city I'm in. It was super fascinating and I'm excited for more of these type of classes. 

Next class is "Adjusting to Traditional Characters from Simplified" down this hall. The staff is basically asking us to be able to recognize traditional characters that we've been using the simplified version of. The teacher went into a pretty long discussing about why we should only use Traditional. They are harder yes, but they represent the true idea behind the character. Each Chinese character is a beautiful story on it's own, and simplified characters abridge that story into something not as beautiful. Our homework comes in both simplified and traditional versions, and I'm trying really hard to only complete the traditional character version. 

Sneaked this photo in. 林老師 is a wonderfully quirky woman. She said her English voice is too sexy for us, so she could only speak in Chinese. She also declared one of the students her 男朋友 or boyfriend. I caught maybe 50% of what she was talking about specifically, but the idea that simplified characters are inferior was definitely presented. Some kids were pretty butt hurt that she only spoke Chinese and ending up leaving during the break. It was quite challenging to keep up with her, but hey, I didn't fly all this way to learn nothing, so gotta stick with it and work hard.
 Some water break shots

After that class we went and had dinner at this Korean barbecue place. 



So learned something new, Korean chopsticks are flat and metal. I was the laugh at the table trying to grab small piece of meat while barely being able to hold the bastards. Now after some research, I found that there's a special way to hold them, which I had not figured out at the time. I really should be taking more pictures of my friends and not just the food haha! 



After that we went and got bubble tea, which may have not been the best idea haha but it was pretty dang tasty. Watched some traffic, tried to explain where Arkansas is to another Taiwanese student (this is quite a common thing now, should really just have a map on me at all times). Anyway, after my Korean barbecue and bubble tea I went back to the dorm with my dorm-mate. He started studying, and I slipped into a coma of being so damn full. I've been going to bed by like 10pm lately haha, it's actually pretty nice other than waking up at 4ish. On the next blog post my early-rising will pay off when I get a couple really sweet shots of the morning.

Hope you all are enjoying the blog! The next couple posts will have some good stuff in them then classes kick back off so not sure what all I'll be getting into. 

謝謝你們!- 張洋
 (so my name is made based on Mainland China's standards and is a little strange over here... thinking about adding another character because three character names are a Taiwanese thing.... I'm still not sure)



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