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
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.
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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