photo: MTC. Pretty imposing huh? You'll laugh when you see inside.
I have settled into quite a good routine now, when it isn't upset by illness that is....
10am Finish at the gym, walk home to deposit gym gear before cycling to school.
10.30-11am Arrive at MTC, a 15 minute bike ride away. I've gotten into the habit of getting an iced black coffee at Dunkin' Donuts every morning. It's cheap and perks me up. It helps that the straw is a pretty colour too! Head to the library for a review of yesterday's class, study for a test if there is one that day.
If there is no test and I'm up to date on homework, there are also some other options. A variety of different "big classes" held in a lecture theatre on subjects such as "Chinese in Everyday Life", "Learning Chinese through Song", "Taiwanese TV Drama" etc etc.
There are also listening labs where you can sit in front of a computer watching a movie in Chinese or listening to the textbook audio.
Spot my time card on the desk. We need to log five hours of study per week in the library, these labs or the lectures. A government requirement! This or deportation....
Noon. Usually bump into people for lunch. At this point I'm disappointed by our very limited repertoire but every few days we find something new so we're slowly getting there.
Somedays it is Chinese but other days I just crave something more like home.
2.20pm Attend class. My class has 8 people, 4 Japanese, 1 Indonesian, 1 Korean and 1 British student. The teacher usually bases the lesson loosely on the textbook, going around the room and asking us questions to make sure we understand that grammar etc.
16.10pm Finish class and head to the library to do my homework. On any given day this could be using the new words in sentences, writing a short paragraph or just studying for a dictation of new words or the final test we have whenever we finish a chapter (once a week.)
Learning new words is pretty tedious and makes up the bulk of what we all spend our library time doing. We need to remember how to write the character, how to pronounce it (the pinyin), what tone is used (4 to choose from) and of course it's meaning. It's a painfully simple process for me... writing the character over and over and over and over until I've got it. It makes me feel like we're all in kindergarten again but no one said learning Chinese was fun...
Can you spot the difference between the traditional (highlighted) and the simplified characters (in brackets)? I've just finished making flashcards for every word that differs between the two... there are a lot!
No comments:
Post a Comment