You thought work was tough....

It's been awhile since I have written about school, so today I thought I would share with everyone how STRESSED I am, along with a few of my classmates.

The first few lessons were going along quite nicely, however both the Foundation Chinese and the Listening Chinese classes have definitely moved more quickly in the past week. In learning Chinese, one needs to determine how to say the word correctly, ie. peng is said like puung, one needs to determine the tone, then one has to learn how to spell the word correctly in pinyin, and last one has to learn to write the Chinese character.

Today, we are moving towards longer sentence structures. Personally, I like the short ones, but if one wants to learn the language properly one should try and speak the entire sentence. Our teacher had us review the initials and finals and currently there are over 400 of them, and that is without the tones. The initial would be the first part of the word, ie xiao, x would be the initial and iao is the final. Multiply that by 4 and you get the picture. As for our Listening Chinese class, she puts the tapes on and we have to determine what the initials and finals, along with the tones. Unfortunately, this is not a multiple choice exercise and when you hear this, x, q and, j, all start to sound alike. Perhaps not to the trained ear, but for us beginners, pretty much sounds the same. The poor teacher wanted us to hand in our work after this little test and the class revolted, so we get to do this all over again this week.

Everyone leaves depressed after this class, but as one of our classmates declared, "think about what we know, we've only had classes for 2 1/2 weeks." We looked at each other, and patted ourselves on the back. We felt so much better.