In my spare time

My Chinese is not very good.  In fact, considering I’ve lived here for five years, you might even be justified in labeling it as pitiful.  There are some things that I’m quite fluent in.  Bargaining phrases and vocabulary?  Got those down.  Food?  Got it.  Normal everyday conversation?  Ummm…not quite.  I could heap up a whole load of excuses such as I’m a full time teacher, I’m working on a master’s degree, and various other responsibilities that eat up my time.  However, the simple fact is that with a little more effort my Chinese could be a lot better than it is now.  My first couple years in China, I was certain I would be headed back to the States the next year, and consequently I didn’t set language learning as a high priority.  In addition, I’m going to be honest, I don’t particularly enjoy studying Chinese.  I love the end result of studying it, but I have found the process quite painful.  This feeling likely arises from the fact that the process is one of the most humbling tasks I’ve ever attempted.

All that being said, this semester I decided to join a real Chinese class at the university.  I figured I would have a great deal more motivation to study and learn if I was in a legitimate classroom setting, as opposed to having Chinese students who are patient with me to a fault privately tutor me.  I also figured it couldn’t hurt to be forced to listen to and attempt to understand non-stop Chinese speaking for six hours a week.  While my oral and listening skills may be slightly beyond beginner level, I decided to start with the entry level because I haven’t really studied characters in the past.  Foreigners looking for the quickest way to learn Chinese neglect the characters (myself included), but I’m convinced there is some secret key to understanding the language hidden in these complex conglomerations of lines and dashes.  And so, I joined about twelve other Korean foreign exchange students in the entry level class meeting three times a week.

We learn around around 75 new words and phrases every week.  Which means, when I find spare time, I write characters.  Again and again and again and again.  It’s the only way I can get them to stick in my head.  And it’s the only way I can have a hope of passing the dictation quizzes our teacher loves to give.  I’m not actually taking the course for credit, so I don’t need to pass or even really take the quizzes.  However, the nerd, or over-achiever, or competitive streak (take your pick) within me pushes me on to want to succeed.

I’ve actually been quite surprised by how much I (usually) enjoy my class.  There is nothing like the satisfaction of realizing I just read an entire one page dialogue only looking at characters.  Or that I was able to read and answer questions only with characters.  There are triumphant moments when everything seems to come together with surprising clarity.  In these moments I think, “There actually is hope that one day I could really learn this language!”

However, there are also days when I leave class a hundred times more confused then when I came.  In these classes, I frantically write down characters from the powerpoint in the hopes of finding a student who later can decipher what my teacher was so patiently attempting to teach our class.  On these days, I often find myself thinking, “I will never be able to learn this language.”  Today was one of those days.  The blessing of these days is that I can better empathize with my own students, which gives me a great deal more patience in my classroom.

So yes, in my spare time, you will find me bent over a pad of paper trying to remember which direction to put the next dash.  When I don’t have spare time, I’ve luckily found a very useful “crutch.”  I discovered there is a free Chinese-English dictionary for the I*pod touch.  This program allows me to draw a character with my finger, and then gives me the meaning.  This crutch is immensely helpful in class, but I know will only perpetuate my “limping along” in Chinese.  And so I will write.  And write some more.