-So it has been a long time since my last entry, but there is good reason for that: not too many eventful things have happened. I’m at the point where I’ve settled in pretty well to my routine, and there aren’t many new and crazy things I do during the day. That isn’t to say I’m not enjoying myself; I’m still having a blast!
-I’ve been hanging out at the Study English Bar a lot lately. It started when we didn’t have internet in our dorm because they have free wireless, delicious free beverages (the first time there they gave us kiwi milk tea—soooooo good), and plenty of Chinese-speakers eager to converse with you! So now I’ve gotten in the habit of bringing my laptop and schoolwork there a couple times a week. It’s a great place to do my Chinese homework because if I have a question about anything, I can just ask anybody there. I got my best grade so far on my latest weekly journal because I had people there look over it and give me suggestions.
-I’m also really happy at how many people I’ve been able to meet there. I now have a few people I exchange emails with. It’s unbelievable how much of a difference it makes to have native speakers to practice Chinese with. I feel like I’m starting to turn the corner in my understanding of the language. A while ago I realized that my biggest problem was I didn’t know hardly any vocabulary. So I decided to work on memorizing as many helpful terms as I could and to just throw them together in a sentence, worrying about grammar later. It worked, because by conversing with native speakers I started to pick up on how their sentences are structured. The next step for me is to improve my listening comprehension, which I suppose mostly means vocabulary. I can express myself pretty well, but if someone speaks to me I often have to think for a minute before I fully understand what they said. My teacher and some friends have told me that watching Chinese TV actually helps a lot. It gets your ears attuned to the language. So I think when I’m sitting in my room doing nothing, I’ll trying turning on the tube for a while.
-The weather has been surprisingly nice lately. I guess it’s becoming Spring! The more I think about it, the more the New Year here makes sense. Whereas ours happens randomly in the middle of the bleak, cold winter, the Chinese New Year takes place at the end of the winter. So the new year actually feels new, as the weather begins to warm up. I’m amazed how on 40-degree days we’ve been ecstatic as to how nice the weather is. Back home I would be huddled up in a blanket in front of the fire. I guess my body is toughening up! Apparently the temp got up to 50 degrees this week! Simply amazing. There have also been several days of blue skies, something that just doesn’t happen here. I learned last week that there are mountains outside of
-Thursday I began my first day teaching English at the study bar! It was actually a bit harder than I was expecting. They just gave me a “common phrases” book (that had obviously seen better days) and put me in front of a class. Most of the students that day were also coming for their first time, so I wasn’t exactly sure where I should start. It was an adult class, so everyone could speak really well. They just needed to learn commonly used colloquial phrases. It was difficult to find where to start, but once I got started on a subject it became really easy to find related topics to jump to. I taught them things like “going off on a tangent” (because I seemed to keep doing that), “take a hike” and “put on an act.” By the end they were just asking me various questions, like the difference between jogging and hiking, American holidays, and other stuff. I’ll be teaching again at 6pm today, I hope it goes well again!
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