Oh Yeah...Class...

I know this might be hard to believe, but I do go to class! Surprise!

Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, we have 4 hours of Chinese class. Everyday we have a dictation, and then on Friday's we have a large test or a presentation. It's pretty brutal. Yes, my Chinese is improving, but it comes at the sake of my soul. Sigh.

I've written to a few of you about my current issue: I am at a plateau. I am coming to the end of this plateau, but it's been hard. Basically, I've been understanding A TON, but cannot find the words to vocalize what I want to say. Additionally, when I do vocalize what I want to say, my tones are off.

All of you know that Chinese is a tonal language - if I'm off a tone I can say "hemp" instead of "horse". I might even be saying mother, instead of saying horse. We all know how important the word horse is in my vocabulary!

So I have enrolled myself in optional pronunciation classes. Yesterday, I described this class to my father as "anal rape". No, I don't know what anal rape feels like, but I assume it's as painful as this class. 15 minutes turned into 40, one-on-one with my Chinese teacher, Zhong Laoshi. We call Zhong Laoshi the cute Laoshi. She's in the 2nd photo, on the left wearing a red hoodie. This photo does not show her cuteness, but trust me, we all want to put her in our handbags and walk around with her. She is cute. But I digress; she was riding me like I would ride Kohe - everything I did was wrong. My tones were off, I couldn't say anything right...it was pretty bad. (But hey, I didn't burst into tears! Side note: I once had a hellish 10th grade French class where I cried afterwards. No joke.)

Anyway, that was yesterday, and today started a new day. Today's small class (we have a big class with 12 people for 1.5 hours, then the rest of class is small class with 6 people). Jia Laoshi taught small class. She's in the 2nd picture, next to Zhong Laoshi. Jia Laoshi is also cute. More lenient that Zhong Laoshi, and kinda lets the class walk over her. Oops. Anyway, the class kinda dissovled into a free for all, and because she doesn't have an English name, my class came up with one for here: Juliette. We like Julie originally (Hi Julie! I miss you!!!) but Julie Jia doesn't sound too good...

The top picture is Liu Laoshi, by the way. We all LOVE her. She subbed for us one day because Lu Laoshi (really, it's hard for us to keep track of their names, too) is on a trip with the other section of IES kids. She's posing with the vocab sentances. Oy.

The video below is a mock job interview did one day in class. That's DJ and Sebastien infront of the camera; the female voice is me talking in Chinese. Yes...this will be the first and probably last time you will ever hear me speak in Chinese. Enjoy it while its lasts....


ps - in the scheme of fairness, I do have one more teacher, Gao Laoshi, and in the sake of fairness I will also say she is cute. And she has a really pimp pair of eyeglasses that I wish she'd wear more often 'cause they are really cool looking....