Shuo Zongwen!! (Speak Chinese!)

So if you noticed in the video below, we were all speaking a combination of Chinese and English. Why? Well, in theory, IES has a language policy. We are supposed to speak Chinese all the time. Why just in theory? You can see that we all speak "Chinglish" - we use English grammar patterns and words and then throw in some Chinese now and then. That's our version of the language policy...chabuduo...

What happens when you don't keep the language policy? Well...your language policy grade goes down. Like mine does, on occasion...and when I say on occasion, I mean it's finally starting to go back up. The language pledge grade is a farce really...but I could just be bitter. Everyone knows that we don't keep the language pledge and while most people are ok-ish with it, some people are not, and speak Chinese 24/7. Those people are normally shunned because we thing it's pretentious to talk in Chinese amongst one another. These kids are also the ones with 100% language pledge grades. Bu hao.

So, one Monday, we come back to class with this posted on the bulletin board:


For real. Well, we all assumed it was one of the teachers doing...but no! It was one of the girl's in my level, Becca's doing. If you'd like to know, she is not one of the hardcore language pledge keepers...she just likes playing tricks on us! We all found this sign very assuming.

Why, you might ask? I mean, besides for the obvious, all the teacher's knew something was funny...but none of them knew what corporal punishment is!! So explaining the sign to them was quite a blast. (The teachers have very good - I assume - English reading and writing skills. Or at least most of the time...instead of saying cat fight, Gao has said "cat fat" and instead of hippie, Zhong has said "huppie". I know...I shouldn't complain...my Chinese is still worse than their English...I think...)

By the way, the word for hippie is "xipi", and the word for a cat fight would be "chao" - that means to quarrel but it's close enough for my purposes.

How do I learn enough vocab words to conduct conversations in Chinese? Besides for the 60+ vocab words a night (tonight we have 78) I have a tutor who I meet with for about 4-5 hours a week, plus a language partner who I found on my own.

The language partner is really great, because she not only speaks Chinese and English, but French as well! It's pretty great. I'll have a blog post on her and my tutor soon-ish.

Another added option for improving one's Chinese is the roommate. I say "option" because I came back on Wednesday night to find my roommate moving out of the room. I still do not have a new one...but that story will not be posted on my blog...mainly because I don't want to get killed by the Tibetan government (half joke-half not...)...but e-mail me if you want the full details! It really is quite the story!