Chinese classes

Last Monday (my second full day here) those who had studied Chinese before had to do a test in order for the university to place them in a suitable class. We turned up to the Overseas Education College, a 15 minute walk/7 minute cycle away from our dormitories, at 9am and were split into different rooms.

The first part of the assessment was an oral test. We all waited around while one person at a time went to talk to a teacher, there were one or two teachers per room. While we were waiting we were given a form to fill in giving basic info such as name, nationality and student number as well as how many years we'd studied Chinese and where. There was no order to the waiting, just whoever barged their way through to the teach first, so I ended up waiting quite a while before I could go and talk to her. The teacher glanced at my form and asked me some questions about it. She then asked if it was my first time in China which meant telling her that I was born in Hong Kong and lived there for the first 7 years of my life, as well as visiting Beijing, Xi 'an, Nanjing, Suzhou, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Macau. She asked me if I'd learnt any Chinese whilst living in Hong Kong and I said yes but that I don't remember much as I was so young! 

After this she gave me a short text to read to check my knowledge of characters. Unfortunately, I've never been very confident with speaking foreign languages so when I was 80% sure I knew the pronunciation of a character, I still didn't say it and she had to tell me what it was. The text was about a foreigner and his struggles with Chinese life including finding it difficult to wake up for 8am classes (I thought 9ams were bad enough!) and finding Chinese greetings strange. The Chinese don't greet people by asking "How are you?" as we would in English, instead they ask things like "Have you eaten yet?" "Where are you going?" "What are you doing?" etc. To a westerner this may be seen as a bit intrusive and the guy in the text got a bit bothered by it, the teacher asked me if these greetings made me angry and I told her that they didn't. What's wrong with people being friendly? She then filled in the bottom of my form and told me that for someone who had only studied Chinese for two years, my level was quite good which was nice of her!

Next was the written test. I went along to another room and gave the teacher there my slip of paper and got a question paper and answer sheet in return. This test was very difficult. It was a multiple choice test filling in the gaps in a sentence. I found that sometimes I could understand all of the characters but still not know what to put in the gap! Different combinations of Chinese characters lead to different meanings so even though you may know the characters that make up a word, you may not know what the word actually means. I ended up guessing most of it and it seems that a lot of other people did the same having spoken to them afterwards. 

Two days later the class lists and timetables were published on one notice board in a dark corridor. Everyone crowded around trying to search for their name, made all the more difficult by the fact that it was Chinese names on the list rather than English ones! I resorted to looking at the nationality column instead as there aren't that many 英国人(British people) here. After minutes of struggling my way through to the board and searching for my Chinese name, I finally found it on a class list and went to the room listed at the top to meet my teacher. It turned out that they'd put all 4 Southampton MFL students together in the same class which meant that I definitely knew people! After very briefly meeting the teacher we went to buy textbooks. The textbooks for our class were called Developing Chinese Elementary (II). We had to buy a general textbook, a listening one (including answer book) and an oral one, adding up to 185元（about £19). Excited at getting into studying Chinese again after a few months, I opened the first page. The first thing on the vocab list was 入乡随俗（when in Rome... ). The first thing on the vocab list in Nanjing last summer was also 入乡随俗so this bothered me a bit knowing that I had studied it before.

Later on I read through the rest of the vocab list; I knew 24 out of the 28 supposedly new words and expressions which was not a good sign. Normally I'll know maybe 2 or 3 of the words on a new vocab list! I decided to try out the class anyway on Monday to see if it would be worth moving up and the timetable had Fridays off which is great! Unfortunately I was right about the classes not being challenging enough so I've now bought a whole new set of textbooks and moved to the next class up. Bye bye Fridays off! At the moment we have Friday classes on Sunday to make up for missed classes because of the holiday this week (Chinese don't seem to understand the concept of a holiday?) which means 8am Chinese oral class this Sunday! I don't blame them for my class placement though as it must be hard to place so many people at the right level and most people do seem to be happy in the classes they've been placed in. I could have stayed in the one I was put in but fancied more of a challenge. I am very happy with my new class and it's the same on as my room mate, Hilary, so we can study together and make sure we both get up in the morning!

The list for the option classes has just come out so I'll try some of those in the next few weeks. The one I most like the sound of is 唱歌学汉语(Learning Chinese through song) but other options include Chinese traditional medicine, calligraphy and Kungfu.

My large collection of new textbooks!