Let me say first that lately I have not been able to find a computer capable of uploading all of my awesome photos and for that I apologize.
Today, I want to explain the hardest thing I'm having to cope with here and it has to do with the Chinese language. I know it's suppoesed to be the most difficult language to learn in the world, and I'll admit, it is proving to be more difficult to pick up than German was, but that's not my problem. Really, to me and my associate exchange students, the grammer is relatively simple (the trick being to forget everything that makes English great, like "the" and plural nouns and tenses) you don't have to conjugate verbs like in German and pronunciation takes practice and attention, but that is just another important aspect of any language.
No, the true difficulty with Chinese is getting native speakers to help me speak it without having them resort to using English every time the conversation strays into something I haven't learned yet and therefore don't understand. It's in not flipping out when the way some people speak to me in English sounds like they're mocking me and inside saying, "You foreign knucklehead, I can speak your language, why don't you just give up on mine. It would be a lot easier."
However, I didn't expect learning any new language to be easy, but when every Taiwanese person comes back to the idea that "Oh, Chinese very difficult to learn" it gets very old. Actually, the nicest thing I heard today was when, in Chinese class, we were making question sentences and so everyone is practicing out loud and the teacher said, "See, it's easy!" I could have cried because it was the first time anyone here had ever given me that kind of encouragement.
My point is that Chinese isn't, in itself, a hard language to learn. It takes time, practice, and patience. The other things I mentioned, though, take time, practice, and patience, as well as self-control, humor, and all kinds of love.
No, the true difficulty with Chinese is getting native speakers to help me speak it without having them resort to using English every time the conversation strays into something I haven't learned yet and therefore don't understand. It's in not flipping out when the way some people speak to me in English sounds like they're mocking me and inside saying, "You foreign knucklehead, I can speak your language, why don't you just give up on mine. It would be a lot easier."
However, I didn't expect learning any new language to be easy, but when every Taiwanese person comes back to the idea that "Oh, Chinese very difficult to learn" it gets very old. Actually, the nicest thing I heard today was when, in Chinese class, we were making question sentences and so everyone is practicing out loud and the teacher said, "See, it's easy!" I could have cried because it was the first time anyone here had ever given me that kind of encouragement.
My point is that Chinese isn't, in itself, a hard language to learn. It takes time, practice, and patience. The other things I mentioned, though, take time, practice, and patience, as well as self-control, humor, and all kinds of love.
1 comment:
Patience, weedhopper is the key to happiness. As my daily doorperson would say Wan sheng ha when she opened my taxi door I would say the same back, then she would form the sound very tight with her teeth to lip and say it again, and i would repeat again Wan sheng ha, and with out the use of a lemon the sound was identical. What festival is coming soon? anything?
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