* 8/6/09 11:08pm Day 33: My English is Getting Worse *

Today was SUPER fun, but, as always, I’m SUPER tired again. So I went to class like always… class is getting sort of boring. I feel like it’s going to slow…I want to learn how to make sentences and have dialogues, but we’re still spending the first 2 hours on finals, initials, and pinyin (just the sounds). And then we learn new words, but they’re only words, we don’t even learn how to use them in sentences. And then we go over some dialogues, which use SOME of the words, but not all. And they don’t teach us any grammatical structure or sentence structure, so we can’t even MAKE sentences using the words we know. But maybe there is not grammatical structure in Chinese. So far as I’ve observed there isn’t. So maybe that’s why I can’t figure out how to make sentences. It’s very frustrating…I’m only making sentences like “I like ….” Or “I am…” but I can’t say anything like “What did you eat for breakfast?” or “Where do you live?” It’s just frustrating, I think, because the other languages I have learned are more straightforward with a general sentence structure, so it was a lot easier to begin to use that language. But with Chinese it’s like, I have to know the EXACT sentence I want to say, otherwise I can’t say it. Sigh. And also, since I have a Chinese background, it’s a lot easier for me to pick up the language quickly, but for the Norwegians in the class, it’s SUPER hard. So the teacher has to go really slow with them, and then those of us who know it just sit around and wait for them to learn. I don’t blame them; I know it must be REALLY hard for them. They’ve never heard the sounds before, so it’s hard for them to hear the differences and make the sounds themselves, so I don’t blame them. But it’s just very frustrating because I feel like I only have a month here, and I want to learn as much as I can. And the teacher isn’t going as fast as she could be, because they’re struggling so much. That’s why I’m trying to do so much independent study...so I can learn more than she teaches in class. Hopefully that will help…I don’t know how well it will work. We’ll find out in a month though!

Anyways, that’s what we did in class. Same old, same old. After class, I came back to the hotel room and chatted with my mom a bit, then did some homework. Then, Raintree came over and helped me and Joanna with our Chinese! It was really fun having her over…she’s really funny, and SUPER cute! Even though she’s older than me, I feel like she’s younger than me because she’s so small and innocent. I really like her. She seems really eager to hang out with us too, because she wants to practice her English and also teach us Chinese, so we set up times to meet every week and stuff like that. Anyways, she stayed a LONG time, so she ended up leaving at like 5:15.

And then at 6, we went on a river cruise across the Huangpu river. It was organized by Fudan, so it’s part of the language course. So everyone who wanted to come was there, including some of my friends from class. It was really pretty, because we got on a nice boat and sailed around the river, seeing the financial district on the east bank and the Bund/old part on the west. Plus, it was really fun because I got to hang out with my friends. Tonight me and Joanna hung out with a Norwegian guy named Henrik, an Indonesian-born guy who now lives in Singapore named Alvand, a Korean guy named Kim, and a Japanese guy who went to school at UC Riverside and just recently moved to China named Tastuhiro (we call him Hiro though, because he likes to watch Heroes, and the Norwegian people couldn’t remember Tatsuhiro). So, as you can see, it was a pretty mixed group. But it made it all that much more fun J

After the cruise, the 6 of us went out to dinner. We went to this cute little café near the Fudan international students’ dorms. Omgosh…it was SO good. Maybe just because I’m sick of Chinese food though. But omgosh…I wish I could eat there everyday. I had a bacon & egg Panini. Goodness it was good. They also had pasta, sandwiches, omelettes, and other non-Chinese food. I wanted to order it all. Omgosh…it felt so good to go there. Everything was in English, and I was there with 5 non-Chinese students, and there was a white guy drinking soup and a Corona, and oh man it just felt so good. We were talking about it at dinner, and everyone agreed it felt like we were in America or Europe. Anyways, I wish I could go back…but it’s really expensive. The program’s budget for our food is 45 yuan per day, which is a little over $6. That’s pretty easy to do, if you’re eating cheap Chinese food all the time. But the international food here is really expensive…my Panini was 35 yuan (which is only $5, but that’s very expensive for food here). So…if I eat there everyday, I would only be able to eat one meal per day. Plus, it’s an 11 yuan taxi ride there, so that would already be over my budget.

Sigh, I can’t wait to go home. On one hand, I don’t want to go home because I’m meeting so many new people and having a lot of fun here. Also, I’m really determined to learn Chinese and what better place to learn it than China? It really gives me good opportunities to practice using what I learn. Especially now that the students from last month are gone, so there’s no one to order for me or tell the taxi drivers where to go. I’m pretty much on my own now, so it forces me to speak Chinese. I like it that way. But on the other hand, I miss home. I miss being home. I miss my family. I miss Disneyland. I miss my bed. I miss playing tennis. I miss the WEATHER!! I miss playing video games. I MISS TELEVISION IN ENGLISH. Oh gosh, I can’t even express what I would give to watch a cartoon in English. I miss high-speed internet. I miss American sandwiches and soup. I miss non-greasy food. I miss home-cooked food. I miss my cellphone. I miss having a closet. I want to go home! But I don’t want to go home. It’s a paradox.

I’m finding that my English is getting worse because I’m speaking to so many international students. When I speak to the Chinese students, sometimes I try to make my sentences less complicated and talk slow so that they’ll better understand me. And then later, when I talk to Joanna, I talk slowly for a while until I realize that she can understand me if I speak normally. I also tend to omit words now. Just little words, like “the” and “a,” but it still makes me sound like a fob. The sad thing is, though, I don’t even have anything to show for it. Usually if your English is getting bad while you’re learning another language, it’s because you’re starting to get used to the rules of the other language and forgetting the rules of English. But nope, I’m not even getting better at Chinese. Just getting worse at English. I also find myself thinking with a Norwegian accent now. I know it sounds weird, but it’s happening. I don’t think in sentences all the time because, well, no one does (we think in ideas? Or at least more abstract terms.). But when I do think in sentences, sometimes it has a Norwegian accent. I don’t even know how that would begin happening. I know that when you hang out with someone with an accent, you start to pick up that accent, but I haven’t even hung out with the Norwegians for that long, and why would that accent penetrate into my thoughts? Weird, I know. Maybe those Norwegians have some sort of Jedi mind tricks they’re playing on me. I wouldn’t be surprised. They’re a crafty bunch, they are.