university

Studying at university again is fun. For the last two and a bit weeks I've been studying Chinese at Suzhou University from 8.30am each morning until 11.50am. The lessons are all in Chinese which is actually really good - just what I have needed to boost my language skills along a little bit. Learning a foreign language in your native language is really slow going and I think, quite limiting. It then becomes a language built around translation, which is difficult to maintain. By hearing everything in Chinese, hopefully we will start to imitate our teacher more and more - which is probably the main way that children learn language. At first of course, it is probably useful to learn Chinese in English.

Our class is small - 15 students at last count. 8 Korean, 3 American, 1 American/Pakistan, 1 Czech Republic, 1 German and me. I'm quite lucky because many of the other classes have 20-30+ students. We are all at a fairly equal level which is also useful, however, there is 1 Korean woman with terrible pronunciation who unfortunately speaks in a really loud voice, which the less intuitive teachers hear and then assume that all of us are struggling with pronunciation. If she'd only drop down to a lower level class, then we'd all be a bit happier. Anyway, I'd rather feel like the classes are a little slow, than too fast. The one area that is moving fast is the characters. On our very first day we were required to learn 7 characters, on the second day 10 new characters, the third day 14 new characters etc... This pace will no doubt continue, but with around 3000-5000 characters needed to understand and read in China, its understandable why they introduce them so fast.

I just went for lunch at a restaurant with Nina (my German classmate) and Lenke (my Czech classmate). It was fun - we ordered a bunch of dishes having no idea what any of them were, as there weren't many pictures, and we couldn't quite understand the characters. I just found out from my boss that the main dish we were eating was Pig Intestines. We kinda had a feeling it was going to be one of 'those' dishes, we were just hoping it wasn't dog, or cat, so I think I can live with that. In China eating a part of the body is supposed to be good for that part in your body. So hopefully, I've just down a bit of good work for my intestines!