Learning Chinese in Kunming I - 在昆明学习汉语

My first week coming into Kunming was pretty militant-style. After roughly 24 hours in the way, I reached the apartment on Sunday evening, but seeing that the hour-difference would not be sleeping-friendly anyway, I opted into immediate exploration of some of Kunming's nightlife. More on that in the next post about Kunming itself, but this means I ended up back to the apartment at around 2AM.

Next morning, bright and early, I was ready for my schooling experience to begin at 8:30 AM (that's 1:30AM on my bio-clock). Having reached the "school" - an apartment 2 floors under the apartment I'm staying in - I found out that they decided to take pity of me, and postpone the class by an hour. Later at the end if the day, I found out that taking pity of me actually meant deleting one hour rather then postponing, as they let me know that the program is one hour less then what I figured. (this has later been settled, after I had to take them through some of the Emails they have sent me)

Anyway, this first day was only 3 hours - but a real treat. As might have been expected, there is no real plan-of-action, and I'd say they're as amateur as it gets - rather arbitraging between lowly-paid young tutors and highly paying foreigners. This was to be expected to some degree, but I thought they'd have some sort of a school general program, recommended books to follow, would be familiar with industry available courses, ...

But of course this was not to be - me mentioning in advance the type of self-studying and material I was using had zero meaning, when I asked them about supporting material (as in Chinese-study books) that drew some long blank stares. Eventually they gave me a good book that I can work through with my teacher on - that book is from somewhere in the deep 90's, teach says words are not really used these days, and as it turned out, this was one book out of a set of five, which is only used for the extra listening exercises (only no CD attached). Told me no problem getting the other parts in any bookstore, but of course nobody in any bookstore has heard of these books in the last 10 years.

No better way to practice a few words in Chinese than over a Chongqing-style Hot Pot.

Still, by 9:30 we were there, me and my teacher bunked in one of the rooms in the office/ school, and off we go ...

The one rule that this school did decide to adopt as part of their serious-business philosophy - "No English in class". Awesome. So I spent the first day - 3 hours straight listening to my teacher speaking Chinese. It can be a lot of fun. And specially when you are on an extreme jetleg, this can be extra useful, as you can feel less apologetic about not really following what is being said, and can float back and forth between complete day-dreaming and quasi-following of the teacher's gestures.

I have to give it to her - she can really carry a monologue. No problem starting to speak at 9:30, and naturally stopping to speak at 12:30, as planned.
From the little I could gather from a few key-words in English (shhh... don't tell the school) she allowed herself to put in between, gestures etc, it seems like she was mainly going around about our non-existent plan for my schooling.Something around us picking up different subjects of importance (food/ restaurant, travel, money, shopping, ...), creating a story around those, and then practicing using the key sentences from the story.

But I already figured out the plan: It's like one of those movies - you've all seen those. The foreigner falls captive in a small remote village up in the mountains, understanding not one word. They keep talking to him in a language he does not understand, and over time (usually visualized through a few seasons changing), the Chinese/ Japanese/ Korean/ Vietnamese naturally changes into English to represent the Foreigner's natural adaption of the language.

Guess they've been watching too many of those movies ... not to mention that I don't really have a few seasons to spend in this school.

Of course, I had to take a bit of control of my own schooling ...

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