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

I had to take things a bit into my own hands, apparently.

For the next day, I went to sleep rather early, and got to class equipped with some energy drinks and a bunch of my own ideas on picking up Chinese. And I don't only mean me finding opportunities to use my 3 words' worth of vocabulary on the streets.

My teacher quickly figured out that I have some expectations, such as that I will get some homework to do in between classes, and more importantly - that I expect her to actually do some homework, and get to class with some sort of a plan. How this was to be rolled out, was to change a few times over the following days, but the basic idea worked, and I'd say we're now on a good route - plan or no plan.

As I mentioned already, the girl can run on talking without a stop for hours - like the little energizer bunny. The 4 hours are real full 4 hours, and I feel quite bad when I have to stop her for 10 minutes to get a refresher mid-way, as my brain reaches its attention limits.

There's also this little rule of speaking only Chinese ... well, we broke that rule on the second day, and through it out the window completely by the 3rd. What doesn't make sense doesn't make sense, and when I need to understand why a word is being used in a certain way - I need to be actually able to figure out the explanation. Guess it's just the weird way my brain functions, what can you do.

Another big step forward, was when at some point she realized the depth of my not understanding her when she speaks. I guess that my gesture-interpretation genius through her off in the beginning (can't really blame her). She still seems to assume I just know a whole lot of staff that I don't, but by now she understood that if I am to understand anything, she needs to slow down her bugs-bunny pace, talk a word at a time, and then repeat. This seems to work better.

With all of this working in our favor, we're making now some real progress, and I only have to try and follow the teach' pace. If not, my notebook is being filled with things that I will be able to try and actually remember over the next few months, but I'd say I'll be reaching at least the level I got in Portuguese/ Spanish during travel in the past, within these first 3 weeks.

Another great way to practice your Chinese - your next door pub.
(unfortunately, just realized all my pictures were automatically resized to to square formats here, so adding now some blanks to correct)

I'll be definitely giving an update on how this all works out later on, but guess we can turn some of the attention on this post to some observations on Education in China.

I've made a quick attempt in the first post to over generalize and bad-mouth a bit on Chinese work ethics. I actually have quite a few Chinese colleagues that are marvelous, so obviously I'm aware of the worth of generalizations, but the observations are observations, and some previous readings kind of support it.
Either way, there was no real debate following the little remarks from my Chinese friends or otherwise (either because they agree, or more probably because they're being polite), so I'll go ahead with some more observations.

Chinese education has some problems. This is probably not a significant insight, and with the changes this country is continuously going through, it is not a big deal to figure out they have to keep on struggling with how to approach education.

As always, my observations are only due to a very incidental run-in to some education-related cases, but 2 cases for me are enough for some sort of feeler.

Education has been key for Chinese people for a while apparently. This is the way for a lot of children to "be successful", and get out of poverty. Along with the general views on child education in Asia, this can be quite tough on the children.

Not too long ago, my teacher went through 15 hours of school 6 days a week, and then only about 7 on the Sundays - not much room for individual development. These days are gone now, but the teacher figure here still carries some weight with it.

What brought me to feel not too comfortable about some of the education methods here are a couple of cases I ran into, but one of them in particular.

I had a couple of chances to make very short visit to Yunnan university here. During both occasions, it took less then 5 mins of me sitting somewhere for a bunch of students to approach me on an assignment from their Teacher. There were enough similarities in both cases, and 2/2 within very short visits was enough for me to start feeling bad. Similarities such as going around and marketing the teacher's greatness, while also trying to make some money in the same time.

Of course there can be some good things to these assignments (the first of which was given by the Taekwondo teacher, no less), but something about the all thing just felt really wrong.

The second case, had two children (by the look, teenagers) that approached me - in English - while I was writing something in my notebook, telling me, "our teacher asked us to make a presentation for you".  "OK ..." (exactly the kind of entertainment I was looking for).

They immediately gave me also the teacher's business card. Name's Sixing Xie, card is boasting a horizon-looking picture of the guy, wearing an Olympic games shirt, the address for his disfunctional site as well as another Chinese blog entry, and behind a quote of his moto (I wouldn't be able to read that, but I'd imagine it would be in the lines of "I'm great - make me your congressman", or the Chinese equivalent). Well, actually I had someone here give me a loose translation - something about improving your future by strengthening your memory. In line with the little show-and-tell I got from his little minions.

The blog has some pictures of his - none of them actually reveals his connection to the Olympic games, but all involve group photos as he visits the people ...

So the two children start their little "presentation" by telling me they can remember numbers if I tell them, and write down in my note book - and they'll repeat. Soon this went for another version in which they would recite the first 200 digits of Pai (just in time, I just forgot the 157's digit which I need for one of my passwords).
After some initial confusion with the English version, they just wrote it down for me in my notebook, and then recited in Chinese.

When they told me they memorized the 200 digits of Pai, I asked them "Why?"
The blank stairs to me and between themselves only lasted a few seconds, and then they understood my question, and answered with confidence "out teacher told us to".
After the little recital, I asked them again, "Why?", and this time elaborated a bit more on why do they need to know all these Pai digits.

The answer for this was also quite easy, and seems to be a translation of some of what's on the back of the card I received - it will help us have a better future.
Right you are.

I am not one to argue the advantages of exercising one's mind - memory, thinking, logic, the whole Shebang. And we've all seen people selling memory-improvement magic-solutions all over the place.

But then came the great finale - they showed me some of their class' logos on these little pins. (Great, I'm gonna be a honorary observer now).

But not just yet - money came up. "You can buy those for ..." (looking at each other) "... 20 dollars" (That's ok, that's the general translation to units-of-money, and they meant the equivalent of 2 Euro).
It was my turn to give the blank stare now, and while I was at it, they added - "we can give you the card for free..." (that's the card with the pretty picture of their teacher.

After another minute of a blank stupid stare - admittedly I was torn about the best approach - I eventually decided to try and make some sense of it.
"And your teacher told you to also ask for money?"
"Yes, he says that we should learn how to take care of ourselves, make money for ourselves"
(by annoying innocent people on the street, and then basically play beggars asking for them to buy useless pins?!)

So, basically, I gave them a quick speech. First on the card (and the pins) - I appreciate you're giving it to me for free, but this is not for me this is ... (I tried a few words until one of them picked up on this one) advertisement for your teacher. You are doing this for him, not for me.

Then I went on with some general lecturing about the whole idea, and told them that "you can tell your teacher I said so".
They were quite immobile, thinking of when it will be polite enough for them to run away from there.

And then, I'm ashamed to say, I did the worst thing - I gave them some money, and sent them on their way. (Just couldn't let these obviously talented kids run away with a sense of failure)
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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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