Creative timekeeping and Chinese family life

After an ~8 year school vacation I returned to university today. I’ve got more motivation to study this time around because it’s already come directly out of my pocket, rather than the government paying for it and me paying it back at some mystical time in the future. The first day was …school…

Some of you may remember that two posts ago I talked about how we had paid for 10 classes a week but had received some bonus ones for free. At every point during our discussions and enrolment in school, it was always presented to us as 10 hours of class a week. But in reality, classes are only 45 minutes long as you can see in the schedule I posted. This means that they’re selling it as 10 hours, but actually only providing 7.5 hours of teaching time. It makes me wonder if the teachers are being paid by the teaching hour as well and they’re double-dipping. Anyway, what it means is that our “free classes” really only take us up to the 10 hours we were sold!

Today I had reading, which turned out to be a lot more speaking than reading, and listening, which turned out to be in a classroom that you had to access by walking through a janitors closet and along a path around the back of the building. The teachers spoke Chinese 99% of the time and I had no clue at all what they were saying, but I just went along with it.

I have 5 classmates, almost all of whom seem to have a bit more experience with speaking and listening than me. They have all been in the country longer than me, and from what I picked up today, it looks like some of them may have studied Chinese at the university previously. While most of them seem to be able to converse with the teacher better than I can, it seems that they haven’t built the foundation that everyone keeps telling me is so important. Their pronunciation of the tones isn’t great and in our listening class today they had a bucketload of trouble distinguishing between the tones. The practice I’ve put in on the BBC site has aparrently had some effect. Two of my classmates are from Cambodia, one from Laos, one from Germany and one from Russia. Hopefully the ice will melt and we’ll all start getting along well soon. Today everyone was a bit shy.

One of the gems that made our teacher giggle today was a sentence in the listening class. I didn’t understand why she was laughing, but after doing a quick lookup on my ipod, it made me laugh too. The sentence is:

Bāba pà māma, māma bú pà bāba.

Which translates to:

Dad is afraid of mum, mum isn’t afraid of dad.

I can only assume that this is an insight from the textbook author into Chinese family life. It’s also good to know my textbook author has a sense of humour!

Tonight we were introduced to a new group of friends who are all in final year uni studying to be Chinese teachers… (lucky!)… The friend that we made in our first hour in Kunming has now returned to Korea, but before leaving Kunming he introduced us to a friend of his who was interested in meeting us and making friends. Tonight we met up with him again and were introduced to a group of his friends! We all had a great time, and will hopefully meet up again soon.

That’s all for now as it’s homework time.