Studio quality sound

Three days of class down and I’ve got mixed feelings. I’m having a good time and learning lots, but the pace set in class is a bit scary. I have to do heaps of review and prep to keep up with what is going on – especially with the characters.

Most of my teachers are fun people. Especially the reading/writing teacher who we have 8 times a week. He has a great sense of humour and we all have a good time in class.

My listening teacher is the same one who gave us the go-ahead for the extra classes. In class she’s a bit scary. She looks perpetually angry and frowns a lot when people make mistakes, but I think that’s just who she is. There’s no malice behind it.

Our listening class is a room full of desks with computers with headphones. We put the headphones on and the teacher controls the playback from the front of the room. I don’t know if the textbook we’re using is one that was written in house or something that is used in a lot of Chinese education institutes, but I have to say that the quality of the audio recording leaves a lot to be desired.

Today in our listening class, as well as the dialogue, questions and statements that we had to follow along with and repeat, we could also hear several different people having background conversations. Occasionally there would be the morse code style beeping that is made when a mobile phone is put too close to a speaker. But the highlight was the building renovation that was apparently happening in the studio where they did the recording. A good 70% of todays audio was almost completely drowned out by the sound of a drill punching holes in a wall.

It made listening to the tones extremely hard!

Todays new word is ěrjī – headphones.