Originally, I was going to put this stuff in with my other post about my week, but I wanted to do a separate little update about my language learning.
Chinese
This week was the first week we had our first oral tutorials for Chinese 1. I knew it was going to be the hardest part of the course because speaking is difficult, but my oral tutorials are even more stressful than I thought they were going to be. Our tutor is a woman from China, who on the first day asked us how long we’d been studying Chinese. She seemed surprised when we said we’d been started a week ago. I don’t know why she didn’t know this was an introductory course. I think that’s part of the reason it’s so much harder than I thought. She speaks a lot of Chinese – more Chinese than English – and half the time I just don’t understand what she’s saying. One of the things she taught us was counting, but on top of learning the numbers one through ten, she also taught us how to count to ten on one hand, which is not intuitive. That would have been okay, but she taught those two things at the same time and within 5 minutes she expected us to count down from ten out-loud while also doing the hand counting. She generally expected us to have previous knowledge of what we learned, but only part of the class did. It was very frustrating, so I hope this week is better.
Other than the oral tutorials, I like Chinese 1. We are going to start learning grammar this week, I think, and Zhang Laoshi, our lecturer from Beijing, is challenging us in a really good way. I always have at least an hour of studying after each 50-minute lecture she gives, but I always feel that I’ve learned a lot. I like her teaching style as well.
On Friday, Tandem put on their second Speed Lingua event, which I of course went to. I sat at the Mandarin table for a while, but it’s quite frustrating that I study Chinese upwards of 12 hours a week and I can’t say anything, so I went to the Spanish table.
Spanish
At the Spanish table Friday, I met a Scottish guy who has studied more languages than anyone I have ever met. He had knowledge of Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Hungarian, Georgian, and more that I can’t recall. It was so interesting! We talked a little about linguistics (all in Spanish), because he had an interest, but had never really studied it. I also met a man from Barcelona who lived in China for a while and spoke Mandarin. That was interesting.
Yesterday at the Italian table, I talked again with the woman from Barcelona that I met last week and it’s reassuring that I can understand everything she says. My ability in Spanish has fluctuated a lot over the last 4 years. Freshman year I couldn’t really be bothered to study it or speak it. In 10th grade, my teacher was a lot more serious and I learned a lot about grammar, culture, and food, so my interest was renewed. In 11th grade, I didn’t have a very good Spanish class and I rarely was forced or encouraged to speak Spanish. My senior year, I had the same teacher from 10th grade and it turned out to be the best Spanish class I’ve ever had. We had discussions in Spanish about politics and culture, we watched films in Spanish, and we read Spanish literature. By then, I was enthusiastic about Spanish, but it still wasn’t my *favorite* language (not that I have favorites!). This past summer, when I went to Costa Rica and got to speak more Spanish than I have ever had the opportunity to since elementary school. Since then, I’ve been trying to maintain my fluency. I want to be able to hold extended conversations about very specialized topics, so I want to speak Spanish when I can.
Italian
Yesterday I spent the whole 2 hours of the Language Cafe at the Italian table and then talked (mostly listened) to Italian for another 2 hours! Now, we didn’t speak in Italian the whole time, but most of the time we did. David would occasionally explain in English what they were talking about, which was great because at one point they were talking about the differences between the way Italian is spoken in Florence and the way it’s spoken in Sicily. That topic was a little bit over my head! But we had such great conversation overall. I think I’m going to use Duolingo to learn the basics of Italian, just enough to start speaking in Italian and then hopefully from there I will be able to learn everything through conversation with native speakers!
I think I have found someone who is willing to practice French with me! I know the grammar, but I need to practice speaking and I need to build up my vocabulary so I can actually express what I want to say, instead of feeling confined by my abysmal vocabulary. We are meeting tomorrow, so I’m hoping that after an hour of speaking I will feel a little bit more comfortable with French. At these Tandem events, I have sort of avoided the French table, because I don’t feel confident speaking in French. Hopefully I can fix that in the next couple of months.
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At the Italian table, we switched from Italian to English to Spanish to French seamlessly. Switching languages like that is so much fun. I can’t even express how much I enjoy it! I’ve never had the opportunity to talk to people who speak as many languages I do, so this is a real treat for me. It encourages me to learn even more languages! I think for now I will just stick with the ones I’ve got, but after Italian is at a good level, I may need to look for a new one to learn!
