My Language Progress

For the past few weeks I've been vacillating between 1. regret over choosing to come to Beijing for so long, 2. happiness over choosing to come to Beijing for so long, and 3. regret over choosing to come to Beijing for so little time.

I'm really having a great time in China, and my Chinese has gotten a lot better. But it makes me sad to think that I chose to give up an entire semester at Yale. I'm really going to miss my friends, and my extracurriculars, and having a variety of classes, and going out on the weekends, and meeting people, and going to lectures and Master's Teas by distinguished guests, and just being at Yale! I love it and I can't believe I'm halfway done. On top of that, I won't get to see my family until Christmas. Luckily, I've been able to keep in touch with them pretty frequently thanks to e-mail and Skype, but it's not the same.

On the other hand, nine weeks is simply not enough time to master a language. Sure, HBA has a language pledge, but while we adhered to it strictly at the beginning, we now speak Chinglish outside of class and English on the weekends. My classroom Chinese has gotten very good. Just a few weeks ago I took a listen to a recording I made back in December, and I am shocked to see how much I improved. I was almost embarrassed to hear how slow I used to speak, and how much trouble I used to have distinguishing different sounds and tones. My reading has also gotten a lot better. But I am nowhere close to fluent. When I interact with someone other than my classmates and teachers (who are familiar with our lessons and can therefore limit what they say to what we can comprehend), I still have a tough time. Plus, while it's easy to recall a word you just learned or grammar points you just drilled, it's hard to recall vocab and grammar from five weeks ago. Everyone has their strengths. One girl in my class can recall vocab from our very first lessons, even words that teachers brought up in class but that we were never actually assigned. Another second-year girl speaks so fluidly that when I met her I thought she was L5. I'm not having as easy a time retaining all I learn, so I'm glad I'm staying for longer than just the summer.

Even so, will six months be long enough? Should I have opted for the whole year? That way, I would have taken a year off completely and would still have four semesters at Yale instead of just three.

I guess we'll see!

I'm also learning a lot about Chinese customs, but again, I have a long way to go. Given that our campus's cafeteria has closed for the summer, HBA students have to find other places to eat. I usually just go to a restaurant called Beijing Beef Noodle, since it's close by and the food is good. I ate there three times this week. Each time, I ordered beef lo mein, and on the third day, the waitress brought me not only my lo mein but also a plate of black fungus. I had seen the dish before at the weekly meals with our teachers, but I usually avoid it. This time, however, I felt bad not eating it, because I thought the dish was "on the house," a gift for eating at the restaurant so frequently. So I tried some. If I didn't know it were fungus, I would have just thought it were sea weed. It wasn't bad tasting, but not anything I'd have ordered myself.

A few minutes later, my waitress came back and told me she had made a mistake. The fungus wasn't supposed to have come to me at all. When she saw that I had ate some she asked me to pay 12 kuai, but when I said I didn't even want it, she asked me why I had been eating it. Oh, China.