Yay! I probably grabbed your attention, didn't I? This one will be about Chinese, my first semester at university and the most interesting thoughts I wrote down during the last few months. But I already know that I won't squeeze all of it into one article so you could expect another one soon.
Why did it take me so long to write something? The main reason is, obviously, that I'm lazy and I postpone almost everything until I realize I don't have much time left and end up doing it 3 days in a row 18 hours a day. This pretty much sums up my first semester with many sleepless nights. So when I finally had some free time, I wanted to do so many things that writing a new blogpost simply didn't fit into my schedule. Oh wait, I don't really have any schedule or a good time management which could have fixed these problems, but I have to be honest with myself. Until I feel like my life is falling apart, I probably won't do anything. Well, I was already pretty close to this so I'd better plan everything better in the future. I kind of nailed all of my exams in the end, but this was just the beginning so I'm not going to underestimate anything now. I only had 11 subjects, it's going to be 17-18 now and it sounds insane. I asked some friends how many subjects they have and I was shocked when the average number was like 6 or 7. I've voluntarily entered the hell. BUT I LOVE IT!
I also needed to write something in English. Few days ago I felt a bit disappointed with my level of English when I enrolled into another course on Coursera, Critical Perspectives on Management. The assigned reading and video lectures were sometimes quite hard to understand, but the real problem arose during the quizzes. I had to spend like 3 minutes just to understand some questions and I wasn't even sure about a few. Nothing that can't be decoded but I really felt lost sometimes. Just like during the final exam from the social psychology course. I needed to score around 80% but I only got around 50. This actually made me sad because I really liked the course and wanted to get that statement of accomplishment. Maybe next time.
But the main reason why I wanna keep on posting regularly is something I never really thought of. I perceived my blog as means of sorting out and sharing my thoughts. Which is definitely right! But Honza told me that he rather regards it as some kind of journal. All of us sometimes think about how we were stupid a few years ago and writing a blog is really good in reminiscent times. One day I hope I'll be able to say something like I wasn't entirely silly a few years ago. But silly or not, it doesn't matter when you could actually enjoy the present. :-)
Time to reveal the mystery behind the title? We're almost there! Last night I was watching a Hong Kong film. I didn't write Chinese film on purpose because they speak Cantonese in the south of China (Hong Kong, Macao and Guangdong province especially) and it's quite different from the Chinese I study. Let me say it's a Chinese dialect for now. I enrolled into Cantonese class for the upcoming semester, but its timetable is inconvenient for me and I hope I'll be able to manage it somehow. Back to the point. I actually caught a lot of phrases and words in that film. If I take into account that it was in Cantonese and I study Chinese only a while, it's not bad. Something I wouldn't expect before university. It's the feeling that you could understand something most people regard as some form of an alien language that motivates me but there are more "boosters" why I love this.
Ni xihuan xiongmao ma? What? Did he just ask me if I like chest hair? ...
This happened to our Chinese teacher when some student wanted to ask her if she likes pandas. Unfortunately, xiongmao pronounced with first and second tone means chest hair and the other way around, with second and first tone, it means panda. And I believe there is a lot of pitfalls like this in Chinese. It is said that you can never get the tones quite right and make them sound natural unless you live in China for at least half a year. Looking forward to studying Cantonese and Vietnamese with 6 tones instead of 4, haha. I might be mistaken, Cantonese might have even more than 6, I'm not sure now. Hopefully it won't fuck up my brain too much because I plan to study all Asian languages that are taught at our university. Chinese, Cantonese and Vietnamese for this year, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean left :-D They just signed some contract with Korea and I hope the course will be opened next year. There is also Mongolian but it's also unopened for this year and this one would be at the bottom of my list. I also want to learn Russian and Portuguese! How many languages does it make in total? I wanted to continue studying Spanish but again, the timetables for suitable courses are so bad for me. Probably just gonna start reading something in Spanish because I feel like I already forgot everything. Which would be a pity because I used to be quite fluent.
I know I probably won't learn all these during my bachelor's programme, but it's a nice plan, isn't it? I have the opportunity so I wanna gain the most out of it. Good luck to me managing all these school things, having a decent social life, at least some income and some time for sports etc. I was used to working out 4 times a week but it was rather 4 times a month during last semester. And I don't feel good about it, both physically and mentally, so I have to find some time for everything.
Time leads me to another aspect of Chinese. I wouldn't say it's hard but it's rather time consuming. And the only thing I really hate is doing homeworks to characters lessons. We have to learn like 30-50 new characters every week and part of it is writing every single character like 60 times. The more complex the character is, the more times you have to write it. And it doesn't make any sense. Your brain turns off after like 3rd time you write it and you actually learn nothing from this. And many other people agree with me. So we spend like 6-8 hours every week just to complete these homeworks. I had problems with learning so many characters every week but I probably found the best way how to remember them and I actually like it now. I have to admit I was kind of forced to find this way because I had to write the final exam from characters on 91% (got 96.6 :-) ), but it was totally worth it. And the more characters you know, the easier you learn new ones because they can consist of mutual components. Not saying I already got into this and it might seem as a tangle of lines without any sense at first. But I even looked into etymology of many characters, tried to remember the meanings of commonly used components and I have to say it's really fascinating. For example, 想 - xiang3 (3rd tone) - to think, consists of elements for tree, eye and heart (left, right, bottom). It doesn't make any sense but you see it as a character with 3 familiar elements and not as a character with 13 strokes anymore. It's actually quite an exception but even one familiar element in a new character helps.
Surprisingly, the most difficult subject was Geography of China. I feel really bad in a way that I know MUCH more about China than about my country. I used to hate it in the beginning when we had to know where exactly are like 150 mountains and 100 mountain ranges in China, but it eventually grew on me when we started putting things in connection and it motivates me even more to visit all those great looking places. The most depressing exam was from maths, at least something not related to China was hard, haha. I really envy some people who attend these economics-related subjects with me and say that it's harder than their second branch of study. Damn, I spend like 90% of my time with Chinese and the rest is dedicated to economics. And unlike Chinese, I passed all my economics exams on the first try.
I also need to stop overestimating myself. I can sound like a self-conceited idiot sometimes, I admit it, but I still think I have justifiable arguments! :-D The thing is, there are some really smart and hardworking people around me now who made me discover more of a thing called humbleness. Only the best ones survive here and I feel like I'm rather average. I didn't count it but my rough guess is that there is only a half of us left after just one semester. And it's gonna be only harder and harder...
I wrote down one quote, I don't remember where I got that from but I like it a lot.
Smooth seas do not make good sailors.
If you are more interested in Chinese in general then read this article, it's quite accurate. See you soon!
Your school sounds pretty demanding. What subjects are you taking, if you're taking 17-18? And are they all mandatory or did you get a choice? I'm trying to make sense of the Czech university system and I'm not sure if I fully understand it... I plan to do a blog post comparing the US and Czech system or at least describing the American one (well, I mean, it's on my agenda. somewhere).
ReplyDeleteYou sound like it's challenging you but in a good way. That makes me really happy, because I'm so sick of people complaining that they hate their school and the teachers' attitude and they want to quit (or they already have!). Kudos to you!
By the way, your English sounds very natural and except for the occasional trifle I don't see any mistakes; I can't say about comprehension, obviously, but you seem more than fine where expression is concerned.
I quite understand the feeling about Cantonese, I know exactly what you're talking about because the same thing happened when I learned Mandarin for 6 months. I'm nowhere near fluent, I can barely say a few basic phrases, but the point is that I know how the language works, which is enough to keep it from sounding like alien gibberish; I can separate words, and I hear the tones (which is something that I think confuses the hell out of people if they don't know about tones, they just think that Chinese people are being purposefully emphatic :-D). Same thing with the characters, they've stopped being a bunch of lines to me, and now I can separate them into radicals and say, huh, I have *no* idea what this means but look, this is the symbol for mouth, this one means heart and this one means tree. Obviously all of this information is useless when it comes to actually understanding the language because then I find out it mean something totally random like librarian. But the point is that I see a system and it's not alien to me, and that just feels good.
The tones are really crazy, I never knew that Cantonese and Vietnamese have 6! So, um, good luck with that :-D
I remember how frustrated I was once when someone asked me "ni hao ma" and I answered "wo hen hao", and he was like, "what? I can't understand you." Especially since the person was half-American, and honestly, what else could I have been saying in that context?
The chest hair thing blows my mind. I would be afraid to say anything to anyone :-D Another great example is the cao ni ma thing I told you about, which means grass-mud horse (=alpaca) but also fuck your mother.
You're crazy that you want to learn all those languages, but in the best way :)
I can definitely relate to knowing more about the geography of China than your own country, it was the same way with my school and knowing more about the geography and history of Spain than about the Czech Republic and the US put together. It's ridiculous, but I guess it's to be expected when you're studying a culture this deeply.
Don't envy people who say that economics is harder than their second major :-D That's not a good sign I think.
I really liked the quote. The article was also really interesting, especially the comparison of putting in time vs. acquiring a skill, and the conflict in a new skill when your brain grasps the concept immediately, but your mind or body don't comply. The way it's written is spot on.
Well, there are "only" 10 mandatory subjects this semester (was 11 the last one). Conversation 2, Geography of China 2, Grammar 2, Grammatology 2, Chinese Studies 2, Listening 2, Enterprise Economics, Introduction to Law 2, Macroeconomics and Statistics. These make up 26 credits in total. You need to have over 180 credits when you finish your Bachelor's degree, so it's (180/3)/2 = 30 credits per semester on average. These mandatory subjects are called A subjects.
ReplyDeleteThen there are B subjects which are related to your major(s). I think I have to earn 19 credits from Chinese and 14 credits from Economics just in B subjects. This semester I've got Introduction into Chinese Language, Rules of Social Behaviour (yaaay, finally a subject in English and it sounds like a piece of cake according to the syllabus), Series of the Lectures of the Experts 5 (just 2 free credits for attending some economics-related lectures), Vietnamese 1 and I had another one, but some guy asked about the subject and was told that it's total bullshit so I got out of it today :-D
And then there are C subjects which are pretty much everything else and I only have to earn 3 credits from them. You can enroll in, for example, biochemistry which is an A subject for some students. But most people actually use it for other languages or sports. I've got Caligraphy 1 and Cantonese 1 as a C subject (maybe that Spanish but it really doesn't fit into my schedule). And that's pretty ridiculous. I study Chinese and I have subjects like Cantonese or Caligraphy designated as C. I was looking into it and only Japanese students have these as B. What the fuck?! :-D It's like if they had Japanese Commercial Correspondence as a C and me as a B.
So yeah, it's gonna be 16-17 depending on that Spanish from which 10 are mandatory, 4 "mandatory/optional" and 2-3 "less mandatory/optional" :-D It would probably suffice if I took only 2-3 B subjects per semester and had just one 3 credits C, but hell, everyone gets their diploma with more than 180 credits, some people even with like 230. I'm interested in so many subjects that I'm gonna be one of those "way over 200 credits people" :-)
Anyway, I copied names of those subjects from the English version of our portal, not my fault if some subject sounds like a joke. There are of course more differences. You have 1 regular and 2 correction dates from every subject (well, we should have). If you fail an A, you have to pass it the next semester you enroll it again, or you go. If you fail a B, you have to pass the same subject again OR you can enroll in a different subject with the same or higher credit rating, and pass. If you fail a C, well, I don't really know this one, some people say it doesn't matter, some other say it's the same procedure as with Bs. Don't wanna find out though :-D
DeleteThank you very much for correcting my grammar mistakes, I really appreciate that!
I'm looking forward to deeply understand the Chinese characters. We talk about radicals, phonetics, origins of characters, but we don't really use dictionaries or find any deeper connections. For example, I wasn't somehow able to learn 准备 - zhun3bei4 - prepare. But when I started looking into it, I've learnt zhun3 as ice (element on the left) + 谁 (shei2 - who) without the element for "word/speech" and bei4 actually as a pictograph which means something like a rack of arrows. Doesn't look like that but I somehow see a bow and a square quiver in it :-D Which leads me for example to 客 - ke4 - guest, and I see it as the bow but now with the quiver emptied because you're under a roof (the top part element). Smart, right? :-D This could go on and on!
Even if you can't pronounce the tones, it really should be sometimes obvious, but I've heard they really like to act like they don't understand, or they don't even wanna understand you. By the way, I know more "hao" words, I just looked into it and hao in the 4th tone could mean wail or roar, so basically wo3 hen3 hao4 could mean something exactly opposite to wo3 hen3 hao3. No one would say it like that, especially when someone is asking "ni hao ma" but it's pretty sick :-D
And thank you for your very long comment, I hadn't expected I would need to seperate my reply into 2 posts because it didn't allow me to post as one, haha.
And I forgot that obviously some As must be done within the given semester and you can't continue without them being passed because you wouldn't be able to enroll in subsequent subjects.
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