Settled in and Loving it!

The past two days have been rather hectic, but also quite wonderful. Thursday we had our welcome ceremony where we were told about the college and the Chinese language program in three different languages. I was extremely proud of myself when the English translations came as repetitions when I understood the Chinese. After the ceremony, we went to the classroom building. I had been placed in the level 202 class. I got to the classroom and quickly became acquainted with a nice Italian classmate. She speaks practically perfect English, extremely good Chinese, as well as French, and of course her native Italian, while I'm just patiently working on my second language.

So, it turned out that we had to wait an hour for class to actually start because our first teacher of the day was still having to work registering new people and couldn't come. We had to wait for our second teacher to get there to be able to start class. My classes are extremely difficult, but I'm enjoying them for the most part.

Unfortunately, my second class yesterday was not fantastic. I think we just wound up with a rather poor teacher. My class is made up of myself, two Italians, six Koreans, and one Japanese man. The textbooks for my other classes have English translations for the vocabulary which gave the Italians and me an unfair advantage. Regardless of translation, the teachers go over all of the vocab and make sure we understand it. This teacher, however, went over the vocabulary in such a way that I had no clue what was going on. I was at least aware that my classmates were on the same page as me. The class is about Chinese news listening, so once we went over the vocab we would listen to a short news story. I had even less of a clue what was going on there. I'm going to give the class another try, because if I really can't stay in it, my only option is to move all of my classes down to the 201 level. I don't really want to do that.

I still have one more class that I will have for the first time next week. It is about reading the newspaper. I'm looking forward to it a lot.

So, this post is just about my classes and such. I was originally going to include everything from the last two days, but I didn't want it to be too disjointed. I will be posting later today about my already wonderful social life here and my adventures around the city. I'll also be trying to figure out how to post the pictures that I took yesterday.

-Joelle