Classes and What-Nots

Note: This week has been very busy and everytime I try to post I get interupted with something. So now that it is Friday and I am done with classes I'm going to try again. Also, I don't know how practical it is for me to try and put Chinese characters in here so I'll just use pīnyīn when I post unless it is a really special occasion. Pīnyīn is the letter/phonetic version of chinese characters. Although many of the letters and letter combonations are pronounced very differently than is natural to Westerners.

On Monday morning I had a "not-really" class, meaning that my class met but we didn't do anything other than meet the teacher and get our books. Chén Lǎoshī (Professor Chén) asked us all to introduce ourselves and say how much experiance we had with Chinese. Her face when I said "none" was priceless. I don't think that she fully understood what the "beginning" Chinese class really meant. The first couple of days was rough going, but it has gotten better as she learns the best way to explain stuff to us and we get better at understanding what she means. She speaks English fairly well, but sometimes her accent makes the words sound a lot different than we are used to and sometimes she askes us how to say and spell things in English. Since half of us in the beggining class have never had Chinese before, she gave us Chinese names. Mine is "Shā Lā" which doesn't really mean anything, but according to Chén Lǎoshī it is "a pretty girl's name." Oh yeah, instead of "Rip" my Chinese surname is "Rén". So if I was to indtroduce myself to someone I would say "Wǒ de míngzi Rén Shā Lā."

Tuesday was a bit more interesting. She brought in pīnyīn pronunciation charts for little kids. As silly as we all felt using materials targeted for Chinese kindergartens the posters were very helpful. A few of the people in my class have had a semester of Chinese at Calvin and say that what we have learned in just 4 short days is more than what the typical beginning class at Calvin learns in several weeks.

Besides pīnyīn pronunciation we have also learned and practiced tones, basic sentance stucture, 3 types of question sentences, numbers up to the ten thousand level (wàn), bunches of vocab, how to write characters (left to right and up to down). I am definantly learning things here in China.

I am also really liking my history class taught by the Calvin prof (Bays). Today as a fun little break from our normal lecture we read Daoist poems we had written for homework. Our prof and his wife, Aunt Jan (she asked us to call her that because calling her Professor Bays would get confusing) said that this year's Daoist poems are the best group they've heard since starting the exercise (I don't know if that is true, but it certainly is a cofidence boost). The central belief of (ancient) Daoists is the idea of non-striving so that the world and all that is in it can go back to its natural state. The Way (Dao) cannot be explained by mere human words and "is like water. Water benefits all creatures but does not compete," (from Daoist text "Laozi"). There is also the idea that in everything good there is already something of the bad and vice versa. "If you want to take from something/ Be sure to give to it," (Laozi). In class we also talked about the Daoist paradox and how it is impossible for there to be a true Daoist (striving to be non-striving).

Thursday (xīngqīsì) we had our first excursion. We went to the Imperial Academy and the next door Confucian Temple. Both were unfortunatly under repair so it was hard to really get to see the place amidst all the scafolding and constuction. Because of that, we decided to also go to a nearby Buddist Temple run by Tibetan Lamas called Yong He Gong (I'm not sure if that needs any tone marks or not). I took lots of pictures at all three places and I will include a few here and try to figure out the best way to display the rest.

I am quite glad that today is Friday. This was definantly a busy week and I am ready to relax. As an added bonus yesterday we had some rain and it has been windy which has blown away the smog so it is sunny and we can actually see the mountains!

Currently I am experiancing technical difficulty with uploading pictures. Sorry!

By the way, I'll probably be doing most of my posting on the weekends as I don't seem to have enough long stretches of time for posting during the week (I'm too busy learning characters!)