Hello friends:
My mom wanted to know about what classes are like so here you go:
We have four classes:
da ban ke: big lecture (10 students)
first there is a small quiz--they say words and we have to write the characters, and they can pick any of your 40-70 vocab words from the night before so you have to know them.
then they go over the material and tell you other ways to use it.
today for example, our lesson taught us how to say "chinese people fondly remember/miss the word "comrade/tongzhi" because you can use it for all kinds of people, men women old and young, and they are all equal, but now they have different words for those things."
then in class we learned how to say "chinese people fondly remember/miss/cherish the memory of Mao Zedong"
sometimes they talk quickly but if you have already studied the material the night before you can keep up pretty easily. also a lot of it is written on the board.
xiao ban ke: small lecture, call and response sorts of things (4 students)
this is like a drill--they ask questions and we answer using the last night's material
for example--we learned how to say "the word tongzhi is one of china's special characteristics"
then the teacher asked "what is one of america's special characteristics?"
and I answered "George W. Bush says that freedom is one of america's special characteristics." because we also learned how to say George W. Bush in our big lecture today.
etc etc (or deng deng in chinese)
dui hua ke: conversation class (2 students)
in this class we are given a topic to discuss with the other student and we have to use the day's vocabulary and grammar patterns. the teacher interacts with the conversation, asking some questions and correcting mistakes. today we had to pick an address like "comrade/tongzhi" that's connotations have changed in America. I chose why some women use Ms. instead of Miss or Mrs., which is really fun and hard to talk about in Chinese. but anyway i had to explain this to my partner who had actually never heard of this happening.
apparently a similar thing exists in china, where you used to call young women xiaojie (just like miss-not married etc), but now many women prefer nushi (which is more like ms.-could be married or not married, sort of neutral-less of a "young" sense to it).
dan ban ke: individual instruction (1 student)
absolutely my favorite class--you discuss with the teacher different things using the day's vocab etc. but you can also ask other questions and it is very helpful and lively. also, this is where you work on your independent project. mine is on tourism and culture. i will be interviewing people (in chinese!) who live in traditional housing areas in beijing or work in tourismy places there like hotels/restaurants about what they think about tourism there and changes in their culture because of it etc.
okay that was longer than i thought. hopefully informative. pictures next time of tiananmen square and maybe the forbidden city if i go with the school this weekend.
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2 comments:
neat, it is interesting hearing about how your classes work. I need to figure out skype so that we can seriously talk on the phone, though. Do you know if you can use skype for just your cell phone and not on the internet, because I can't do the internet thing.
Ha ha, awesome. yeah, maybe i'll send you a real e-mail because this whole talking on each other's blog comment boards is fun, but sometimes i have more, um, private thoughts. i still don't know how to check the minutes on my cell phone. all i know is that i have the mts super red plus minute program, which doesn't help me out at all.
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