As I already announced in my last report I came back to my favorite Asian country, to study Chinese in National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. Well the Normal in NTNU just stands for normal/common subjects, but still sounds a little weird I know. The language center here in NTNU is the biggest and most famous one in Taiwan. So about four month ago I started my first Chinese class quarter together with round about 1500 other foreigners.
After my first year here, my Chinese was not that bad, but still, Mandarin, as I should call it, is not a language you can learn within a year. Furthermore I didn’t learn how to read and write while working in the children’s home back in Chiayi, so I had a lot more to catch up with.
During my two month home leave, many of my friends asked me how my Chinese skills improved so far and how I actually managed to communicate at the beginning… Well Mandarin, unlike many other languages, does not allow you that many inaccuracies while speaking. If you mess up the tone of a word, you will most probably end up harvesting lots of laughter, or worse. I don’t know how many times I encountered misunderstandings, because of inaccurate pronunciation. What looks quite exaggerated in the Rush-Hour movies actually happened to me quite a lot of times…
Those misunderstandings are more or less unavoidable and happen to everyone, who isn’t completely mastering the Chinese language, once in a while. As the workload in the intensive course I chose at NTNU is pretty huge, I finally got the chance to work on my tones and minimize these mostly embarrassing misunderstandings.
I remember this one Friday night right at the beginning of my social year, when I was on my way to Tainan and tried to buy a train ticket in Chiayi main station. The guy behind the counter got really mad, because I was apparently complaining about the length of the train. It took me all the way to Tainan to figure out, that I actually told him that the train was 7cm too short, instead of asking for the one train which left with 7 min delay! That was probably why he didn’t calm down when I told him, that it didn’t really bother me, that the train was late! – Well, who knows what I really said…
With only 3 hours class a day the intensive course might sound not too intense, but with tests nearly every day and an allotted task that gets more and more every week, you can actually find yourself spending another 6 or 7 hours practicing and still not finish everything you’re supposed to. But still even if you don’t, you learn a lot and that’s what I came here for.
Even though we nearly have no holidays at all, we had the chance for a small south Asia tour in between our last two terms. We started our trip in Bangkok and went on to southern Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia, before coming back to Taiwan. Just about 3 weeks after we were back, we were forced to skip a few days of class to leave the country and went back to Bangkok again to apply for a new visa.
I will try to upload a few pictures from our trips in the “Photos” section soon…
My course finishes in May so I will probably leave Taiwan in June to go back to Germany, but I already said that last year. So let’s see where this goes… :P
