Lao Shi Hao!

Mandarin classes here at Jiao Tong have been going well and I've about adjusted to my schedule. Most of the students who have come here seem to have spent some time studying Mandarin either through their home universities or in another Chinese city (i.e. Beijing). The program here is divided into 3 levels (n00b, Intermediate, and Advanced). Within each level, students are further siphoned into 4 groups (i.e. n00b I, II, III, and IV). A majority of the foreign student population fall within n00b I - Intermediate I. I'm in n00b I.

I have classes 5 days a week for about 3 hours per day. I have morning classes M, W-F (8:30am - 11:50am) and afternoon class T (1:10pm - 4:30). Schedules vary for everyone and they give us a week to settle on which classes and schedules we want to attend. After the musical chair session that was the first week my class ended up with around 22 people. About 9 Europeans, 5 South Americans, 1 Filipino, 1 Thai, 2 Russians, 2 Canadians, 2 Americans. All the Koreans and Japanese hop classes until they found ones that were primarily made up of their countrymen. However there are always a few white guys in these classes who are looking to meet an Asian girl.

Every one in my class has the same schedule, which means we get to see each other 15 hours a week. Our n00b I class attends 4 intensive reading, 2 intensive listening, and 4 intensive speaking classes each week. The classes move pretty fast and every day we encounter a new set of vocabulary words that need to be processed and memorized. Westerners (including me) definitely have a harder time learning the language than those from other Asians countries. The Japanese use a lot of the same characters so reading and writing is pretty easy for them, but their pronunciation is crap. Koreans have a completely different spoken and written language, but they are used to writing characters and I hear the sentence structure of the two languages are similar.

Most of the people in my class are really nice and its been fun learning with such a diverse group of people. The only complaint I have against my classmates is when they open their mouths and try to speak what they think is Chinese. Granted the Asians in the class have spent more time around Chinese and are used to hearing the syllables. But when some of my classmates speak it sounds as if they are mentally-handicapped, deaf, and have a chunk of meat in their mouthes. Kudos to our instructors for being so patient and being able to comprehend the gibberish that comes out of their mouths. Some of the Latinos in my class are having a really hard time with the language. Due to the nature of the Spanish language they are just incapable of reproducing and differentiating the tones necessary for speaking Chinese (i.e. pwned).

Initially I found all facets of the language to be challenging, but over the last month I've gotten much better at writing characters and my listening skills are improving. I still find stringing together complex sentences to be my biggest challenge. I usually spend my weekday evenings downstairs in our building studying. I've been trying to spend about 2hrs/day studying. 2hrs/day is probably close to the minimum needed just to keep up with class. However living in a city like Shanghai has sometimes made it difficult to hit this quota.