It's About Damn Time

Hello all!

So even though I've been in Beijing for a full two weeks, it's only now that I'm getting around to starting up this blog (sorry about that, Kelly, I promise I'll catch up soon). On the other hand, I now have loads of material to throw at you guys with this first post.

Wow, what a difference a year makes. I was recently thinking back to my first few weeks at HBA last summer, and I can remember sitting at my desk late at night, trying desperately to ignore that little voice in the back of my head that kept reminding me "there's no way you'll ever remember all these new characters". If I had to put my finger on the biggest difference so far, it would be the whole adjustment process that takes place in the first couple weeks. Last year I went from studying 8 characters a night at Yale, to 80 a night at HBA. Even the most ordinary tasks, from ordering food to buying laundry detergent, required a level of Chinese that I had not yet reached. I'm happy to say that this year, on the other hand, I feel like I've picked up right where I left off. The level of comfort that I feel in this environment, even after such a short time, has left me nothing short of ecstatic. And I'm confident that it will only get better from here.

As far as classes go, the Duke program is just as intensive as HBA. I still have 60 some-odd new words to memorize on a daily basis, and the in-class schedule equally rigorous. That being said, I am infinitely more relaxed as compared to last year. This is due exclusively to the fact that my Chinese now is light-years ahead of where it was last June. At both Duke and HBA, classes are taught almost entirely in Chinese. At the second-year level you might see a teacher use a few English words to clarify a given grammar point, but for the large part, it's all Chinese. Last year, this was a big challenge for me, especially in the early going. I hadn't reached the point where I could listen to a string of Chinese and understand, without having to do some on-the-fly t

ranslation - basically it went like this, I would hear Chinese, translate in my head from Chinese to English, and then get the meaning. This strategy works only in so far as the person speaking pauses after each sentence to give you time to think. Obviously that's rarely the case, so I would often find that by the time I knew what a teacher was saying, he or she was already two more grammar points ahead.

To be honest, that leads me to one of the biggest steps I've made in this language learning process so far. It must have been some point last summer, I can't remember an exact time, that my listening comprehension moved from choppy, on-the-fly translation, to fluid understanding. The fact that I can listen to a stream of spoken Chinese and grasp the meaning, without ever thinking about it in English, is a testament to the effectiveness of these language programs, and the progress that I've made amazes me on a daily basis. Though I'll be the first to admit my Chinese is a long way from any sort of fluency, I'd like to think that I've made the most of these first two years.

In terms of travel, we spent some time over in the Tiananmen Square/Gugong area last weekend, and we're headed to the Great Wall early tomorrow morning. I'm planning on putting up another post tomorrow or Sunday, so I'll save some travel/exploration chat for then. As for now, I'm probably going to have a little Friday afternoon nap, maybe stop by the gym, and then get ready for a night out! Hope you all have a great Friday (for those of you in the States), and I'll leave some pictures for you to check out down below.

Cheers,

Jamey