Callibration

The last couple of weeks have been both challenging and rewarding. For the most part, I have been attempting to adapt to life in the Fu Jen program after CIEE's Peking University program. Many assume Taiwan and China, or all of Asia, for that matter, are very similar. This could not be further from the truth!

The strangest part of my experience here is the size of the program: there are five of us here from Notre Dame. Aside from a few foreigners, mostly from Japan or Indonesia, there are no other foreigners in our classes. It's a little daunting to me after the sheer size of Beijing Daxue's program: there were almost fifty of us spread out across the levels, all American students, put together with several thousand other international students. Needless to say, there was always someone to hang out with. Here, there are five of us. Luckily, we've gotten on pretty well, but it can be a bit lonely when the four other people are busy, tired, etc.

Classes are also kind of odd at the moment. There are only four levels of Chinese instruction at Fu Jen as opposed to the 35 at PKU. There was no placement test, but I somehow ended up in the most advanced classes, after coming from a solidly intermediate class in Beijing. This makes me a little nervous, for obvious reasons. The classes I'm in are extremely small. For two of the three classes, it is just Wendy(also from ND), myself, and the teacher. The main class has a few Japanese, Indonesian, and Vietnamese kids who are akin to Chinese-speaking robots--they never make mistakes. On every single test, no matter how badly Wendy and I have done, they have all gotten perfect scores. Intimidating? Yeah.

I have three classes--the first is one centered around reading the newspaper, the second around Confucian Philosophy, and the third on ancient history. The topics seem to be a handful in English, but these are in Chinese all the way. The teacher for two of them is awesome, super nice and always up for a detour to talk about something else. I often steer the conversation to something more useful, like, say politics! <junkie!> Honestly though, Confucian ethics is useful, but sometimes I just want to practice speaking regular Chinese...

My brain pretty much turns to mush every afternoon after four to six hours of full language immersion, but I'm beginning to think I can hold my own if I prepare enough. We go so fast! There are no activities really, it's just vocab-news article-next chapter vocab-article...etc.  The history one is this old lady who wears a back brace and is quite Catholic school in terms of personality and strictness, if you catch my drift! I'm totally scared of her, but we'll see if I can't get on her good side. If there is one. She will blab on for about twenty minutes at a stretch and then quickly say "understand?!" Needless to say, it's a little tough to tell her you had no idea what she said...I also kind of like teasing her though! Sometimes I tell her I can't understand her Taiwanese accent, which makes her really flustered. "WHAT TAIWANESE ACCENT?!" she moans at me. I tell her Beijing is the standard and Taiwanese is way different. That usually prompts a smack with the dictionary, hahaha!

Overall, though, I am rising to the challenge. It may require a lot more work than Beida, but I feel like the rewards will be much greater!