Random Realization

The thought occurred to me when my teacher was explaining a classical Chinese term. This is impossible, I thought to myself grumpily. I wish she would just speak English like we usually do. 

Then I realized: I don't remember my teacher ever speaking more than a few difficult words in English. Everything we had discussed, from idioms to petty gossip, had been in Chinese. She spoke one full sentence in English once, and I freaked at how weird it sounded. My other teacher has never spoken one word of English as far as I can remember. 

I'm not trying to pat myself on the back here. I make horribly stupid mistakes and am still working on what they say the total price is at the cash register...even numbers can throw me if said fast! It's just amazing at how far I've come in the past months. I feel like it has gone by so quickly and that I haven't really learned anything, but when I look back to where I was in my days at Notre Dame, to Beijing, where the teacher sometimes used excessive English (much to the dismay of some Kygers among us) to here, where I have been challenged to the point of brain-mushing by full Chinese classes teaching philosophy normally taught to us in our native language. Throw in the major differences between Taiwanese Chinese and Beijing Chinese, and it becomes quite the challenge. 

It's not that Chinese has suddenly become easy to me in entirety. It's sort of like driving around a city without a GPS. At first, going anywhere is stressful and challenging because you often have no idea where you are apart from your front door. Everything is a blur. But over time, you get used to your own street. After that, maybe you can navigate a few blocks. After months and months of driving, you know many parts like the back of your hand--this is here, that is there, and then comes this. You are comfortable here. You zone out to the "Call Me Maybe" or Adele playing for the seventieth time on the radio because the wheel practically steers itself. But there are always parts--neighborhoods, districts--that are still completely foreign. That is the best way I can explain learning Chinese. Many topics are comfortable. Others are mind-boggling in their unfamiliarity. But you just have to take a deep breath and look around--the only way to learn is to keep on driving.

So I may feel like the fumbling fool in my newspaper class. The white boy who can't read the sentences as perfectly as the Japanese girls. That idiot kid who spent more time writing a blog post than studying for his test. But looking back, and looking hard, I can see anyone, even yours truly, can really get used to a language. 

Yeah! We can dooo it!