The e-mail I sent after my first day of class:
So my first day of classes starts tomorrow! We had our first class meetingtoday and they gave us the books and our homework. For our first class tomorrowwe have to study two book chapters. This is going to be hard, but hopefully worth it. I guess I should backtrack a little bit. This will be a long e-mail,so you can skim if you want! Not taking the group flight was the best choice to make. Since we didn't haveto sign the language pledge until June 23rd at noon, I had time to meet peopleand make friends with them in English. I have a core group of 3 other girls, 2 of them are rising sophomores from Yale (Jioana and Andrea) that I hadn't met until coming to ACC and the other is from Brown (Julia). It is great because they all placed into 4th year and I placed into 3rd year (the level I wantedb/c I thought year 2 was too low) and 2 of them speak Chinese at home, so just by being around them my spoken Chinese has improved dramatically. Hopefully I will get to know the other ACCers better, but it is nice to already have people you know and are more comfortable with. On the 22nd we took the placement exam in the morning. The placement exam consisted of a written part and an oral portion. The written part lasted 2 hours and the oral part 20 min. Afterwards we went out to lunch. Since we have to eat all of our meals out we have an opportunity to explore the local restaurants. The food for the most part has been pretty good. In the afternoon Andrea, Julia, Jiona and I went to the nearby gym to buy a membership, which is $100 USD for 2 months, actually pretty expensive, but they have classes and nice machines. We went out at night andwent to the nearest party area San Li Tuan which has a lot of clubs frequented by expats. The next day we had our orientation meeting and had to sign the language pledge at noon. Since then I have been speaking nothing but Chinese, which is hard, butI've been making a big effort to just keep talking. It's not hard with my friends because their Chinese is good so they can usually fill in the vocab word I'm missing and I have never felt embarassed speaking in front of them. We chatted all the time in English so I was worried it would stop once we had to speak only Chinese, but we just switched over to chatting a lot in a different language. Our class assignment was posted at 8:30 pm on the 23rd and I was really relieved to see I had passed into 3rd year. I was afraid they might put me in 2nd year. Third year has the most students, and consequently the mostteachers.
Today we had a "field trip" that started at 8:30 am. We went to Jingshang Park which was fun because it was really crowded with people singing, dancing,playing the Chinese equivalent of hackey-scak etc. Then we went to Tian'anmenSquare, which was less exciting because it was around 11, painfully hot and so smoggy you couldn't see very far in front of you. We had convocation at 3pm,which basically consisted of various teachers giving speeches. I really am excited about the prospect of improving my Chinese so much, but I know that once the work load starts to pile on it will get a lot more depressing.
So my first day of classes starts tomorrow! We had our first class meetingtoday and they gave us the books and our homework. For our first class tomorrowwe have to study two book chapters. This is going to be hard, but hopefully worth it. I guess I should backtrack a little bit. This will be a long e-mail,so you can skim if you want! Not taking the group flight was the best choice to make. Since we didn't haveto sign the language pledge until June 23rd at noon, I had time to meet peopleand make friends with them in English. I have a core group of 3 other girls, 2 of them are rising sophomores from Yale (Jioana and Andrea) that I hadn't met until coming to ACC and the other is from Brown (Julia). It is great because they all placed into 4th year and I placed into 3rd year (the level I wantedb/c I thought year 2 was too low) and 2 of them speak Chinese at home, so just by being around them my spoken Chinese has improved dramatically. Hopefully I will get to know the other ACCers better, but it is nice to already have people you know and are more comfortable with. On the 22nd we took the placement exam in the morning. The placement exam consisted of a written part and an oral portion. The written part lasted 2 hours and the oral part 20 min. Afterwards we went out to lunch. Since we have to eat all of our meals out we have an opportunity to explore the local restaurants. The food for the most part has been pretty good. In the afternoon Andrea, Julia, Jiona and I went to the nearby gym to buy a membership, which is $100 USD for 2 months, actually pretty expensive, but they have classes and nice machines. We went out at night andwent to the nearest party area San Li Tuan which has a lot of clubs frequented by expats. The next day we had our orientation meeting and had to sign the language pledge at noon. Since then I have been speaking nothing but Chinese, which is hard, butI've been making a big effort to just keep talking. It's not hard with my friends because their Chinese is good so they can usually fill in the vocab word I'm missing and I have never felt embarassed speaking in front of them. We chatted all the time in English so I was worried it would stop once we had to speak only Chinese, but we just switched over to chatting a lot in a different language. Our class assignment was posted at 8:30 pm on the 23rd and I was really relieved to see I had passed into 3rd year. I was afraid they might put me in 2nd year. Third year has the most students, and consequently the mostteachers.
Today we had a "field trip" that started at 8:30 am. We went to Jingshang Park which was fun because it was really crowded with people singing, dancing,playing the Chinese equivalent of hackey-scak etc. Then we went to Tian'anmenSquare, which was less exciting because it was around 11, painfully hot and so smoggy you couldn't see very far in front of you. We had convocation at 3pm,which basically consisted of various teachers giving speeches. I really am excited about the prospect of improving my Chinese so much, but I know that once the work load starts to pile on it will get a lot more depressing.
