learn Chinese

my electronic dictionary.

Originally it’s “only” Japanese-French-English. The 25 dictionaries include all possible combinations of these languages which is great, and it has the usual Japanese character dictionary etc too. But the best thing is that it’s upgradable, it has a card slot and you can buy different kinds of dictionaries on memory card.

So I bought the Chinese-Japanese Japanese-Chinese card. It has no English version which is a little annoying :( but with the jump function I can move to the Japanese-English one easily. And the dictionaries are great… You can look up a word in so many ways and it has a special section where it compares Chinese and Japanese characters. Cool. Pinyin is written very clearly and I can actually listen to the pronounciation of words too.

It’s great that I reached a level when the textbook is not enough any more and I need an extra dictionary… :)

“Although my neighbors are all barbarians,
And you, you are a thousand miles away,
There are always two cups on my table.”

So today I had a Chinese lesson again, and apparently my teacher took my remarks about our progress seriously.

He went to speak to his boss. wow. When I arrived today she (his boss) came to speak with me, she told me she heard about my concerns and I shouldn’t be worried cos she consulted my teacher and we will speed up things.

The whole thing looked like I criticized his teaching methods… which I really didn’t intend to do. But now it became kinda personal with an intervention by a supervisor.

I felt sorry for him (being criticized by a student; but actually if I think more about it, in my own classes I was criticed too, many times and I still survived).

Anyway, the outcome is a happy one beacuse we covered one unit from the book when it usually takes three classes; we got loads of homework so I know I will definitely study and prepare for the next class; and we even got extracurricular stuff to memorize.

I wanna be able to communicate in Chinese within half a year. Now I actually see some hope to achive this goal! Yay!

my Chinese teacher that I’m not satisfied with my progress. I was blaming myself and I do know that the choice of studying harder or not rests ultimately with me, but still, with a stricter teacher I naturally study more.

I didn’t tell him this, I was just saying that I’m so lazy, I don’t prepare enough and although I see the progress I know I could do so much more if I had the willpower.

I think he got the message… He said he will be more demanding. And about the willpower… I will study. Come on, I’m paying for those classes, I want to benefit from them as much as possible.

Here is the common Chinese transcript for my name.
For my first name, of course.

It’s basically the sounds which make up a transcript, not the meaning. Which is lucky beacuse the characters in my name have the meaning of:
the first one: horse
the second one: honor, virtue
the third one: small forest (modified slightly to look more feminine)

So according to this my name is something like “Virtuous Horse in Forest”. :(((
Luckily the Chinese really don’t care about the meaning when giving names to foreigners.

By the way, the pronunciation of the characters is Madelin which is really close to my original name.

I actually started to go to a language school in May. It’s a semi-private class with a friend and it’s so much fun!

But if I proceed at this speed I will be able to communicate in Chinese only in fifty years or so.