Name: Alice Hunter
Location: China
Report Title: Grappling with Chinese
Report Date: 11/08/2010
I have been living in China for over 9 months now and have come to the I generally prefer it when I'm left to get on with things though. Everyday just walking down the street, people stare at you, almost as though they haven’t seen you or any other Westener before. The extend of most people's English in the town is mainly "hello" or the occasional "nice to meet you" apart from some of the teachers and students at the schools and colleges. That should mean that my Chinese is amazing by now, but not quite, though it has improved a lot since my last report. In Dingxi people mainly speak the local dialect, Dingxihua, which is almost another language to Mandarin, and much harder. Some of the older generation tell me that my Mandarin is better than theirs simply because they don’t really speak it here. The main way I have tried to learn Chinese is by practicing, and actually I've learnt a lot of characters just from texting my friends. I can just about get by with things that I want to buy and do, and I do have some only Chinese-speaking friends, but conversation is a little limited, so I have a long way to go. Although I'm based in Dingxi, I have a lot of time to go travelling recently. Around Chinese New Year I had 7 weeks to go and explore China. I spent actual New Year with some friends who live in Jianxi province setting off fireworks. The trip, however, began with a 17 hour train journey to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Unfortunately there were no other tickets left other than standing, and the next train with seating tickets was about 3 days later. Luckily the train guards found us a good spot to sit on our bags for most of the journey, so all in all it wasn’t too bad. This good place they found us, wasoutside their office which did mean that they could attempt to chat to us in a strong dialect Chinese, but I wasn’t complaining at a place to sit! Despite travelling by hard seat for most of the time, I had the best time travelling and already can't wait to set off again this summer. Some of the highlights so far were seeing the pandas in Chengdu, some of the scenery in Yunnan province and in Yangshuo (a small town in South China beside the Li River) and meeting different people and seeing different parts of China. My Chinese definitely improved whilst travelling as did my general knowledge about Chinese culture and, of course, politics. I can barely believe how little time I have left in China, it's only about 8 weeks now until I fly home. I have a week left teaching in Dingxi then hopefully about 7 weeks again to see more of China or go back to places to see some friends. It's been wonderful, scary, thrilling and a bit boring at times but then that's life. I don't know how I'll adjust to living back in England andUni butthere is always the thought of China past and (who knows?) future, to keep megoing.
conclusion that even ifI could speak perfect Chinese I probably still wouldn’t have a clue what was going on.
My time in Dingxi is nearly at an end, and I only have a few more lessons to go. While I'm slightly relieved to have the responsibility of teaching out of the way, it's still really sad to tell all my students that next week is our last lesson. I've gotten used to seeing their faces every week and hearing their cries of hello or nervous smiles as I’m walking around school. Because I teach so many students it's impossible to get to know all of them really well, but nonetheless I will miss them - well most of them anyway!
Some days of teachinghaven’t beenas ordinary as others. For example, last
month I was woken up by my boss knocking on my bedroom door. Opening the
door, still wearing my pajamas, I was informed that later that day Dingxi TV station would be coming to film the "English corner" and maybe one of my lessons. Thankfully they didn't film my lessons, only one of my partners, but the main problem was the English corner, because at that point in the morning the English corner didn’t exist. The school had never asked us to do one before because there was nowhere to have one. We ended up inviting about 30 students into our kitchen to play an adapted form of 20 questions. I still haven’t seen the TV programme but I've been told that it's been shown on TV a few times. Being one of 4 Western people in a town of 40,000 Chinese occasionally involves things like that.
