i think i'm turning chinese

Ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I did 1. Order vegetarian baozi (Chinese steamed bun) in Chinese and had the person actually understand me. Normally when I order baozi I just say "Bu yao rou" which is literally "I don't want meat" and a very childish way of saying it. My 8th graders tried to teach me how to say vegetable in Chinese (shucai), but since I'm self-diagnosed tone deaf, I thought it would be impossible for me to ever get it right.

But I did it! And it wasn't even at my regular bao zi place so I know for sure that they understood me (that and they actually gave me the vegetable baozi I asked for). Having a visitor was definitely eye opening in terms of how much Chinese I actually know. By no means am I conversational, but I was able to order from street vendors, give taxi drivers directions, and shoo away people selling knock-off merchandise all in mandarin!

Me with my victory vegetable baozi:


I know it's not much, but it's exciting to me that I know a little bit of Chinese, plus, I can understand a lot of what people are saying, I just can't respond back. This summer I'm considering taking a mandarin course when all my graduate courses are over and my teaching internship is done, that way I can concentrate on it 100%.

it's tuesday and i'll cry if i want to

I tend to avoid things that give me a headache. There are plenty of things I put myself through on a daily basis that I find uncomfortable, like wearing heels for example, but the pain of a headache is something I usually try to avoid altogether. In fifth grade when I went to see Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, I walked out of the theater because watching the alternating high and low speed transitions made my brain hurt. After about 30 seconds of Tom Leykis's grainy voice spouting misogynistic propaganda to penis-driven young males and insecure females, the beginning pounding of a migraine forces me to change the station. If only I had a choice when it comes to Chinese.

Of course, I do have a choice. I could just not go to China. However, that's not really an option. I want to go to Shanghai and teach English more than anything I've ever wanted to do before, but learning the language is like putting my head through a vise while simultaneously listening to recordings of the word "Ma" being said in all four tones. I have never tried to learn something before that literally gave me a headache when I studied it. Today in class, after a series of encouraging words, my professor offhandedly commented that I needed to practice my Pinyin and I nearly broke down into tears. Of course I know that I need to practice my Pinyin, to date I've only had 9 hours of formal instruction in Chinese, but after being asked to distinguish being "zh" "ch" and "sh" for thirty minutes my brain had reached maximum capacity. I am definitely making progress, but like any sort of language learning, it is taking time, especially since I have to learn how to read and write characters as well. Luckily, my class is super small (four people including me), so I was able to pull each person aside today and warn them of the inevitable waterworks that will occur sometime between now and the last class in 4 weeks.

To help in my Chinese language endeavors, I filled my Netflix queue with a bunch of Chinese and Taiwanese films and will be watching them over the next month to somewhat immerse myself in the verbal part of the language. It's pretty cool that this school is in southern California because there is a huge Chinese population, and so many stores and businesses have Chinese characters in their signs. So far I can really only recognize 5 characters, two of which are in my name, but when I do see a character I recognize it feels so rewarding. Approximately 3,000 are required to be able to read a mainland Chinese newspaper, so looks like I have 2,995 to go.