I started Mandarin class a few weeks ago. It’s not as basic as I thought it would be, but it’s still manageable. It’s rather funny that over 80% of the people in the class are of Chinese-origin; about half of them are like me, English-speaking, but the other half look like Cantonese-speaking fobs. Ironically, the instructor put down a no-Cantonese rule (although didn’t specify the punishment). I had the same rule in my grade 7 science class.
The class started pretty quickly, we learned how to read pinyin within the first class, and spent a lot of time saying ‘I Am Canadian’ which leads me to think that the Chinese takeover of Canada will start by getting us all addicted to beer. In the first class we only learned a couple of phrases: “How are you”, and “I am (not) Canadian/Chinese/Japanese”. It was like that for the second class too, a lot of repeating what the teacher said and learning basic phrases such as “What’s your name?”.
Then we had a two week break for the May 2-4 holiday (mm beer) and I forgot everything I learned the classes before. The worst part was that our homework was to prepare a presentation about a location in China and present it to the class, kind of like a grade 3 book report. It’s not so bad though, because our presentations would be spread out over multiple classes, although you couldn’t repeat a location twice, and both Hong Kong and Shanghai have already been presented. My brain reset was also not a big deal, since we spent the class re-learning the material from the first two lessons; in fact we only added 3 more words in the third class: Mr. Miss. and student. I don’t think I’m getting fluent anytime soon.
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