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With 18 hours of Mandarin instruction done its time they gave us a quiz. It wasn’t bad at all, but I am retaining little under this compressed schedule. Four hours of class every morning was mentally exhausting when we first started after a week it’s become manageable but still tough to look forward to. Pronunciation is definitely still an issue for me, and given my English pronunciation isn’t so great when encountering new words my Chinese pronunciation must be laughable for my teachers. The setup is two 2 hour courses from 8:20am to 12:30 with a 10 minute break in-between. We have one teacher for the MWF first period a second for the TR first period and a third for the MTWRF second period. They are all incredible nice and helpful in their instruction, but the challenge for me in learning the language does not come down to their instruction but the class rate and my own abilities. We are going at a rate of one lesson per day in the text. So that’s roughly 20 new words and 5 grammar rules per day. We each lesson there is a dialogue using the new vocabulary along with past vocabulary. So we
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That forklift doesn't stand a chance start by reviewing and pronouncing the new words then typically play some flash card based game with our second teacher to get more practice in. Since middle of last week she has been bringing in some small snack or bakery items for the game winner to receive first, but there is always enough for even the last place finishers. Which is good because I have that spot pretty well secured. Otherwise memorizing the characters to read Chinese is extremely difficult, I feel like you would need an eidetic memory to keep pace.
In the afternoon we visited the wood carving district of Guilin where they aren’t messing around just making some gimmicky touristy pieces. They’re construction larger than life wood carvings of animals and people. Bulls were particular popular, but we also saw several dinosaur, elephant, and panther carvings. I think the biggest had to be the eagle though. This thing as you can see in the picture is just absurdly large not that some of the other pieces aren’t as well, but this one really stood out. We spent an hour or so checking out different pieces a number of them were repeated from shop to
shop.
Later in the evening must of us went to a massage parlor foremost for the massage but we got dinner there too as part of the package deal. Before eating we changed into the provided robes and returned to the dining space which overlooked the river. The dinner was alright but the protein devotees were again disgruntled. This time because only two chicken wings came with the meal which was otherwise rice, some pickle like vegetable, plus some meat stuffed rolls on the side. The full body massage more than made it up for everyone as we all came out feeling great. I was in a shared room with one other student and one pengyou who was helping us communicate with our masseuses and it got us a different experience then everyone else. When it came time for the back massage our pengyou informed us could chose to go with the usual by hand done massage or they could get up on the bars above us and do it with their feet. Selecting to go for the full experience we opted with the “walk on our back massage”. Based on everyone’s time the regular style was great too, but I’ll just say they have some incredible foot control.
After that we ended up meeting other folks from CLI at KTV a karaoke club. Of course right… I mean we are in China. But it was better than one in the states were you perform in front of everyone. Here there were private rooms so you only made of fool of yourself in front of friends or at least acquaintances. As it was one students birthday things got pretty memorable. When that event ended the group separated with some returning to CLI and the birthday celebration continuing to the music club MUSE where more stories were made.
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