Second Semester in Beibei:  Triumph over Adversity

 

                                Looking forward, I knew that it was time to really challenge my Chinese skills moving forward.  In order to meet these lofty goals I was going to need to try and attend as many classes as were possible with the other foreign students studying Chinese, use Chinese every day, and spend more time studying the materials in class.

 

                                One unfortunate problem was that I had previously committed to working other part time jobs at Southwest University which would have the accumulated effect of adding more pressure on me.  Initially, I accepted the other job in order to help a departing friend from the Netherlands find a replacement at his position.  The new class I was to teach dealt primarily with helping students planning on studying abroad learn more about western culture and helping them improve their scores on the IELTS college entrance exam.  Just because I think I may at times have a tendency towards masochism, I decided to take on a couple weekly tutoring jobs for extra cash too.

 

                                Looking back it seems understandable to me now, as well to you probably, that burnout was inevitable.  Despite this fact I ended up progressing rather well throughout the semester; although, I did encounter several periods of declining interest in spending time with friends, exercising, reading, etcetera.  Since these things are usually really important to me it seems clear to me know that I was probably over-working myself at times during the semester.

 

                                The highlight of my semester was being able to give two individual half hour presentations on the Rise of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany and Hannibal Barca's role in the Punic Wars.  Both of these presentations where conducted exclusively in Chinese; likewise, my ppt presentation slides only had written "汉字" or Chinese characters on them which really was a challenge for me to present with.  In my mind, this accomplishment was really the capstone of my entire year's work in the language, and I was really proud of myself for doing a good job of presenting in front of my peers.  Naturally, I did also have a sense of failure at not performing the perfect speech; nonetheless, I was pleased with the progress that I had made in only the past few months of learning Chinese in a part-time classroom setting.

 

                               During this period of time I really made a conscious effort to speak only in Chinese outside of the classroom.  I also found that in many ways augmenting the classroom experience by sometimes conflating the two languages was both entertaining and interesting for the students.  Truly these couple of months really saw my Chinese take off, （飞黄腾达). Being able to recognize that all of the effort that I had put forth in order to further my language acquisition was paying off was a bone to my constitution.