Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Learning Chinese In Westwood

Last night I drove up to UCLA to go to my Chinese class. You can probably fit a dozen Montana Tech campuses on UCLA's campus. I felt lost just driving around. I'm just happy that I found my class with little difficulty. I can't imagine what it must be like to have an entire load of classes there. But I have the coolness factor of saying I go to UCLA now.

Class was, I must admit, a lot of fun.

We have a huge class - something around thirty students. A lot of people want to speak Mandarin, apparently. My teacher is from Taiwan, so I think that will be an immense help because she has a native understanding of the language and would be better at correcting pronunciation as well as teaching "everyday" or "speaking" Chinese rather than just "book" Chinese.

There are a lot of different people in my class. Young, old, white, hispanic, asian (non Chinese), poor, rich (or at least richer than myself). It's nice to know that I'm going to be stuck there with a lot of bananas (or twinkies, an asian-american slang derogatory to mean one is only yellow on the outside) and horny creepy guys.

In class we introduced ourselves and learned the initials in bo po mo fo.

No comments: