Let's learn Chinese! (Women qu xuexi Zhongwen!)

Finally, after much planning, I began to formally return to my study of Chinese. On January 6, 2007, I started attending the Basic Level 2 class at the Ateneo Confucius Institute. The class will have a total of 24 hours and conducted in 8 sessions at 3 hours per session. I was a bit surprised on the first day to see that we were so many in the class. Most of them came from two separate Basic Level 1 classes which were conducted from October to December 2006. I was expecting to be a bit behind since they have learned their Chinese fairly recently while my last review was quite a number of years ago. However, I was petrified when we were asked to introduce ourselves in 5 lines of Chinese as I didn't reveiw at all. I was even more shocked when I heard some of them speak like they were straight out of a Beijing-made Chinese movie. What are they studying Chinese for, I wondered. I did survive the ordeal as the Chinese that I already knew came back to me, thankfully! I guess you will never really gonna loose it once you know it. I was also pleased to confirm that I was right in deciding to skip Basic Level 1 as it focuses on a lot of basic stuff and pronunciation which I've already learned. My teacher in UP, I think, taught us very well. Eventually, by the following week, a handful of the my original classmates were moved to Basic Chinese 3 (where the teacher speaks no English at all - *gasp!*). Still, a little over 2 dozens of us remained in the Basic Level 2 class.

Four weeks into the classes and actually halfway done, I would say I would have learned more if we were not too many in the class. At any rate, it is still an advantage to study Chinese at the Confucius Institute because you will be assured that there will be continuity in your studies as the institute would offer the Basic Level all the way to Level 4, the Intermediate Level from Levels 1 to 4, and also my target, which is Business Chinese, also in 4 levels.

I am actually having a lot of fun studying Chinese. It's been a while since I last attended a class and had classmates and it is such a welcome relief from the usual work-house-recreation routine. I'm optimistic that in the next few months, I will be able to post messages here entirely in pinyin. And I will definitely work hard on it.