汉语课-上课！Chinese Class Begins!

The 4th of March, a Wendsday, marked the first day of my elementary level chinese course which I now take M-F from 8:30am to 11:50am. The class is broken into 3 peices a listening course (听力课), a reading course (精读课),  and a spoken class (会话课). The class time is split into 2 class periods split by a 20 min break which are further split by a single 10 min break within each period. It works out to two 40 min sessions of two class types per day. It's one of those things that makes a lot more sense when it's displayed in a table - as I'm too lazy to make such a table you'll unfortunately have to suffer.

There is but one problem that persists in two of my three classes. When something needs to be explained (grammer, vocabulary, usage, etc.) two of our teachers chose to explain that item with chinese - on top of that usually chinese that we haven't been exposed to before. This results in the asker being more confused when the question has been answered then before he had asked in the first place. Now there is no problem with the moderate level of comprehension throughout the class - say when the teachers choose to go on a gesticulated, smile imbued tangent. However my classmates and I believe it is probably best to integrate some English where necessary when explaining new concepts/vocabulary/grammer. 

-End bitch'n'moan section-  

Those interested can take a gander at this Shenzhen Da Xue (深圳大学) class website I put together for my fellow students and myself. Be nice I am well aware it needs more tlc before its really going to be useful to anyone.

Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures

The following entry is a tribute to the article linked in the title of this entry.

For anyone that has spent a significant amount of time in China working with the Chinese people this net roots development is inspiring. Why? you might ask - well one of the biggest problems you will run into trying to work with the Chinese is their collective lack of creative problem solving skills - this applies to all arenas of life, business and otherwise. These Baidu 10 mythical creatures were created as a satirical backlash from chinese netizens against the censurship of many words/sites online. In a humorous display of creative defiance they have created mythical creatures with names sounding equivolent to chinese swear words/slang. They also created accompanying explanations/stories of these animals which cleverly refer to the swear/slang words meaning in some fashion. I personally applaud the creativity and hope to see more, hopefully more tasteful applications, of such creativity in the future.