For reasons that are better left to another blog post, I am not teaching this semester. I have some project students, and am supervising a distance ed course.<\/p>\n
Rather than have free time (like a normal person would opt for), I decided to prepare for my semester in exile<\/a> by taking a Mandarin course.<\/p>\n Being on the other side of the lectern is weird.<\/p>\n And not just any Mandarin course, naturally. I’m taking the intensive course that our DDP<\/a> students take. It’s basically the regular SFU Mandarin course at double-pace. This means that I’m going to learn a decent amount before I go, but it’s a little like drinking from a firehose.<\/p>\n The instructor has done a really good job of organizing the course to make it all bearable, but there is just a mountain of vocabulary to deal with.<\/p>\n Surprise #1: the written language doesn’t bother me so much—I’m actually pretty good at remembering characters, which I did not expect.<\/p>\n Surprise #2: I’m being a much more kinesthetic learner than I would have ever expected in my learning. The characters are less a picture than a series of motions to draw them. I often remember the tones of words with a motion in my head.<\/p>\n Surprise #3: I recently got a Chinese name (\u00e5\u0090\u00b4\u00e5\u0090\u203a\u00e7\u009d\u00bf\/Wu Junrui) and a Renren account<\/a> (the Chinese facebook equivalent). Using social media with only Google translate and conventions<\/a> to guide you is a challenge. Doing the CAPTCHA<\/a> to open the account took me like 20 minutes.<\/p>\n Current mood: cautious optimism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For reasons that are better left to another blog post, I am not teaching this semester. I have some project students, and am supervising a distance ed course. Rather than have free time (like a normal person would opt for), I decided to prepare for my semester in exile by taking a Mandarin course. Being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1333"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1335,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333\/revisions\/1335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}