The highlights of February include the following: meeting with my iTalki tutor, meeting with Leyao, practicing reading and writing Chinese characters, and making a list of common illnesses with English and Chinese translation. January was the month to figure out my schedule and settle into the new semester while February became much more productive with coursework and further educating myself on Cantonese and Mandarin. Even though this class is dedicated to further deepening my understanding of Cantonese in writing, reading, and speaking, Cantonese and Mandarin overlap in many ways, so oftentimes I am learning both dialects simultaneously. For example, some phrases in Mandarin would be the same in Cantonese only the pronunciation is different but the meaning stays the same (e.g. 糖尿病 = diabetes in Cantonese and Mandarin).
During my iTalki tutoring sessions, I practiced speaking with my tutor, and we would talk about a range of topics from Chinese and USA relationship to Taiwanese food and culture. The sessions help me become more comfortable describing what I want to say by using a variety of grammar sentence structures and vocabulary. We meet for thirty minutes three times a week, but it varies based on her availability and my availability. We sometimes converse in Mandarin and in Cantonese. Some topics I hope we can talk more about in the future would be the medical system in China versus the US, management of diabetes since China has one of the largest populations of type two diabetics, and the opioid crisis. Because I am currently taking a pharmacology class right now, I think these topics will be very fitting to link different disciplines together.
It is always a wonderful time meeting with Leyao. Her dual experience being educated in China and the United States gives her an experience I never had, so it was quite interesting understanding the private sector in education in China and the United States. We had a productive conversation about the education system in China and the United States, and her experience in both countries. One thing that surprised me during that conversation was that she went to boarding school in grade school! Given how young she was, I didn’t think it would be possible to send kids at that young of an age to go to boarding school. During February, we also watched shows and discussed their significance and discussed the cultural holidays celebrated in mainland China and Hong Kong such as the Dragon Boat festival. For March, I hope that we can discuss Chinese work culture, things unique to China, and hopefully go on a food excursion!
This semester, I am also taking CHIN 401 Advanced Intermediate Chinese, so in terms of vocabulary and grammar, I use their material to also practice Cantonese. I don’t know how to write in Chinese, so based on the textbook from CHIN 401, I practiced writing weekly vocabulary for CHIN 401 and for this class. I now have a deeper appreciation for those that can write beautiful Chinese characters or 汉子, because my characters look like an elementary student wrote it. The characters were based on the readings for CHIN 401, so they mostly were for day-to-day conversations or culture related. For March, I hope to continue with writing Chinese characters on a weekly basis and read the assigned Mandarin passages in Cantonese.
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