In this month, I continued to take iTalki lessons with Karen老师, met with Leyao for our weekly meetings, and read Chinese passages + character practice.
I meet with my iTalki teacher, Karen老师, for 1 hour twice a week to practice speaking Mandarin and Cantonese. Because she is a native speaker of Cantonese and Mandarin, it helps to sometimes switch the conversation from one dialect to the next. The lessons aren’t formal language classes where we read passages from a textbook and discuss. Rather, we have an open conversation about topics such as health, beauty, Taiwan/China relationships, our future plans, etc. I prefer this style of learning because it has helped me gain confidence in my speaking skills in both Mandarin and Cantonese. After the semester ends, I am planning to continue these lessons with Karen老师 to help me maintain and improve my speaking skills.
Meeting with Leyao, my language partner, has always been one of my highlights of my week because we plan fun activities to do from food excursions to doing cultural activities. One food excursion we did for this month was to go to Kokee Tea, which is a milk tea shop. We did some research online and found that Kokee Tea sold egg waffles, which is a popular street food in Hong Kong. We decided to go and try it out, but when we got there, it turned out that they took it out of the menu. We got milk tea instead, which was still delicious, but I wish we could have tried the egg waffles. Egg waffles are called such because the waffle has egg-shaped pieces, and can be eaten plain or with toppings such as chocolate, seaweed, pork floss, etc. You can picture the texture and shape of bubble wrap and that is pretty much what egg waffle is but an edible version.
One of the passages I read this month was about Chinese/Taiwanese/USA's relationship because my other Chinese class was reading about the same topic. These passages around this topic showed that my vocabulary in Cantonese (or Mandarin) is quite limited and when reading or speaking about specific topics such as politics in this case is quite difficult for me. Same with talking about my science research with my iTalki teacher because there are certain things such as the "immune system" or "cytokine" that I just do not know how to translate from English to Cantonese. However, I think as I continue to read more about politics or science in Chinese, I will slowly learn how to express those specific vocab words.
Comments
Oh my goodness, I want an egg waffle and some milk tea now! It sounds like you have a really good balance to your language studies, which I hope to emulate, and you also know where you want to build more vocabulary, which is great!