Day 52: Back to the madness

I can't remember if I've talked about my classes much on here, so I'm going to now, and if I've already told you, sorry.

Okay, so every week, we have 18 hours of class. These are split into 汉语中级 (comprehensive), 听说 (speaking and listening), 阅读 (reading) and 文化 (culture, which is an elective for intermediate students, but it's interesting, and it's helping my Chinese (it's entirely in Chinese (as is the textbook))).

Our teachers are of varying qualities. 张雪梅老师 (Zhang Xuemei) teaches us the comprehensive class, and she is a brilliant teacher. She's from Shandong, so has an accent that I'm not used to hearing in these parts, but I still understand. She's big on discipline (which is good, see below) and is very fair, and can be a good laugh. We went out for lunch at Mid Autumn Festival with her, which was nice, and she only has a few words of English, so it had to be Chinese the whole time. In fact, that's kind of normal for this part of China.

Anyway, then for listening and speaking we have 易红老师 (Yi Hong). She's absolutely lovely, although her accent is a little strange (for example, 问 (wen) she pronounces with a 'v'). Not too good on discipline though, and not big on correcting mistakes either. Non Chinese-speakers may move on to the next paragraph now. Say if someone reads the sentence 还有什么？对了，有空儿的话，欢迎来我家玩儿！ as "hei yao shi ma, yao kong de hui, huan yin lei wo zha wanr", she'll still say, "非常好！" Which is annoying.

For reading, we normally have a teacher called 周册老师, but she's currently on leave. And for this, we are grateful. Our temporary teacher is called 阎(I think)新艳老师. She's a much better teacher, although her characters are not fun to try and decipher. The first teacher tries to get us to read at 100 characters a minute, when we know about 50 of them, and bans dictionary use. After we got the book changed to one that wasn't ridiculously hard (aimed at people who had had over 250 hours, we've had about 150, if that), she calmed down a little and explained things better, although still using more complex vocabulary than is needed. But oh well. When we changed book though, the bookstore from where the university buys the textbooks didn't send them for ages, so we had no books. Then, when 周册老师 suddenly 有事 (we think a nervous breakdown, in all seriousness. She was the most tightly wound person I have ever encountered. And she was 30 and Chinese, yet still gave herself a Croydon Facelift)
the new teacher wasn't told we had no books, so we spent one two hour reading class telling stories. It was actually a really good class - everyone got to speak (and the Kazakhs weren't there, more below), and it turns out that Korea, China and the UK all have the same stories they tell their kids.

Okay, so that's my classes. Now for the people. There are five westerners in my class, the four of us from Newcastle (Rachel, Catherine, Nikki and myself) and a guy who is doing postgrad (possibly PhD, apologies for forgetting) at Manchester, and has to do a year in China learning Chinese as part of it. Then there are three Koreans, a couple in their early forties and a guy of about 18. Then Galina, a Russian girl whose name is probably not spelt like that. Then there are the Stanleys. The Stanleys is the name we use to refer to all those people from the countries which end in -stan. Now, I am not a racist person as I'm sure you all know, but these people have put me off Kazakhs, Tajiks etc. for life. In class, they are noisy, disruptive and disrespectful, and spend the entire time chatting very loudly in Russian, making phone calls etc. There are one or two who do work, and I feel very sorry for them being tarred with the same brush, and I'm sure that outside of my class, there are some really nice Kazakh people. But these people are so bad that Tobin (the guy from Manchester uni (but he's Glaswegian, I forgot to say)) wrote a letter of complaint to the head of our college demanding that they be moved from our class or that he be refunded his tuition and he would move to Beijing and study there. The next day, she came into our class and shouted at everyone saying that this was a place of study, and those who weren't here to study would be expelled, because 师范大学 (my university) does not want that type of student. Which worked for the rest of that class. Then yesterday, the good news.

(English is below)"这个班的学生太多了，所以下星期二分开了。英国人，韩国人和Galina在其他的班，别的都在这个班。"(There are too many students in this class, so from Tuesday, you will be split. The British and Korean students and Galina will be in a different class, everyone else stays in this class." Our timetable is the same and we have the same teachers, so I don't know on whom they're inflicting the Kazakhs.

This was great news, but I was confused. Why Tuesday? Then I remembered, this uni gives all the Muslim holidays (no Christian ones, so no Christmas :(), and today is the last day of Ramadan in China (elsewhere, it was yesterday), so Monday is a one day holiday for Eid ul-Fitr. Yay! It's also the day Frankie goes back to Shanghai, after travelling with us then a stay in the infirmary here (Nikki and Catherine were both ill, both better now).

Today I shall go shopping, and some of you might get packages from China in the post. If so, please don't open them until the 25th of December. They're not Christmas presents like, but just wait 'til that day :P

Oh, and only Ross has sent me his address, any more postcard requests?