Alas, Tiger Student, I am not.

This is my small break after six hours of prepping for my second week of school.  After what seems like a lifetime of writing and repeating Chinese characters over and over again in my practice book, my right hand has cramped into a claw-like form.  I might as well be half velociraptor.

I must admit, this week was quite the roller coaster of emotions and experiences.  From the anxiety of the first day and seeing if I was actually placed properly into a class of my skill level, to the frustration of hours upon hours of written homework to improve on my writing abilities, and finally, to the joy of completing my first exam without feeling like I bombed the entire thing - I'm very glad this week is over.

I enrolled in the program at the advice of my father.  In spending so much time here in Taiwan, it would be a shame not to learn something in the process.  Having left Taiwan before entering elementary school, I had limited exposure to reading and writing Chinese.  Most of my ability remains in speaking the language, and even that sometimes is more Chinglish than actual conversational Mandarin.

So it was a shock when I got my placement exams back and they placed me in the level 7 section (of which there are 10 levels) of the program at National Taiwan University.  I immediately thought they had made some sort of mistake; nonetheless, I would go and try it out, see where my comfort level was and hopefully fit in with the other students.

After six months of not having a daily routine, it was nice to get back into one again.  Normally, I would wake up at a late hour and laze around the house, go to the gym, write a couple of paragraphs of a short story at the local S-bucks and head to dinner with the family.  Now, I am up every morning early, having breakfast, heading off to school to do a couple of hours of studying before my class starts at noon.

My class is an interesting mix of people - three Japanese, one Indonesian, one American and me.  We are all at different skill levels in reading, writing and speaking, but within the same level of comprehension of vocabulary and sentence structure.  Each of us have our own weaknesses, but we have found a nice groove helping each other out during group exercises and conversational breaks.

Our teacher is a lovely early 40s woman named Mrs. Shen.  She's what you'd picture a teacher to be - patient, happy and always eager to help you learn something new.  I've asked her for extra work (in an attempt to try to catch up to writing at a proficient level) and she's more than happily obliged, even helping me out with my phonetics, which is in dire need of assistance.

As an eager beaver student, I quickly rush to the library after my three hour class is over everyday to re-write all my notes.  It's my way of memorizing the vocabulary that we learned that day - you have to keep re-reading and re-writing the words in order to memorize the characters, there's really no other way to learn.  I'm there for another three hours as I take the extra step of teaching myself the bo/po/mo/fo phonetics technique and reacquaint myself with how to determine the intonations again.  

All this preparation is done because we are tested at the beginning of every class on the previous class' material.  If you don't do your homework or at least review what was taught the day before, you're totally fucked on the dictation quiz.  I've been doing pretty average on these quizzes so far, even with the hours of prep time I've been putting in.

By mid-week, my brain is spinning from all the new words I've learned.  This chapter is all about things around the house and while it is great to learn how to read and write this vocabulary, it's not so practical if I ever want to use it in business.  The phrase: "Put the bowls away because the kitchen is smelly," is likely not something you'll throw out in a meeting.

It felt like an eternity, but once Friday hit, I felt like a sack of Chinese characters had landed on my head; my noggin was about to explode with how many new characters I had absorbed in just that one week.  Our week-end exam was almost an hour long testing our reading comprehension, writing skills with a full composition section and a question and answer section with our teacher.  I walked out of there knowing I didn't fail miserably, but probably scoring around an 85.  Tiger Student I had hoped to be, alas Tiger Student I am not.

Having said that, this experience has been fun.  There are "aha!" moments where I know exactly how to write the words by piecing together the root words.  There are also "it's all coming back to me now" moments where I feel like I've resurrected a memory of Chinese school in Toronto from the deepest darkest recesses of my mind.  Then there are the "wow, I did it!" moments - something I haven't felt in a while when it comes to learning something new.

This is just after one week, there's eleven more weeks of this fun.

Now back to more vocab - there are 35 new words and phrases to remember for my test tomorrow.  Aiya.