Chinese Lessons

It's been a pretty busy week. Caitlin and I are getting 6 hours of Chinese lessons a week. Maosi, one of the bosses, teaches at a teaching college. So his students are our teachers- they want to be Chinese teachers to foreigners. Chinese is very hard- there are four tones and several sounds that aren't found in English. We are doing an immersion type of method which is good, because it is like what we do to teach the kids English. But it can be a bit overwhelming. I also think Caitlin is better than me. It feels a bit like school, which is sort of tough for me. I'm really sick of school of any kind at the moment. Yeah, but I know I'm also lucky to get free Chinese lessons from native speakers. Hopefully we will do writing eventually. I have never really learned to write Chinese so I think that would be cool. I need to actually study to learn something. The best way to learn would be to apply what I've learned. So hopefully I can start doing that when I go shopping (we've learned some clothes) and play dice games (the numbers are still hard for me!).

I have the same schedule as last week for my classes. I am starting to get better at this teaching thing. Putting kids on teams and taking away points when they speak Chinese works wonders- they start to only speak English and they also stop misbehaving. Today in my older beginner class I played number bingo, with numbers 1-10. It was really good, especially since that is a class of 16 crazy kids (13 are boys, only 3 girls!). Plus they even learned something- most of them could name the numbers by the end of class.