And the last post is incomplete.

The party was pretty awesome. I met up with some other Yalies (it was crazy, yeah, I have no idea how they found out about this thing either) and we spent pretty much the entire party with each other. It was fun.

Now, I kind of want to talk about what exactly is going down with this entire language immersion business.

I have to say that I am in some ways very disappointed with how foreign languages are taught. Yeah, I thought about it for a while and decided that my disapproval is not just limited to how I’m learning Chinese right now. I’m gonna list the problems I see one by one.

第一个: I know that during class, us 2nd year students mess up a lot on our tones and/or pronunciations of words. However, from my point of view, we are not being correctly nearly as much as we should be. Instead of this, our classes are more focused on pounding in new vocabulary into our heads, and not enough time is spent nailing the fundamental issues. And every class comes with new vocabulary, so oftentimes we don’t get to practice the vocabulary we learned the day before!

第二个: We do too much talking, and not enough listening–listening to our classmates (and ourselves) say the wrong thing in class, over and over and over. This cannot be the right way to learn a language. The system at PiB is: teacher asks a question, student responds. Thus, the emphasis is on talking, when I think listening is the more important aspect. When one is asked a question, he is obviously listening. But I don’t think this is enough. This is basically all the language interaction that we get during class. On top of that, we are often asked to use the newly learned vocabulary in complex sentences when we haven’t even learned how to properly say the words. Of course there are going to be problems when your sole means of studying the night before is listen to a CD. But you can’t ask a CD questions, like, “in what other case can you use this word” or “why is there a 了 in this sentence?”. It’s just not the same.

第三个: Our interactions with native speakers is lacking. The only chances we really have to have “meaningful” and uncut discussions with our teachers is during 中文桌子 (chinese table, zhong1wen2 zhuo1zi) and our individual sessions. I say meaningful with quotes because I think our thoughts are being shaped by the vocabulary that we have, in many ways. We are only taught to use the words we know in certain constructions, and these sentences come straight from a book that has come to the conclusion that the real reason US-Sino relations are so good is because China sent a ping-pong team on an official visit to the U.S. in 1978. Yeah… I mean, of course we have our own thoughts, but what I’m saying is that it’s hard to ask the teachers during class what the other word you want to say is, etc.

Ok, I’m wiped, and I could make a long list, but I’m too tired right now.