Everybody in my class is feeling exhausted. The first thing we did in class today was a quiz on numbers. The tutor, Yin, dictated the numbers while we wrote the pin yin and the Chinese characters for the number. I am surprised at how easy it was to learn the numbers and I am pleased with myself because now I have my first one hundred in the grade book.
After the quiz I learned how to say the date, my birthday, ask for somebody’s birthday, say I am starving to death, the colors, and some other useful phrases. It was a challenging day but my biggest challenge was writing a random question without any help; I began to panic when I heard Lao Shi Ling saying that we were not able to use the internet or our classmates’ help to write a random question. After a couple minutes of panic and frustration, I was finally able to write my own random question in Chinese.
你是 墨西哥人吗
Ni shi mò xi ge rén ma?
“Are you Mexican?”
That is the first thing I was able to write in Chinese by myself. To my surprise there are no conjugations in the Chinese language and that honestly makes things a lot easier.
Today has been a long day and even though we spend most of our days in the classroom, we still get homework. All the work makes my brain feel a bit dead, but I am really looking forwards to being able to write more sentences by myself.
Class Hours: 13
Study/Homework: 4
Total Hours: 30
Chinese at the Federal Service Language Academy 