Time now for the last in my language learning series. It's a while since my chinese course, but I will do my best to remember the highlights.

I had been looking forward to the course since I heard it was available. Once again I was surprised at the number of people who didn't even consider the course, considering it absurd to attempt such a difficult language. Having found Japanese not worthy of the "difficulty hype", I dived in. Others simply took it to fill the minimum course requirements as it didn't require an exam at the end of the period. Having now studied two oriental languages, some of the western stereotypes regarding them strike me as quite amusing. One is the common assumption that they all use the same characters. However, should you observe a sentence written in Japanese, Chinese and Korean, you would find them all quite distinct. The difference is especially recognisable in speech.  Another amusing, non language related fact is how often people confuse Japan and China. I often laugh at this when people ask about my upcoming trip or about my language studies.

It was nice to find Sodfoot in the same course, and as you might have noticed, many of the scribbles originate from the course. To start off the course we were introduced to a host of characters who, although apparently about the same age as us, seemed to be all suffering from a severe hormone deficiency, BOY here being one of them. This seemed particularly odd when we did a chapter where they talked about upcoming driving lessons.

Our teacher was a nice Chinese woman, who I will mostly remember by how her face contorted into various odd expressions as she did her best to demonstrate to us correct pronounciation. Indeed the pronounciation seemed ridiculously difficult at first. "Wo" could be pronounced in four different ways to mean four completely different things.  Funnily though, her face also occasionally contorted when speaking in English. As could be expected, she did make her fair share of, seemingly obligatory, language teacher pronounciation mistakes, among them her instructions to fill in "the blankets" on a worksheet.

In addition to proper studying, we were delighted by a couple CDs sent to us by the Chinese embassy. Unfortunately, these were made in China. Firstly, whenever you navigated on the CD menu to a different area, an error message would pop up saying the correct music could not be found, meaning you had to manually open the music files on the cd whenever prompted. Genius as I am however, I thought we could get around this by copying the music to where the program looks for it. This took a slight while, but once done it all worked perfectly, - almost. Actually, it was still a mess. After finally being able to navigate the menus properly, we clicked on something about Chinese cuisine. Now all hell breaks loose, as the flash program attempts to open the pdf file, and thus launches Adobe reader, that being the default program for pdf files. We are confronted with a veritable barrage of error messages and warning noises.

Realising now that the CD is essentially a bunch of pdfs in fancy packaging, we simply browse to the CD to open them. Inside we find pages upon pages on Chinese culture punctuated with the occasional picture. Not one to waste her country's generosity, the teacher was then content to skim the various texts pausing for brief explanations at the pictures. For what was left of the class anyway. How they thought an encyclopedic eBook would help our studies... I don't know.

There isn't terribly much to say about what happened in the class aside from what you normally get with languages. The actual language on the other hand is completely different. Ridiculously difficult pronounciation (and I usually find that the easy bit in languages), and words which are very hard to remember beacuse they seem so similar; not to mention the ultimate mammoth task of learning the characters. In comparison, Japanese is quite easy. However it was an interesting course I was glad to participate in, and I think I will take the next one when I get back from Japan. Hopefully I will remember something, which seems unlikely, since I've forgoten most already.

That might've been my only decent analysis of any of the languages I've studied, well the most useful anyway I think. I did realise that to anyone actually wanting to know about what it is to learn languages, the series is quite useless.

 As a side note, some others and I have noted the very high average age of language teachers, possibly due to the fact that theyve spent most of their life learning different languages well enought to teach. This jumble of learnt languages then has the occasional side effect of causing general pronounciation to go awry. This has the more predictable side effect of earning ridicule from students. Luckily I myself am above such foolishness... eheh...