There is a great Chinese saying, actually there are millions of great Chinese sayings, but one that I like in particular is a way to say you are tired that literally means: "I am so tired I feel like a fish that has been half eaten and needs to be flipped over so the other side can be consumed." (This is because fish are often cooked and served whole in Chinese cuisine, head, tail and bones included. When you finish you have a nice Garfield-style fish skeleton.)
"Why are you so tired, Kristie?" my concerned reader might ask.
This time Ellie can't be blamed because...she's now sleeping through the night !! I can't say it too loudly lest I jinx things back to the way they were.
The blame for my current problem lies with my Chinese classes. And the intense amount of brain power required of me. I have two classes: one is easy, one is hard. The easy class is there to give me the number of credits required by the Taiwanese government and to allow me half a chance at keeping up with the hard class. The hard class is hard because the materials are difficult and because I am at the bottom of the heap as far as Chinese ability goes.
But I love it! It is challenging. It is interesting. It is tiring. But I love it. We are reading a real novel, no more cheesy textbooks and practice sentences. The novel (台北人) is a collection of vignettes--snapshots into the lives of people who lived through the Sino-Japanese War, World War II and civil war in China, then came to Taiwan with the defeated Nationalist Army. Sounds exciting, right?
Unfortunately, due to excessive dictionary use it takes me about half an hour to read each page. This slows the excitement a little.
Which brings me to the second reason the class is hard. My classmates. Two are brothers, they were born in Taiwan and lived here and went to school here until they were 10 and 12, when their parents moved to the US. Ten and twelve!!!! They can speak Chinese. They can read Chinese. They can't write very well, but then neither can I. When one of The Brothers reads I always find myself suddenly 3 or 4 lines behind, then just doing the best I can to figure out again where they are. Then there's my other classmate, a guy from Switzerland who has a photographic memory and has used it to memorize a large portion of the Chinese dictionary. My final classmate is closer to my level, but she is also native Taiwanese, only her parents moved her to South Africa when she was 5 so she got less schooling.
And now we come to my real problem. I've never been the slow reader, and I don't want to be the slow reader now. So I look up all the words I don't know, that way when it's my turn to read in class I don't have to stop and ask, oh, about every 7th character (in some sentences 7 out of 10 characters!). With Chinese characters if you don't know it you don't even have a chance, it's not like you can sound out characters. (Okay, sometimes you can, but it's rare). Because my classmates have such stellar Chinese we can cover 6-8 pages in a class period. At 30 minutes a page that's a lot of reading time every night.
It's too much.
Because even though Ellie is going to sleep easily now, and staying asleep, 3-4 hours of reading each night is just not manageable. Not if I ever want to do anything else. Like blog. Or house chores. Or take a break. Plus, despite our 360-degree-sleep-turn-around, things still aren't perfect in that department and Ellie is now waking up at 5am, sometimes even earlier. You know 5 am is nice, and quiet, and cool, but it's a tad on the early side. Then you have to factor in how incredibly tiring it is to do that much reading in a second language. Tiring. If you've never done anything like it, imagine reading a Calculus textbook for 3 hours, it's about like that. Tiring.
So I'm trying to learn how to be a bad student. I'm already working on it in my other class, the easy one. One day when we had a quiz I tried coming to class 10 minutes late so that the quiz would be over by the time I arrived. Too bad all my other classmates had the same idea and the quiz got postponed to the next day! (These are different classmates, happily mostly at or below my level. I was originally in a newspaper reading class with The Brothers, but got out of that one fast.) I tried asking the teacher to let me off the hook for tests, but she wasn't giving in to that one.
With my novel I've started trying to look up fewer words. Last week I only looked up 4/5 of the words I don't know, saving the ones I thought seemed most uncommon to ask during class. Maybe a good goal would be to work down to only looking up words that I need for understanding the meaning of the story. It's hard to zero in on that place of understanding versus extra descriptive details, but I need try.
Now, dear reader, you know, why I feel like I'm half-eaten, ready to be flipped over so the diners can get at the meat on my other side. I've really got to make some changes before the other half gets gone too.
"Why are you so tired, Kristie?" my concerned reader might ask.
This time Ellie can't be blamed because...she's now sleeping through the night !! I can't say it too loudly lest I jinx things back to the way they were.
The blame for my current problem lies with my Chinese classes. And the intense amount of brain power required of me. I have two classes: one is easy, one is hard. The easy class is there to give me the number of credits required by the Taiwanese government and to allow me half a chance at keeping up with the hard class. The hard class is hard because the materials are difficult and because I am at the bottom of the heap as far as Chinese ability goes.
But I love it! It is challenging. It is interesting. It is tiring. But I love it. We are reading a real novel, no more cheesy textbooks and practice sentences. The novel (台北人) is a collection of vignettes--snapshots into the lives of people who lived through the Sino-Japanese War, World War II and civil war in China, then came to Taiwan with the defeated Nationalist Army. Sounds exciting, right?
Unfortunately, due to excessive dictionary use it takes me about half an hour to read each page. This slows the excitement a little.
Which brings me to the second reason the class is hard. My classmates. Two are brothers, they were born in Taiwan and lived here and went to school here until they were 10 and 12, when their parents moved to the US. Ten and twelve!!!! They can speak Chinese. They can read Chinese. They can't write very well, but then neither can I. When one of The Brothers reads I always find myself suddenly 3 or 4 lines behind, then just doing the best I can to figure out again where they are. Then there's my other classmate, a guy from Switzerland who has a photographic memory and has used it to memorize a large portion of the Chinese dictionary. My final classmate is closer to my level, but she is also native Taiwanese, only her parents moved her to South Africa when she was 5 so she got less schooling.
And now we come to my real problem. I've never been the slow reader, and I don't want to be the slow reader now. So I look up all the words I don't know, that way when it's my turn to read in class I don't have to stop and ask, oh, about every 7th character (in some sentences 7 out of 10 characters!). With Chinese characters if you don't know it you don't even have a chance, it's not like you can sound out characters. (Okay, sometimes you can, but it's rare). Because my classmates have such stellar Chinese we can cover 6-8 pages in a class period. At 30 minutes a page that's a lot of reading time every night.
It's too much.
Because even though Ellie is going to sleep easily now, and staying asleep, 3-4 hours of reading each night is just not manageable. Not if I ever want to do anything else. Like blog. Or house chores. Or take a break. Plus, despite our 360-degree-sleep-turn-around, things still aren't perfect in that department and Ellie is now waking up at 5am, sometimes even earlier. You know 5 am is nice, and quiet, and cool, but it's a tad on the early side. Then you have to factor in how incredibly tiring it is to do that much reading in a second language. Tiring. If you've never done anything like it, imagine reading a Calculus textbook for 3 hours, it's about like that. Tiring.
So I'm trying to learn how to be a bad student. I'm already working on it in my other class, the easy one. One day when we had a quiz I tried coming to class 10 minutes late so that the quiz would be over by the time I arrived. Too bad all my other classmates had the same idea and the quiz got postponed to the next day! (These are different classmates, happily mostly at or below my level. I was originally in a newspaper reading class with The Brothers, but got out of that one fast.) I tried asking the teacher to let me off the hook for tests, but she wasn't giving in to that one.
With my novel I've started trying to look up fewer words. Last week I only looked up 4/5 of the words I don't know, saving the ones I thought seemed most uncommon to ask during class. Maybe a good goal would be to work down to only looking up words that I need for understanding the meaning of the story. It's hard to zero in on that place of understanding versus extra descriptive details, but I need try.
Now, dear reader, you know, why I feel like I'm half-eaten, ready to be flipped over so the diners can get at the meat on my other side. I've really got to make some changes before the other half gets gone too.
Leave a comment
Powered by Ajax Comments