Bad Chinese strategies, photos and an update
My experiment with learning Chinese was more or less a failure – I’ve definitely made some improvement, but squandered the opportunity by not putting enough time and effort into it outside of the lessons. Partly laziness and partly the constraints of having to live a busy life. (Apologies to my teacher, Elaine.) I’m not giving up, but I’ll have to really think about what strategy I will use in the future. So I can add to the list of Chinese-learning strategies that don’t work:
- Doing nothing and feeling guilty about it
- Living near Chinatown
- Getting a Chinese-speaking girlfriend and hoping for the best
- Watching Crouching Tiger and Gong Fu over and over
- Having daily lessons but not doing the homework and vocab review properly
Water calligraphy at Lu Xun Park
Recently work has suffered a few upheavals, keeping me quite busy – I didn’t get bored of China or Chinese, but just let life get in the way. In a week I’m returning to Australia for crisis control/to explore some new project possibilities. I’ll be sorry to leave Shanghai for now, but I’m not done with China yet.
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- 27 floors up!
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- Park Karaoke. What a noise!
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- Otherwise, do what you feel like.
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- Happy fat baby.
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- Water calligraphy at Lu Xun Park
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- Streetside rabbit seller. “Get yer rodents here!”
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- You can smell the quality helium.
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- Jiuguang by night.
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- Hello Kitty wedding studios.
More photos at Flickr.
Sorry to hear the study hasn’t gone so well.
I really like the water calligraphy photo.
Colin, I’m in the same boat.
I, however, am much more egocentric (being American?) so I blame the lack of teaching method. It’s my field of expertise, so I feel confident…
http://jpv206.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/blame-the-lack-of-method/
I blogged about it there. I’m a little bitter about it.
There have been some minor victories though. Yesterday a Chinese girl came up to me and asked me if I spoke Chinese to ask directions. She freaked out a little when said yes and told her how to get to Harold Square.