Back to School

The Chinese New Year celebrations are over, and I am glad to be getting back to some sense of normalcy. It was a good break spent in fellowship with friends, but at the same time was somewhat boring with many places (other than some grocery stores) closed for the entire month. The upside to the 'downtime' was that I was able to do a lot of studying. I spent 3-4 hours per day studying by reviewing all vocabulary (from definition to correct tones), to answering all the sentence translations at the end of each chapter. The real test of how much I have learned will be determined tomorrow when classes resume.

Speaking of classes, mine will be a little different this semester. Instead of continuing with 2-to-1 like I was doing last semester, I will now be doing 1-to-1. My friend, whom I was taking classes with last semester, is farther ahead of me and it had become apparent that she felt like class was moving too fast for me to keep up with her pace of learning, and I felt like I was slowing her down. (Side note: my friend has lived here in China for 2 years, and had begun language before, but being a mother had to put language on the back burner for a short time, but by starting over with me it helped her to eventually remember things that she had learned from living here 2 years.) So, we both decided that this semester would be a great opportunity for me to do 1-to-1 in order to progress my language, but at a pace that I will continue to retain the information. I do know one thing, it will be a challenge since I don't have anyone else to rely on to help out when I don't understand, but I also know it will force me to 'step it up a notch' in my learning too. One thing that I am excited about is that I will still have two teachers this semester as well. I will have one of my teachers from last semester again, and the other teacher will be the one that went with me to help on my teaching trip to the village. I really like all the teachers from our school, and would be happy to have any of them, but feel that I have begun to build relationships with these two, so am excited to continue that this semester. I will keep you posted on how my first week in 1-to-1 goes.