Swamped

I’ve been cramming like I’ve never crammed before. About ten hours of study a day right through the weekend and Monday. It’s working pretty nicely in terms of hanzi, my handwriting is coming along a lot better. I am still kind of shellshocked with the sheer level of work needed. It literally took me all that time just to complete the book exercises and a 300 character homework. I feel pretty happy I’ve cranked through but I really can’t help but wonder if the other students would throw away their weekend in this way.

This afternoon I finally managed a couple of hours listening to some recordings of the listening comprehension exercises. These are recordings I specifically requested, they weren’t provided as a matter of course. In class they just bust out a tape recording of loads of Chinese and you have to work out what’s being said and answer questions being asked in Chinese.  The last and largest excersize in each section is a really long segment that doesn’t conform in any way to the vocab you’re supposed to know at this point, but you’re supposed to answer questions about it. So I’ve been working my way through the recordings and discovered a couple of days of saying things which I had never heard of before and embedded in such a way that really the sentences just made zero sence without that knowledge. That’s the problem with Chinese, if you don’t know a word it’s not even that you don’t know it but you will almost certainly know a word that sounds like it – so your brain will try assume that’s what it is leading you down a complete red herring.

If this wasn’t impossible enough, we apparently now need to write answers in hanzi. Meaning you have even less time to answer anything as you painstakingly scratch out half-remembered characters. The fact we were so bad at this generated enough sympathy to give us a 300 character homework assignment in writing hanzi which took me about four hours to do.

I’ve played the very first recording through about 20 times now and I now know what it says and I can answer the questions. That was with plenty of pausing and looking up stuff in the dictionary. What we get in the class is two full speed no pause play-throughs. Chinese is even more compact than English which means even if I do understand something I simply don’t have time to write it down and by the time you get to the end, I couldn’t tell you what it was. In fact it sort of feels like I’d be at least as well served working out how to write some short cues down as it’s streaming past.

I’m assuming this will get better but right now I’m just left with the feeling that this is a horrifically inefficient training exercise which is doing little other than to stress me out. If the vocab was constraint or the recordings were shorter it might be better. Maybe tomorrow will be a little different. With such intense study I’m discovering some curious artifacts where I come back to something the next day and I know it completely where it feels like I shouldn’t know it. I have to hope on some level those listening comprehension skills are somehow assembling themselves in my sleep.

Needless to say spending most of today writing an essay about Shakespeare felt like an unnecessary distraction.