Half Way and Not Sucking
Over half way actually, but the milestone is having submitted major assignments in all subjects and having got back some actual marks. Well, so far only one actually, an essay I wrote on the villainous Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. I take it as a good sign that I thought I did okay, without being overconfident about it. So I was blown away when I got a H1 for it, the highest possible mark. I can’t help post the comment:
Mat, this essay was a real pleasure to read. You make a number of very interesting points and are highly sophisticated in your analysis. I look forward to reading the next one!
It’s not that I’m insure enough that I absolutely require this sort of feedback but when engaged in something as radical as this move is for me, it’s good to get some sort of tangible response that you aren’t over your head. So this means a lot.
Without overstating things, a decade as a journalist probably means I wasn’t looking at bombing out or anything. The achievement here, in a sense, is that this was in a non-Chinese subject and everything non-Chinese right now is virtually back burner in comparison. I’m in the situation where it would be very helpful to ace every subject since applying for a limited number of mid-year spots in the actual BA program, scores actually matter in the way that they don’t for my fellow students. I should, touch wood, be feasible to ace these subjects by simply taking them seriously. The big question remains Chinese.
So what of Chinese now? It continues to unfold in unexpected ways. The coordinator is really the only tutor that has been consistent in delivery of the course material. The others have been either radically changing the practice mechanisms or forging ahead with material that doesn’t seem connected to the level of students in the class. I still have the sense of an under-resourced and over-taxed undergrad teaching system and I guess I’m surprised that since it’s been running for years it’s not a little more refined in terms of teaching mechanisms. I can soldier through by putting in extra work but I have a sense it’s kind of failing to get the most out of the students at the extreme ends in the classes.
Listening comprehension is an examination showstopper for me. It’s just like the listening comprehension excersizes we do and I’m being utterly owned. I nail the first two questions on everything and then get overrun. Discussing my difficulties, one of my tutors kindly offered to let me attend a second class – basically the one a level down from my regular one – Chinese 2A. This is for people that learned Chinese for one year at university but had no prior learning before doing so, as opposed to my actual Chinese 2E level which is post-VCE (year 12) . Weirdly they use completely different text-books, one of which is a real spoken language course (2A) and the other is a highly grammatical and formal system (2E). Actually I think it’s a better text book than the one I’m using for my official classes but there you go.
It’s still nowhere near enough. The tutor in charge of the dreaded listening comprehension class has offered to sit down with me for 20 minutes before the class for one-on-one 100% Chinese discussion. This is extraordinarily generous. Really I can’t say enough good things about the staff. There’s also my LLE program, which in honesty is a 1 hour sit down with my Chinese friend Suzie where we do some random Chinese stuff. The other lass that comes along has a Chinese mum and she’s actually quite comfortable speaking in Chinese and she can understand naturally spoken Chinese quite well. She couldn’t be more different from me, where my ability in these areas is very weak but my vocab, character knowledge and grammar appreciation etc seems notably higher. I didn’t really think that people would have different sorts of language competency before I set on down this path, I just sort of visualised language ability as a single line which everyone sat on at some point between zero and fluency. It seems obvious with the benefit of hindsight but it does demonstrate the difficulties that language programs have when they have such a diverse range of students.
My biggest problem is still lack of confidence when speaking. It’s fractionally better than it was. I can generally say what I want after an uncomfortable pause, I just tend not to want to. Which hasn’t been lost on others… so this is something I need to tackle head first. A couple of days ago I went along to the Chinese debating society session (as an observer only!). A packed auditorium where I was the only non Chinese guy there, which was pretty weird too – you have the sense that everything is looking at you because, well, they are! As you can imagine this was fluent rapid fire debating Chinese and on quite a sophisticated subject. I was under the mistaken view I was getting somewhere by following stuff said in movies, but this was a real eye opener. It just utterly washed over me, with the continued absurdity that if I sort of mentally capture something that was said and think about it for a bit, I can grasp it.
There were some other curious effects. I couldn’t understand some of the guys at all at the start, but an hour later I could. I can intellectualise my weakness here, it seems to be an inability to skip over something I don’t know. It seizes up the pipeline like a CPU cache flush, using a nerdy tech analogy. So if there’s a lot of words I don’t understand, or rather more commonly a word I know but don’t recognise when it’s spoken right away, then I lack the ability to file that as an unknown and continue trying to parse the language. It’s like someone just removed my bablefish and now they’re doing the Tin Tin equivalent of speaking in hieroglyphics. Then I have to switch back to a ‘mode’ where I’m listening for the start of a sentence to try begin the process again. Self-awareness of what’s going wrong is, however, utterly useless at actually fixing it. The brain is an unknowable box that just needs to be left to its own devices to form the appropriate connections.
Another thorny issue is that it’s becoming clear I need to become more efficient with my time. If I thought I was busy before, well… I wasn’t. The praise above is something I need to try live up to in a larger more complicated assignment I effectively need to write this weekend (resenting the time spent on it when I know exactly what I need to do for Chinese…) and my calendar ominously heralds an increasing frequency of due assignments. The bright side is the heavy assignment subjects are the ones that don’t do exams. With luck that should provide some much needed breathing space in the run up to the Chinese exam for intense study in the weak areas.
Right, better get back to it. Romantic period poetry here I come.
