So, so close!!

Well, the end is almost here. I take my Chinese test on Thursday. If all goes well, we will pack out next week and move to Maryland to commence our home leave.

It's been a long road. I cannot wait to be done. Not done with learning Chinese. Even after 9 months of full time study, my Chinese is quite elementary. It's just a hard, hard language and I have so much more to learn. But done with sitting in a classroom, 5 hours a day, mostly being passive. And done with spending the other hours in the dungeon they call a language lab! I preferred to study there because of the ability to use a particular Chinese language computer program (KEY5)and I found it much more comfortable than my other options. But it gets a little old!

Don't get me wrong, I am incredibly glad to be here and grateful that I get paid to learn a language. But I am really excited to get started doing my job and being more active.

I learned a few things:

1) Even if you use another program too, use Rapid Rote from the start, mostly because after a while you won't want to create all those flashcards, and the teachers have already done it for you.

2) Start learning the characters right away!

3) Once you get into the Intermediate reading book, they give you too many words to learn every day. It's not humanly possible (and many of them are not useful words, anyway). The thing is, they don't really expect you to learn them all, so I was more blase (sp) than I should have been about it. A friend of mine looked at the coming week's words on Sundays and chose about 150 of the most important ones to learn during that week; he then reviewed those flashcards all week. I wish he had told me about his strategy earlier, because it is a great idea. My reading is probably my weakest ability- I just got overwhelmed at all the reading and therefore didn't learn a lot of characters.

4) If you are here on long-term language training, any language, do an immersion! The Chinese program has not done one in a while, and when I asked, I was encouraged to propose a trip. A few of my classmates and I met to brainstorm a trip to NYC, but we ultimately decided that the trip might help with our routine Chinese needs (eg shopping, dining out, etc), but wouldn't help us with the more sophisticated vocabulary that we needed for the test. In retrospect, I wish we had gone ahead. I became SO BORED around April that I wanted to pull out my hair. Luckily, that was right around the Cherry Blossom festival and just at the right time, our teachers organized a trip to see them. That helped, though it was just one day. We also did a museum trip a few weeks later.

You don't have to go to a community that speaks the language - one language section just organized a few days at a hotel on the Eastern Shore where students and teachers just spent concentrated time together- cooking, watching movies, and speaking the language all day. I wish we had done TWO immersions! You really need something to break up the monotony.

That's all I can think of right now, but I'm sure other items will come to me.

I'll be posting lots about pack out so come back soon if that's your thing! I'm not panicking about it, only because we only have about 1000 pounds here (so it has to be easier, right?). Also, I can bring any uneaten food to my mom's house. That's super helpful.

That's it for now.