Really settling in

It's starting to feel like home around here.

The kids have attended two full weeks of school, and seem to be loving their teachers. They are making friends. I am starting to feel more confidant on the visa line, and my husband is getting used to his job as a Management Specialist (basically, assisting the Management Officer with any project or task).

We received our last shipment and even hung some artwork. I will share some more photos of our home soon.

We found a new housekeeper (ayi in Chinese) who is making my life so much easier. She cooks, picks up the kids, and organizes my home. This is such a big perk of life in the FS and I am grateful.

We are all learning Chinese! The kids have an hour of Chinese at school every day, and already learned some songs and skits for the Mid-Autumn Festival on Monday. They also have a tutor coming twice a week, and she seems to be really good at teaching children.

Each officer is allowed 20 hours of Chinese tutoring per month, but I only do about 12 hours. I can't seem to find the right time. Some officers meet their tutor at lunch, but I only do this once/week since I am usually tired and hungry (I try to eat quickly before the tutor comes, but there isn't always time). My tutor also comes 2x/week at 6:30pm, but I am usually exhausted by this time and can't stop yawning. The ideal time for me would be 8am, but that is not an option- I'm already at work. And although some officers find a way to have tutoring during the workday, I feel like my day is just too packed. Still, I am grateful for the resources and hope to find a way to increase my study time.

I am busy planning some vacations! We have trips planned to Beijing, Hainan (China's tropical island), and Thailand coming up. I just have to get cracking on the details. There is a lot to arrange but I am so excited. I love that the kids are big enough to travel easily.

Scooters are the perfect vehicle around here. 

We just love this gorgeous pool

Food is a big preoccupation for us. I have found a great company called Guangzhou Grocery that will go shopping at the warehouse store and deliver it the same day to your home. I am all about home delivery. We also use an Australian butcher and I hope to set up organic vegetable delivery soon.

Here we are at the warehouse store. It's kind of fun, but takes up a lot of time...

The kids are doing great with Chinese food. L, especially, will try anything. Yesterday, she ate onion pancakes! She keeps asking for xiaolongbao, or soup dumplings, which we tried back in Maryland. I've eaten some great dumplings but have not yet taken her for her favorites- shrimp or soup dumplings. Happily, the new ayi makes dumplings.

All in all, things are going great. And I don't take that for granted at all.

Food is so yummy here! Looking forward to colder weather so these handpulled noodles will be even more enjoyable

This kid is really embracing everything Chinese. The clothes, the chopsticks, much of the food. I'm proud of her!
PS She likes having her picture taken much more than her brother...

Made it through Chinese!

Last week, I passed my Chinese test!

It feels like it was by the skin of my teeth. I had heard the tester spoke very quickly and with a strong accent, so I thought I was ready to fight my way through the test. But I was so keyed up by the time I got in there that when he opened his mouth and I didn't understand a word, I totally broke down. I started to cry and couldn't stop. They got me some tissues and then left for five minutes to let me compose myself. I sat there telling myself- you can do this!

When they came back, I pushed through, sighing with relief each time we finished a different section. Every once in a while, I would freak out again but was able to push it away and keep going. The reading was a whole different beast and I was frustrated that it was nothing like the readings we had practiced, but I did the best I could. 

As I sat in the waiting room waiting to learn my score, I was a mess...wondering if I failed both parts or just one, thinking about what it meant for my plans (really not a big deal), wishing I could control my nerves better. When they brought me back in and told me my score (2 in speaking and 1 in reading), I couldn't believe I passed, and of course, that made me cry anew. 

While I don't know that my performance that day really was deserving of that score, I know that the past nine months are. I have worked pretty hard, about as hard as I could work while also being a mom and trying to take care of myself. 

Out of my cohort of 10, 9 passed, with scores including 2+/2+ and 2/2 in addition to the minimum passing score, 2/1. I find that interesting, since we all started from 0, but absorbed the language at different rates. I don't think scores correlated with how hard we worked or how much extra time we put into it, though that extra time didn't hurt. Innate language ability plays a huge role. In some ways, that bothers me, because I have always been pretty good at languages, yet I was not one of the shining stars this time. But one thing I know is that I move slowly - it takes me a while to conquer things- so I'm hopeful that by the time I leave China, my Chinese level will have improved greatly. We'll see. 

The day after my test, I had LASIK, so I've been recovering from that while also trying to prepare for packout (in two days). Since we don't have all our stuff here (only about 1000 pounds), I'm not too worried about it. Plus, we have time during home leave to organize things further. But maybe that's why I can't sleep. :)

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.

Chinese progress for the kids...

My children have been taking a two-hour Mandarin Chinese class on Sundays since we returned to Washington. I originally just hoped they would gain some "familiarity" with Mandarin- I didn't really expect them to learn a lot. But I sit in class next to my daughter every week, and I started to notice that all the kids- not just mine- seem to retain very little from week to week.

Now, I'm no kindergarten teacher, but I think L's teacher has a lot of good tactics- she uses repetition, games, individual questions, pair work, etc. I'm sure there is something more she could do to appeal to these kids, but overall, I think she does a decent job. And yet, none of them seem to remember anything, even the kids with Chinese parents (the class is probably 1/3 kids with non-Chinese speaking parents, 2/3 kids with Chinese parents, some of whom seem to speak to them at home in Chinese and some that don't.).

This whole thing about kids learning languages so quickly is starting to seem questionable.

So I've been thinking about it. One possible reason is that these kids don't HAVE to learn Chinese. There is no urgency or necessity- now throw them into a Chinese-only school, like we did with the kids in the DR, and I suspect they would learn more quickly.

But the other thing is that we were only paying attention to Mandarin once a week. They needed more repetition, and they needed help attaching meaning to the characters. We knew it, but we just couldn't find the time.

Two weeks ago, I reached my threshold. The kids were just sitting in class, tuning out the teachers, learning nothing. I realized if we didn't change something, we would have wasted three (including commute) precious hours every weekend for a whole school year.

I looked at my dream of them learning to speak Chinese during this tour - it's not going to be easy. It's not easy for Chinese children to learn their language- it takes long hours of writing characters over and over again and I don't know what else. For us, too, it's going to take time and it's going to take commitment. So, we decided to try our best to start reviewing Chinese during the week. And lo and behold, it worked!

We made Pleco flashcards for each lesson and helped the kids memorize some characters and sentences last week. They were excited to use the Ipad. We practiced speaking at random times. And today, my daughter READ from her book- pairing characters together on her own to make questions and sentences, something she hasn't done since we started this class.  It was the coolest thing! And after we finished spinning around the table in celebration, she said- I want to do more Chinese homework! I want to do it every day!

Now I'm not naive enough to think THAT desire will last, but I am hopeful that their progress will lead to more progress which will lead to being able to have conversations in China! My long-term vision is that one day, they will be fluent in Chinese, and they will shock native Chinese speakers, and they will say, thanks Mom, for pushing us learn Chinese as kids.

We'll see, though.

Getting even busier!

Time is flying! Ever since the New Year began, I've been feeling like our time here is almost up. I've been making (tentative) departure plans, thinking about weekends away after I (hopefully) pass my test, and cramming as much Chinese as possible into my brain. But if I thought it was hard before, it's about to get harder. Last week, we finished our college Chinese textbooks and graduated to the FSI-created job-related and other textbooks. We went from about 100 vocabulary words a week to what is looking like 300 a week. Now, I'll be honest- I can't learn every one of those words. I am pretty good at learning their sound/meaning, but the characters take a LOT of work. I try to choose which are more important, and I hope that by seeing them over and over again, I'll learn them passively (it's not really working). So, I will be spending even more time in the lab, working with Rapid Rote to memorize those characters.

As if I wasn't busy enough, I just signed up for a month trial of CrossFit (let's not talk about that right now, what was I thinking?), as well as a photography class!! I recently took a 4 hour in-person "Momtographie" photography class, and it was excellent (the next one is Feb. 23!). We just bought a new DSLR, and for a while now, I've been wanting to take better photos, but didn't know how. The creator of Momtographie, Beryl Ayn Young, is a terrific teacher who focuses on helping moms take better photos of their kids. I love her business model and approach- it fits me. So I couldn't resist signing up for her 6 week online course, in which she will expand on the topics covered during the 4 hour class. I want to arrive in China and really know how to capture the things I see!

In other news, it's the Chinese New Year and we had a fabulous celebration at FSI yesterday. I made my debut as a Chinese elf. My parents were so proud....

We are off to check out some other festivities! 祝大家春节快乐! (wishing everyone a Happy New Year!)

Some tips about starting to learn Chinese

I keep thinking about a few tips that might help anyone starting Chinese at FSI soon, and I'd like to share.

1) Start learning the characters right away. You will start by learning pinyin and the sound of the words in the book. You will be overwhelmed learning the pronunciation, vocabulary, and everything else. The teachers will tell you you don't need to learn them yet. They won't introduce characters until about a week into class. You might think you only need to learn the characters from the Reading book at first. NOT TRUE. From the moment you open that Integrated Chinese book and see that vocabulary list, learn the characters as well, because two weeks later you will realize you need to know them and you don't.

(A certain blogger/former Chinese student  told me this (go down to the paragraph that reads "DO *****NOT NOT NOT***** LISTEN WHEN APOLOGETIC TEACHERS TRY TO TELL YOU THAT THERE'S NO NEED TO MEMORIZE THE READING OR SPINE VOCABULARY IMMEDIATELY. ..). I remembered it. But I was so overwhelmed that I didn't listen. Don't be stupid like me.)

2) No one is going to teach you HOW to learn the characters. When I first started, I thought someone was going to hold my hand and literally teach me each one. Nope. No time for that. You have to do the work yourself. You'll start with numbers, and quickly move on to words. Look at each one. Find some way to make it stick in your brain that, for example, 我 (Wǒ) means I (I looked for the upside down w).

At first, you may use broad shapes of characters to memorize them- like this character has this funny thing on this right side. At some point, you'll see more characters with that funny thing and realize you're in trouble. But by then, your mind may be somewhat more open to this exercise and you'll find you can absorb more. At least that's what happened to me.

Some people choose to write the characters over and over again to memorize them. But since we don't have to write for the test, and we learn 50-150 characters in a week, I didn't feel like I had the time to do that. You might- you'll have to figure out your own method. I used Pleco flashcards heavily in the beginning, but as the characters kept piling up, I couldn't keep up. I still rely on Pleco heavily to look words and characters up.

Nowadays I use Quizlet in the lab to learn the characters- they have some fun games and tests that help with the monotony of learning so many words.

3) I don't know if this is common or not, but I realized about 2 months into class that I was totally wasting time I could have been using to learn characters. How? When my teachers use powerpoint presentations (3-5 hours of the day), they usually write the characters, the pinyin, and the English. Without even realizing it, my brain and eyes were ignoring the characters and going straight to the pinyin. I have had to train my eyes to linger on the characters, to read the characters first rather than the pinyin- basically to not squander this extra time I have to learn the characters. I was really surprised when I realized what I was doing.

Those are my thoughts for now. Hope they are helpful to someone else out there.

Happy New Year!

Welcome, 2014! It's going to be an exciting year. Last New Year's day, when I looked ahead, I was focused on the big transition of us leaving the DR and arriving in the U.S. I find it interesting that this year, I am not looking to July and our departure to China right now, even though it's coming soon and will be much bigger than our last move.

All I can see today is the next five months of Mandarin study- it's going to get more intense and more complex. I am very aware that although I am about halfway through, I still speak like a baby. I wonder how I'll get to the 2 level, and how I'll ever get beyond that. It is preoccupying to say the least!

I find that in this FS life, time passes so quickly. Now that it's 2014, we'll be making summer and travel and fall school plans. I'm going to blink and this year in the U.S. will be over.

But for now, all Mandarin, all the time.

So I think this is my NY's photo. These are the books we've gone through so far (well, we're still in the middle of IC L1P2). There are many more books to come!

再见! Goodbye!

Plugging along...

I'm still here, just plugging along with Mandarin. I think I have adapted to the pace and rhythm of our program, after a rough first month. A few weeks ago, I was moved to a different class (at my request), and it's a much better fit for me. I was feeling stressed and embarrassed that I could not keep up with my classmates' speaking pace and (most of all) character retention, and it was very demoralizing. To be totally honest, I'm not used to being at the bottom of a language class, and it was hard on my pride. Once I moved to the new class, the pressure and stress decreased dramatically, and now I can say that I'm enjoying learning Mandarin (most days). I feel like I'm making progress!

I'm starting to devour books and movies related to China, so please let me know if you have a good one to recommend. Lisa See is my current favorite author and I'm re-reading her novels with a greater sense of understanding. I have a long list of Chinese movies on my Netflix queue.

I have also, inexplicably, decided that now is the time to learn to cook Asian food. Now, when I finally have Thai food at my fingertips. When I have the center of Vietnamese food right next door. When I have so much free time. Don't ask me why, but I finally stopped being intimidated by the long recipes with unfamiliar ingredients and bought an Asian cookbook. I made my first Thai coconut curry a few weeks ago, and it was darn good! I am getting really excited about exploring Asia, one meal at a time.

Today I ventured to Grand Mart for the first time and came home with some basics for my first few meals (the cookbook explained the ingredients and helped me know what to choose and where to find it- super helpful).

The kids, after years of pickiness, are starting to branch out and at least TRY things. I'm determined to have them eating some Chinese food before we arrive- otherwise, it will be a rough cultural entry. And they are doing pretty well in their Chinese classes!

Life is good in our neck of the woods. Hope the same for all of you.

Chinese, month one

I didn't mean to disappear for so long. I wrote a post during my first week of Chinese, and then thought I'd wait a few days to see if I still felt the same way. Then the full force of the FSI Chinese program hit me! If I stop to blog, that's 30 minutes I am not studying...and I pretty much feel like I need to study all the time.

I knew learning Mandarin would be hard, but knowing that abstractly and experiencing the challenge are two different things. Oh my goodness, this is hard.

It's been a while since I learned a new language- 17 years in fact (how can that be!?). I started learning Spanish in 7th grade, so the last time I was studying at FSI, I was already quite comfortable with the language. I learned Hausa, a West African language, from zero when I was in Peace Corps Niger, and I remember that it was hard. Hausa has some interesting sounds which I learned to make in time, but the basic language is pretty easy to pronounce. In contrast, Mandarin pronunciation is so challenging. Even after 3 weeks, my pronunciation is stilted and wrong most of the time. My teachers make sounds I really can't reproduce. It is humbling.

When we learn a new vocabulary word, we have to learn the meaning (keeping in mind that many words/sounds have multiple meanings), how to pronounce it (which is counterintuitive to what I want to say when I look at it, and keeping in mind the 5 tones which change the meaning entirely), AND memorize the Chinese character(s) that represents it.

Oh, the characters.

We started out by learning pinyin, a standard system of romanized spelling of Chinese sounds that allows foreigners or non-Mandarin readers to read aloud, even if they don't know the meaning. So I guess I thought the teachers would really hold our hands and gently introduce us to reading characters. We had two "intro to reading" classes that I really resisted psychologically. It was so hard already that I really didn't feel like I could take on anymore. I missed out on some important basics of reading characters because I was so resistant to it.

But I really didn't have a choice, did I? I had to get with the program. So I learned the characters in our reading book, about 8 characters a night. The teachers didn't tell us we were supposed to be memorizing the characters from our textbook too (a good 20-30 per lesson). So the first time the teacher put up slides with only characters on them, I panicked. My classmates could read them, and I couldn't.

After an intense week cramming characters, I managed to kind of catch up to my classmates in terms of reading. I am really struggling with my memory- I can't remember certain characters, even after seeing them a hundred times. I am trying to employ all kinds of memory tricks, but they are not really working with this 40 year old brain of mine.

I admit I've already cried twice in class. But after one of my really bad days, an A-100 friend of mine who is three months ahead of me gave me a great pep talk. Since then, I've been trying to take his advice: a) look at what I can already say, rather than how much I can't, b) do as much as I can do, but don't kill myself for not doing more, c) don't compare myself to others- all that matters is my own progress, and c) learn more about memory and how to retain more of what I see.

This week, I feel ok. I did well on our first quiz, which was great for my confidence. I have my new Iphone, flashcards all set up, and a method to studying. That all helps.

Now, a little info on how my course is organized, for anyone who is interested. I have been allotted 36 weeks to reach the goal of a 2 in speaking (I think this means basic proficiency) and a 1 in reading (elementary proficiency). At the end of my training course, I will take a test, and if I don't pass, I must study for another month (and arrive late to post). Luckily, the Chinese department monitors our progress along the way and offers more help if someone is not progressing as she/he should. Still, in the end, each person is responsible for her/his own language achievement.

My 36 week cohort consists of 12 people (only one EFM, or spouse of an officer), 3 per class. We are on the late shift, which means we have class from 10:40am-12:40pm, and then again from 2:40pm-5:30pm. Lest you think I am sleeping until 10am, let me reassure you that actual Chinese class is only a part of the learning plan. We are expected to do at least 3 hours of outside homework and lab work to make up an 8 hour day, but I'm putting in at least 5 outside class (2-2.5 in the morning before class, 1-1.5 during lunch, and 2 more at home) for a daily total between 10-11 hours. And that is just to stay afloat, not race ahead. If I had more hours in the day, I could do much more.

This is one of those times when it is hard to balance my job with the rest of my life. On the one hand, I am loving this year. It is so cool that I am being paid to learn Chinese. We are enjoying being in the U.S. and all the DC area has to offer. But it is hard being a mom studying Chinese. I wish I didn't have to worry about studying over the weekends, but I need to do at least 2 hours/day. When you add in all the activities we're doing, we are crazy busy every weekend.

The good news is that despite my moments of panic and feeling like a wet noodle at the end of every day, I am enjoying myself. I love the musicality of Mandarin. I long for the day when I can speak with some degree of ease!

One day at a time.