November Blog
Hello again, everyone! How has November been for all of you, with the colder weather coming in and the Christmas period slowly approaching? The month of November for us has been quite relaxed, as without holidays and so on we’ve had a real chance to settle down here in Tianjin. This includes finally coming to terms with how cold it is now, as we have to wrap up in gloves and coats every time we leave the building - the cold would be bearable but the strong, sharp wind takes some getting used to! In this blog, I'm going to write about some of the main events of this month, and then at the end I'm going to speak for a bit about our experiences of Chinese so far, and some thoughts about learning the language here.
There have been quite a few highlights over this month – such as the 30th of November, which was the Scottish Alumni Ball in Beijing to which we were all invited – a lovely event! That was the second time going to Beijing in November, as a few weeks previous some of us took a day trip there; nine of us set off on the slow train after class one Thursday, to avoid the weekend rush. We split up upon arrival, with some going to sights such as Tiananmen Square while the rest of us went to go see the Ginkgo trees! I wasn’t sure what to look for at first, but the long expanse of yellow trees and leaves alongside one of the main roads stood out pretty well, and so we spent a while kicking around leaves and getting photos. I’d never heard of Ginkgo trees before, but as it turns out they’re fairly well known for their colour and their scent, or rather stench, as the smell becomes stronger the more the leaves decay – we had to scrape leaves off of our shoes when we got back home so our rooms didn’t smell of it. As it turns out there was a photography group there at the same time as us, and upon seeing our group they invited us to come along and pose, asking us to throw up leaves and run towards all the cameras to get action shots. Maya in particular was very popular; at one point she was surrounded by thirteen different photographers, and one of the people sent her the photos of herself and the group afterwards via WeChat – they’re incredibly professional looking!
The photos from the photography group, and Maya being surrounded by cameras!
After our time among the trees we walked back along to the subway to go grab dinner, passing through fun, brightly light streets on our way. The sun had set long ago but Beijing was brightly lit, lively yet not overcrowded. We shared a dinner in a nice restaurant and walked along to a seriously fancy shopping area for some bubble tea, then popped into a couple of shops nearby before heading back out into the night, catching the subway and train and eventually reaching home again.
As for the ball, there were actually two events we were invited to that weekend – the Scottish Alumni Ceilidh on the Friday, and the St Andrews Charity Ball the next night. We all went to the ceilidh while around half of us bought tickets for the ball, and as part of the former group, I planned alongside Jody and Henry to sleep over in Beijing after the ceilidh and then spend the next day in the city, which is just what we did. We packed backpacks the night before, so on Friday after class we were ready to head straight over to the train station to get our bullet train to Beijing. We found our accommodation and started to get ready for the ball, then got a taxi to the venue which was a very fancy hotel, with Christmas lights bedazzling the front of the building and doormen to open your taxi doors for you! Most of the others had already arrived, so we joined in with some mingling and finger foods before heading in to the main area for the announcer and guests to say some words. The dancing started shortly after – I may have hated having to do social dancing in PE from 1st to 4th year, but I have to admit that it prepared me well for this, as we all had a blast of a time, Scottish and Chinese students alike! The event was held in a big hotel, and as well as the 21 of us there were many many students there that had studied in Scottish universities, such as the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Whether we were speaking to them about life in Scotland and our respective studies, or helping to teach them the dances, it was lovely to meet everyone. We all danced so much, and even with our high hopes for the night the event still exceeded our expectations! The photographer for the event sent us the link to the photos afterwards, so I've included a few of them here along with the link for those interested.
After such a fun night in the venue, can you guess what we were met with when we left? The first snow of our time in China! The ground was too wet for most of it to lie, but nevertheless the cars that drove up and down picking up guests were covered in a layer of white, and it was still snowing lightly as we waited for our taxis to arrive.
The walk back to our accommodation through the hutong streets was certainly interesting (we got lost) but even though Jody and I were pretty cold in our dresses and high heels, the snow that lay thick on the cars and some parts of the ground was so nice that I would happily have walked barefoot! The next morning was even better; being the first of four in the mixed hostel room to wake up, I left the (very warm) room and went out to sit on the (very cold) roof area, where I made a wee snowman and sat for a while before meeting up with the others to get ready, pack up all our stuff, and check out.
Can you see the tiny snowman I made, silhouetted against the sun? :)
Our first place to visit after leaving the hostel was Tiananmen Square via subway, but we got out at the wrong exit and got a bit lost, so instead we went back a subway stop and ended up at the same shopping centre I'd been to weeks before! We got some food and I directed us back through the streets in the opposite direction from what we'd done the last time, leading to a big shopping street that we walked down for a bit before finding the Beijing Foreign Languages Bookstore, which we all spent a long time in – I didn't want to leave! The first floor was all English publications, but the second floor had more foreign language learning books than I think I've ever seen in my life. They had sections for French, Russian, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean... the books were reasonably priced, but I'm trying to budget so I only got one book from this section (a German comprehension book) although there were simply so many books that it would be possible to spend an entire day there, browsing through them all! There was another section with novels that were in both Chinese and English, alongside a huge wall of books relating to linguistics and translation – perhaps a day each for both of these sections would be best!
After dragging myself away from the shop with the two books I got, we went to the same restaurant as last time before heading back to the subway and straight to the train station, where I bought us our return tickets (good practise booking tickets for our big holiday coming up soon!) and we got our bullet train back to Tianjin. The three of us sat in an almost empty subway carriage back home, as the train station is at the very end of the subway line and there weren't many people boarding at the other stops at that time in the evening – we were quite a sight, three foreigners sitting in a row with their travel bags, each reading their own respective novels! All in all, with Beijing being so easy to get to but still such a different city from Tianjin (and of course, the capital) it's the perfect place for weekend trips such as this, and we had a great time. And the ceilidh was simply wonderful; we're very grateful to have been invited to such an event!
November was also the month of the huge 11/11 shopping sale, which my mum informs me was big enough to reach the news in Scotland (this year was a record breaking number of sales, by quite a margin if I remember right) and may even find its way into the West in years to come. It certainly is a big deal here, because from midnight to midnight on the 11th of November we all went crazy on taobao, buying things we'd been adding to our baskets for weeks and weeks in preparation. I’d been pretty reserved with my taobao purchases up until that point, so I took the opportunity to get quite a lot of things – including new shoes, books, some lovely decorative fairy lights for our room, some winter clothing, and a nice warm blanket! Over the next two weeks or so everyone’s parcels started flooding in, and there were always big queues after class of people waiting to pick up their purchases from the delivery unit. Speaking of parcels, another thing to note about November is the parcel (or ‘care package’ as we call them) that arrived from home! It came with some sweets, two chocolate oranges (yesss!), an advert calendar each for my roommate Maya and I, and also my glasses, which are quite a handy thing to have around now while studying.
That brings me nicely on to the next topic for this month's blog – I thought I'd speak for a bit about what it's like learning the language here, and about some of our progress so far.
We’ve now been studying Chinese here for just under three months, and the progress we were starting to see last month has done nothing but grow since then. Chinese is so unlike other languages I’ve studied before in many ways, with one being that in a sense it's much more straightforward and intuitive. There’s no verb conjugation in Chinese, no adjectival agreements, very few prepositions, and lots of constructions that we learn in class that are not only easy to learn and use for many different things, but also intuitive and logical. Things we learn in class seem to pop up wherever we go, as what was once a string of incomprehensible sounds now sticks out as something you understand, and a character that didn't seem all that useful in class now pops up in signs and bits of writing, and you realise that every single thing you learn comes into use in one way or another! Living here lets you surround yourself with Chinese, whether you're passively hearing and seeing it around you or actively starting conversations and seeking out reading materials, et cetera. This way is the most natural, genuine way of picking up a language, and in our every day as well as in classes we learn things that are actually useful to our lives, allowing us to carry out our day-to-day lives in this language. I studied German for six years in school, and yet there are things I can now say in Chinese that I simply don't know how to say in German. Perhaps for forming long essay sentences I'd have an easier time in German than in Chinese as that's what we learn in school in order to pass our exam, but what's more important is being able to actually use the language naturally, a skill that isn't necessarily focused on much while learning a foreign language in a British school – so it's not just interesting to compare the two languages and see what similarities and differences there are, but being aware of this difference in level also motivates me to put more effort into improving my German! Another thing about learning Chinese here is that immersion is not only an effective way of learning from a logical standpoint, it’s also fascinating to be sitting in class and realise that although you could probably translate bit-by-bit what the teachers are saying into English with reasonable accuracy, you don't need to, because you’re understanding it perfectly well in Chinese! The constant impulse to translate everything into English is often a barrier when speaking another language - I keep reminding myself, this person isn’t saying “Go slowly” in English, they’re telling me to 慢慢走(mánmán zǒu) in Chinese - while a direct translation of this phrase could be 'Go slowly', a proper equivalent in English would be something like 'Take care'. But this shouldn't matter, because we're in China and I think it's important to not put as much thought into translating things to English as we do into simply understanding it in the language in which it is presented. As well as this, there are many phrases that would sound weird or unnatural were you to translate them directly (or even rephrasing them slightly) into English, whereas in Chinese it's a common thing to say - in a sense, when going from one language to another you need to take culture into consideration just as much as the literal language, and so getting into the habit of thinking in and through Chinese is much more beneficial in the long run, even if it feels unnatural at times. And seeing others make progress around you is a great thing – at least once a week someone has a story about how they used their Chinese that day, and how surprised they were at how much they managed to use after such a short time! And we're only three months in, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing the progress everyone makes in the months to come, and to seeing how our lives here change the more we learn about the language and way of life.
So that's my blog for this month over – as usual, if you have any questions or comments please feel free to get in touch!
再见！
艾米 (Amy)