Learning Experience 1: Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival and Comedy Skit

Here is a video of a performance my group and I put on for the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, part of TCU's culture week. We performed a comedy skit in front of all of our fellow 'zhongwen tongxuemen' (chinese students) as well as our native chinese speakers here at Texas Christian University.

Going into our performance I was extremely nervous. We would be performing in front of around 50 people, a relatively small and yet still daunting amount. The scariest part about it was that we would be performing in solely Chinese after only a couple months of learning. My speaking ability at this point has definitely improved a lot since then but at  that point there was only a few sentences I could say and understand. The difficult thing about Chinese is that in addition to there being different words, there is also different tones for words which change their meaning. For example, (and just by the way I learned this one the hard way and it caused much embarrassment), to say I am a elder or a master you can say ‘wo shi xiou jie’ — xiou middle tone and jie falling tone, however, if you were instead to use jie in rising tone then you’ll end up calling yourself an old prostitute. This caused my Chinese teacher to laugh at me uncontrollably for a few minutes and then make fun of me meanwhile I still had no idea what I had said. Nevertheless, It’s safe to say I still had quite a few reservations about going up in front of so many people and performing, especially considering how easily I could mess up and say something totally different than what I intended to.

However, we managed to pull it off. Or at least it seemed to be entertaining enough. While my face got pretty red while I was up on stage, we managed to get a few laughs, which was the main goal. The whole experience gave me a lot more confidence in just experimenting with speaking to other native speakers and not worrying so much about screwing up. In fact, I think that our screw ups and mistakes in speaking actually probably made our performance funnier than it would have been had we spoken perfect Chinese. Obviously, there are still miles of room for improvement and after our performance I was more excited than ever to improve on my speaking and understanding. I think that the performance also gave me some insight into the Chinese comedic perspective. The native Chinese speakers who were there seemed to particularly enjoy when groups went over to top and also when we emphasized common mistakes those non-native speakers make. I think that it was really useful to be able to practice humor because it is such a common and important element to any culture and language.

Learning Partner: 1st Meeting — Introductions

I met last week with my learning partner, Winslen, at the Barnes and Noble here on campus. He came to America from Colombia with his wife in hopes of a better future for him and his family. He explained to me how health and medical benefits as well as the standard of living here is much better than back in Columbia. He also explained that he is attending TCU to learn English fluently for his career as an industrial engineer. We talked about the different economies around Latin America and which ones are growing faster and reasons why. We also discussed the differences in climate between Texas and Colombia and how the climate back in Colombia is the same all year round. I understand now why it was so hard at first for us to meet because Winslen is not a regular student; he lives with his wife around Arlington and relies on her for transportation to and from school. She works nearby as a linguistic coach for children. It really surprised me to hear that Winslen did not have a car. I previously had expected my learning partner to be a student here living on on-campus housing, so the fact that he was neither changed my views quite a bit. I now understood fully why it was so hard for us to find a time to meet previously. While I was frustrated earlier with our lack of common time to meet, I now feel a little embarrassed for my frustration now realizing that his schedule makes it much more difficult for him to meet than my own. In this first meeting, we were both a bit reserved — talking about our general backgrounds and not going into much deep conversation. This however is a necessary step in meeting and getting to know anyone however. As I discussed before, previously I had no idea about Winslen and it led me to be frustrated by our lack of common ground in our schedules. Now that I’ve met him and spoken with him I feel like we both understand each other much better.