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.