Finally arrived at Chengda

After spending a week and a half at Thiery's place in Zhongli, it is time for us to move on to the real deal. No more slacking around and acting like a tourist anymore. From now and here on, there is only a 100% focus on leveling up our Mandarin skills. 

This also means that Behnam and I are going our seperate ways here in Taiwan. While I'll be studying at NCCU in Taipei, Behnam will continue his mandarin studies at Qingda. The blog entries will also vary from time to time. So in the future (if i'm in a blogging mood) you will read something about me and my pathetic attempts at learning Chinese here at Chengda. Whereas mister Sobhani will donate some of his most excellent entries from his crib in HsinChu (of course when he is not busy jerking off onto some black puss bun). 

You probably read in an earlier entry that Koon and I did not take the Mandarin placement test at the NCCU. Luckily the people at the language center did not mind about our little slipup, we were casually placed somewhere in between the mid-high level portion of the students. This monday we had our first class. What can I say about it, but just this: it sucked donkey! 

My first lesson did not went very smoothly as i would have hoped. I mean,  the last couple of months before i left for Taiwan, all i did was work work work. You could imagine that the amount of mandarin I was using back in Dutchland was extremely low and therefore my proficiency was actually of an 5 year old infant. My other classmates on the other hand are pretty good. We have this Lady (see photo) from poland who shoots her mandarin "raps" like an AK-47. Other classmates are from Thailan, Korea and America all of them are very skilled and proficient (i hate them).

I imagined that my lack of skill would occur in the Netherlands but I just hope that with some time and some adjustment everything eventually would come back.  I won't despair though, i will try to keep up with the class as much as I can and try to survive the first week. Koon on the other hand, had the advantage of 6 weeks of summer school, some dating experience with some Taiwanese women (luckily no one got hurt or pregnant) and his very broad knowledge Chinese thanks to his cantonese background. So his re-adjustment for this course was a very minor. 

Though his cantonese advantage will diminish in time as the advanced stuff will get harder and harder, his current class performance is pretty good for now. Still it's pretty hard  for him to get rid of his heavy Cantonese accent. There were occasions where he could not hide from his canto heritage. Imagine yourself having a conversation with some stranger and the first thing this person asks you is : "are you from HongKong ? Are you Cantonese or something?" I guess it pisses him off every time he hears that. But it's funny to see how local people would react on some chinese dude talking mandarin with a heavy canto accent. 

As far as i can tell, the level of my class is a steep enough to provide me enough challenge. This is good because this will prevent me from getting lazy. Furthermore our teacher (miss Ma) is surprisingly good in her teachings, not to mention also very good looking). Although quite young compared to the other teachers at the language center, her enthusiasm and wit makes the class good and fun (sheesh this is beginning to sound like an ad for Chengda).  Our lesson schedule is quite gruesome. Though we have class for 3 hours each day, the amount of homework is still staggering high. For instance the required preparation time for each lesson would take like a an hour to an hour and a half. In each lesson we go through the new material and afterwards there will be a small test. Talk about intensive! Come to think of it, this kind of teaching method would certainly never happen at Leiden University. Which let me think that i should have done this a lot sooner instead of wasting a year and a half of my time getting a scholarship. Remember this well kids. Stop wasting time taking any language lessons back at home. You wanna learn mandarin? Go to China or Taiwan!

So to put it simply, our daily schedule would  like this:  From 8 am till 11 am, we receive three hours of raw mandarin pounding. Afterwards you're free to go. In reality this means you will have to review the class material and do some serious rigorous studying. The amount of new words everyday is almost overwhelming. Looking ahead in a few weeks time, there will be some extra courses as well for language students to choose from in order to improve their language proficiency. But there are other non Chinese related classes you can take too. It all depends how much you want to do in your year here at NCCU. 

Speaking of which, NCCU is a very nice university to stay at. There are a lot of good student facilities here. For example there is a nice swimming pool and a gym besides it. A one year membership of the swimming pool and the gym only cost students about 50 euros. And did i mention that is place is nice because of the girls? Really, everyone i spoke to these couple of days congratulated me on the fine choice i made going to NCCU because this place harbors the nicest and the prettiest girls of Taiwan.  As the regular classes have not started just yet, there are already a lot of nice looking girls walking around on the campus. Koon is putting all his hopes here to find his future spouse. So let's all root for him... hahahaha