As Long As I Know How to Love, I Know I Will Survive

I have survived my first week of school! (BTW, the title is a shout out to my Karaoke partner.)

Class is from 8:10am to 11:50am. Alvin and I are in the same class, and we have 15 students in our class including us, and 13 of them are Korean. You do the math. By the way, to get the correct answer, you need to know that Alvin and I are not Korean. Hmm, I wonder if we are in the same class for a year, will we start picking up some Korean?

The Korean students are very good at reading characters. I definitely feel like my character recognition is not as strong, but one advantage I have is my listening is ok since I grew up listening to Chinese. I know that I have to put in some extra time up front to try to catch up in my reading. The teacher told us that this first month is the hardest because we all are playing catch up. Eventually, we will get better at recognizing character, learning characters, or even guessing the characters in context.

Next week we start our optional afternoon class. Alvin and I both would like to take the calligraphy class.

One thing I am impressed at is that the teachers can guess where we are from just from one or two sentences of speaking Chinese. They automatically can tell who is Korean by the way they say some words. The first day of class, I said one sentence, and the teacher said, "you are American?" Then I said another sentence, and he said, "and your parents are from southern China." I was afraid if I said another sentence, he would say, "You also were born in Phoenix, studied to LA, and then lived in Dallas." Woah!