Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Q3: 1st Day of Class

I just started my 3rd quarter at Shida and had a great first day of class. The teacher is older, speaks quickly (in a natural way), and jokes a lot, making for a very entertaining class. There were 8 of us there today (Ting Zhou was missing b/c he's still in Japan). The others included:
  • Canadian who has a degree in history
  • Guatemalan who is pursuing his master's in TW
  • Japanese woman from north of Tokyo
  • French woman who studied Chinese art history (or something like that)
  • American from Minnesota who studied economics and government, and likes the British accent
  • Indonesian hua qiao (Chinese descent) whose parents also did not speak to him in Chinese when he was growing up
  • Spaniard - hmmm, can't remember any details about him
The teacher joked around about us finding a partner in Taiwan. Since the population growth has slowed down a lot, she was encouraging us to marry locally and start having babies. We are also using the second edition of the book, which has the bopomofo and now two types of pinyin. One is the type commonly used in Taipei and the rest of the world. The other was mandated by the Green party, who will likely only be around for 3 months longer. They've instated a lot of expensive changes that don't seem to have a lot of reason.

The teacher talked a lot about the history as we went through looking at some of the new photographs in the new edition. She was saying in Ch 9, of the beauty pageant picture, that there is no longer a national competition, but just smaller county ones. There was something about the national winner going off to Las Vegas and taking off her clothes and how the TW didn't think that was so great. Also, they no longer wear the "Chinese" style dress - Taiwan is promoting Taiwan culture - except no one knows what that means. For the competition, they started using aboriginal clothing colors (bright blue and red) but it's not characteristic enough of Taiwan.

Another interesting difference between China and Taiwan is married life. Our teacher was saying that in China it's common for the husband to do the cooking and child rearing nowadays and the woman to come home from work and just relax by reading the paper. Since the one child policy created a higher percentage of males, women can be choosier. "Not you, not you, can you cook? ok, you." haha

She ended the class talking about all the slang in Taiwan. When she was a kid, one of the vocab words was new - "bang". When she used it, her mom didn't understand her. This book has a lot of informal type language since the premise is of an American campus. She also talked about current day slang, especially on the computer. 520 (wu3 er4 ling2) means I love you. 3Q (san1 Q) sounds like Thank You. 81 (ba1 yi1) sounds like Bye, so they also use 881 (Bye bye). Orz is a pictograph. The 0 is the head, the r is the arms and the z is the legs. So it's someone bai-bai-ing, ie praying, on the ground.

I've switched back to the 2 hour class and what with all the laughing and interesting tidbits, class just flew by. It also helps that the weather is beautiful again - going to class when it's sunny and coming out it's still sunny.

1 comment:

Catherine Shu said...

Hi Lin,
A fellow Taipei expat knitter I met on Ravelry is hosting a Stitch N' Bitch at her apartment near Da'An Park this Saturday at 2PM and I wanted to let you know. Let me know if you're interested in coming. There'll be a few people there, including another student from Shida (it's a small world!).
Catherine