Post-mid-term: Progress with Chinese?

I actually wrote an entry detailing the schedule for my average day at IUP, but I realized that it was incredibly boring and decided not to inflict it upon the 1-3 people who read this blog.

Well, we took our mid-term at IUP on Friday--it took about 1.5-3 hours (depending on your own abilities & particular classes), and the teachers actually scrambled to finish grading it over lunch so that they could all meet with each of us in the afternoon to go over the results as well as discuss how the term was going.

The test was ridiculously easy--they really don't try to make it hard for you.  One of my teachers told me that she thinks of it as a good chance for students to review old material since we move so quickly, which I think is a healthy attitude towards testing.  There were basically three sections: one for my 聽力課(廣播1), my 思想與社會 textbook that covers two classes, and a take-home exam for my 小單班 (in which I read Chinese short stories) that I handed in the afternoon before.  I got 2 or 3 questions wrong across the majority of the test, but lost more points with the short paragraph we wrote for 思想與社會 and my essay questions for my 小單班.

I was talking with friends who feel that their Chinese has already improved immensely over the past month--really?  Actually, I don't have class with them, so it's a bit harder for me to see concrete differences in their Chinese.  But I feel slightly jealous because I don't feel that my Chinese has improved greatly by any stretch of the imagination.  At most I'm more aware of potential mistakes that I make with Chinese.  I can't really open my mouth without being highly aware of pitfalls lining my way down every sentence...

I think my goals are a bit different because I'm already quite experienced with speaking Mandarin and reading some form of Chinese characters (traditional when I was little, a lot of Japanese kanji in recent years).  If I'm really honest about it, my goal is probably to be like a native speaker.  In some ways, I do use Chinese as well as a native speaker would--I don't have huge issues with tones, my vocabulary is surprisingly expansive if I stop to think about it, and I can respond very naturally in casual conversations.  But I occasionally do strange little things with grammar, don't know a lot of vocabulary that would be common knowledge to anyone who'd grown up in a Chinese-speaking country, and I can't claim to be able to understand a work of modern Chinese literature in a very nuanced way.  I'm extremely self-conscious when I speak because I want to do so correctly, but without teachers to correct me, it's not that productive and simply stresses me out--I've given up on having my parents learn how to help me with Chinese.  Now when I talk with my dad on the phone, and I still sound awkward and have to search for words occasionally, I feel frustrated since IUP hasn't worked like some sort of miracle drug.  Isn't talking casually with your parents supposed to be relatively easy?  I suppose that being able to talk about issues with Chinese society in the classroom after reading a text is different from simply pulling something out on the spot in sometimes unexplored territory.

Unfortunately, I probably won't be taking more Chinese language classes for the next few years (I will be taking a Sinophone lit grad seminar this fall, but that's quite different).  I miss Japan, and next summer I'll probably be doing research in Tokyo and only coming to Beijing for a month to do a Chinese film class.  I'm even tempted to just do my annual family visit in Taipei and stay in Japan for the rest of the summer.  I'm starting to feel more fond of Beijing after exploring areas of it outside of Wudaokou, but it's been rough health-wise.  You can accuse me of being pampered, but at some point it would be nice to have a summer that felt more like an actual break in a city that's easier for me to live in.  But I envy those students who are staying on for another semester or the entire academic year.  They're going to make improvements in Chinese that I can't imagine for myself.  But even though I get greedy in a language-learning environment, when I sit back and take a breath, I realize that I'm going to be making improvements in a multitude of areas back at Yale, that would never be possible in Beijing.  It's always a trade-off...