So if you could not tell from the name of this blog post I have officially chosen where I will be spending my gap year!!!!! GO CHENGDU CHINA!!!!!!!!! I am so so so so so excited and have been learning Mandarin all week. On Monday I had my first meeting with Jessica (the Mandarin teacher at LREI). It was so much fun. I have been wanting to learn Mandarin for weeks but it is such a different experience to learn with someone. We spent an hour navigating Q-Talk (the site I am learning Mandarin on). Normally we would meet every Monday and Thursday but this week due to us not having school on Thursday we just met on Monday. Jessica is so amazing and I am so thankful I have her as a resource to learn Mandarin with and to motivate me to work harder. Having meetings two times a week is really pushing me to learn the language in between each lesson.
After trying to learn Mandarin for a week I have a lot of thoughts. First, learning Mandarin is a lot harder than I thought it would be. Second, it takes time for language learning to be fun. Mandarin is so different from both of the languages I know (English and Spanish), I am having trouble pronouncing the words. For example, xi huan is pronounced shi huwan. At the begining of the week when I was self studying it was hard and kinda boring. I had to push myself to start learning and even then I kept going over the same couple pages of the textbook over and over. But I don’t know when I sat down to learn Mandarin today on Sunday after taking a two day break for Passover it all flowed so much better. Then I got to play the Q-Talk games and on my first try I got 98%! I am so proud of the progress I am making. I know how to say so many things like I love you, I am American, I love to speak Chinese and more!!!
The Q-Talk textbook is really cool too. Here is a picture of the vocabulary I learnt this week.
This is only 28 words but it is incredible how many sentences you can form out of it. I really am so happy with my progress and I cannot wait to keep learning!