This year one of my main goals is to learn Chinese. In order to make sufficient income I will also be teaching English. I feel like my brain will go through the ringer in order to create lesson plans and transfer information to students as well as to collect information in order to perform up to class expectations and my personal goals for the year. Reading and writing in Chinese is really my biggest challenge in this area. Because every character has to be learned one by one, and you can't simply read something by "sounding it out" as we are accustomed to doing in English from the time we were in Kindergarten.
The purpose of learning Chinese, of course, is primarily for building relationships and opening up opportunities for the future. I don't want a language barrier to exist between me and my in-laws.
Another opportunity has opened up as well for Rex to improve his Taiwanese. There is a church in Taipei that has a Bible study in the Taiwanese language. Rex's Taiwanese is a little broken, which makes communicating with his grandma more troublesome. If he attends this Bible study he can improve his speaking, understanding, and even reading of the language. Even most Taiwanese who have spoken Taiwanese at home with their families don't read the language because in school they primarily just learn Mandarin. This is, of course, because of the Nationalists bringing and enforcing the use of Mandarin in Taiwan when they came after World War 2 to Taiwan.
What I realize is an easy pitfall is the possibility of forgetting my Romanian language. I don't want that to happen, so one of my goals is to listen to things in Romanian and keep up relationships with my friends in Romania.
Maybe my expectations of myself are too high. I guess we'll see.
No comments:
Post a Comment