Class Begins

We started our Chinese classes on Wednesday. Whilst registering, we met the only two other British people in Urumqi (or so it seemed!): a Scottish couple called Tracey and Tobin. Tracey is ridiculously good at Chinese and so is in a much higher class, but Tobin is at our level and so is in our class. There are in fact only four levels: beginner, lower intermediate (us), higher intermediate, and advanced (Tracey). Classes had actually begun on Tuesday, but we’d missed them because of the medical. After the medical we ran into Tobin on campus, and he told us that the classes were really hard. Comprehension, he said, was not so bad, but he told us that the reading classes were virtually incomprehensible. So we were ready for the classes when we came to begin them the next day.
The first class we experienced was speaking/listening, and I was shocked to discover that my Chinese was awful. I got the general gist, but the details were washing right over my head. Proper Heathrow Job. Half the time I just simply didn’t know what was going on. But Tobin had warned us and none of us British students seemed able to cope, so I wasn’t overly worried. The next day we got to experience comprehension and reading. The comprehension class was quite a lift; the teacher spoke very clearly and seemed to actually understand how to teach, unlike our listening teacher of the day before. That made us feel a lot more confident, but we still knew we had a long way to go. As Tobin said, reading was incomprehensible and all of us came away feeling very disheartened and stupid. The texts were just too hard for our level.
Our comprehension teacher, Teacher Zhang, is the Banjuren (personal tutor) for the intermediate level, and with the help of Tracey we explained to her that we couldn’t cope with the level of the reading class. She spoke to the head of the department and they organised an exam to test our level. I missed the exam because I was ill, as per usual, but from what I hear it was a bit of a joke. It was designed for a beginner’s level only, and everyone else in the exam basically just cheated anyway. However after that they agreed to change our book and so we got a slightly easier reading book. It took a pretty huge fight to get them to change our listening book, but finally they changed that too. The comprehension book was already at a perfect level.
One issue we had with the classes up to the half term holiday, known as Golden Week, at the end of October, was that we were in a class with absolutely loads of Kazakhs. Let me just say that I have nothing against Kazakhs in particular, and also that it wasn’t just Kazakhs (though they are the majority), it was also Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Kyrgyz. There were also three Koreans in our class, us five British people, and two Russians. The Kazakhs seem like fun-loving people! However, in a class environment, their desire for fun gets a little tedious. Not to sound like a huge geek or anything, but we are here to learn, and learning is a little difficult when the person next to you is on their phone, the pair in front of you are deep in conversation, the person directly behind you is playing music, whilst the 12 year old kid next to them is shouting across the room and throwing pens at his 13 year old friend. I struggle enough with my listening skills as it is without having to deal with all that. Added to that, our teachers seem to think it is perfectly acceptable that the students act like this, and on the few occasions that they bother to say anything, they don’t seem too fussed that their requests are completely ignored. Lots of the students are clearly too young to be at university, and none of them seem to have ever experienced discipline in a classroom environment. Tobin on occasion politely asked them to be quiet, which tended to be met with both amusement and also complete bemusement at being asked something so simple as to not be noisy so the rest of us could concentrate. It made our classes really quite pointless, as we spent every minute of every lesson wanting to kill our fellow students and quite incapable of learning anything. As far as the British are concerned, keeping the students in line is the teacher’s job, not the other students’. But then again, as far as the average student in higher education is concerned, being such an idiot class is immature and really not the done thing. We’re not in Year 7 any more guys… grow up.