Was that English?

No, that was NOT English. Of course it wasn't, you're not allowed to speak English. So we all ask each other to either repeat our sentences several times or, if things are desperate, perform a quick game of cherades to pantomime our thoughts.


Since no one knows wtf anyone else is saying, things are pretty entertaining. Only about 15 people, myself included, can have a decent conversation, because quite a few people either haven't taken chinese yet, or have only taken a year or less. In my opinion, it would be completely impossible to communicate with anyone if I didn't know at least some Chinese, but there are about 10 students who came here with zero chinese knowledge, and they seem to be doing fairly well. While they have no idea what most of us are saying, they can already say basic phrases and express ideas pretty accurately, which is really impressive.


But I'm not complaining. I love the fact that English is banned, I can't imagine learning much if I could just say whatever I wanted to in another language. That's exactly why I picked this program, and it's already paying off. In three days of class, I learned about three solid weeks of material, so things are really fast-paced. 1 day = 1 week, essentially. 


Here's a run-down of an average weekday at CET:

• Get woken up by the sun at approximately 6 am. The sun has fully risen by 6:15, which is SO ANNOYING. So I never ever get enough sleep. 
• Try to sleep in until 8 am, but fail miserably. 
• Leap out of bed with a spring in my step and twinkle in my eye at 7:45 am.
• Go downstairs, walk for 25 seconds outside and I immediately hit several 小摊 (street vendors), where they serve some pretty interesting breakfast items. I usually pick up a type of fried pancake filled with veggies or pork, or an egg roll-up with lettuce inside. (it's kinda hard to translate what these things are). 
• Anyhow, they're all delicious, and breakfast typically costs between 1-2 kuai (RMB), which is approximately 15-30 cents. Yep. 15-30 cents.
• Go to class, where the teacher reviews the new words we "learned" (taught ourself) the previous day, which is about 50-75 new words. This is the rough part. She reviews by speaking three sentences, which we have to write down. This is called 听写 (dictation), and is a pretty challenging way to test our vocabulary memory.
• We then learn new grammar structures, which consist of 20-30 new sentence patterns and ways to say things. I've already covered over 100 new patterns in 4 days, so.... 
• After a short break, which usually involves us going back to the street vendors for some snacks, we split up the "large" class of 6 people into 3 and 3, where different teachers drill us on what we just learned. The idea here is instant memorization, which... is a bitch.
• Oh, and pretty much every teacher here is attractive. (I can practically hear trang groaning...)
• Anyway..... after we finish the first small class, we come back for another round of getting owned by the teacher. This usually consists of her quizzing us on both old and new material, and testing how fast we can speak and how fast we can listen. Definitely not easy.
• Class is over at 12:30, 4 hours later. After a free lunch at the CET cafeteria, which is soooo much better than any cafeteria food in America, we head to 一对一，or one-on-one sessions. 
• 1-on-1 sessions are 30 minutes of oral drilling. 
• Then it's back home to do about 2 hours of writing homework, and then memorize 60 new words and read a 4-page story for the next day. We have way too much homework. :(
• My roommate gets back at around 7 pm from work (he's a lawyer's assistant), and then we usually go grab dinner with some people. A typical dinner is 4-10 people, everyone orders a dish, and we share them all. Costs about $2.30 each (including drinks)
• At home, more word-memorizing. Bedtime at midnight, which is usually too late. 

Our first test is tomorrow: a 2-hour written test, followed by two 30-minute oral tests. 

Fun picture of the day: this huge bottle cost 3 kuai, about 44 cents. (It's a 21oz beer)