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More on Learning Chinese–and Teaching Through Earthquakes

1) A follow-up on my Chinese language woes, which I mentioned last week: I’m happy to say that on Tuesday, Jill and I had our first class at the Taipei Language Institute’s Kaohsiung branch.

Our teacher, a Taiwanese woman in her fifties, ruled the classroom with an iron fist. We practiced the four Chinese tones until my tongue was numb. We repeated various sounds and words over and over and over again, and maddeningly, there was no context for their meaning. I’m actually convinced our teacher had us speaking Vulcan.

2) Yesterday, I taught through my very first earthquake–a 6.5 tremblor. It actually didn’t feel like much. I wouldn’t have known anything was happening unless my students, enthusiastic six-and-seven-year-olds, hadn’t started saying “teacher, teacher!” and moving their hands back and forth to indicate the ground was moving. I thought they were doing some sort of odd dance. They kept saying the Chinese word for earthquake. I stood at the front of the classroom with a beguiled grin on my face, oblivious to the earthquake until it had passed.

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