I couldn't help myself with the title, especially being a big fan of "Arrested Development".
Anyway, I got the assessment call from Aggie on Friday. And, and...
I'm at an Elementary level!
I was in shock, and somewhat horrified because she said they would assign 40 Elementary level lessons to me over the next 8 weeks. My comprehension of Chinese grammar is weak so I'm hoping this will help.
What I found interesting is a conversation I had with a friend this weekend about learning. He said that to become better at something required you to practice AND to push yourself beyond what you are able to do. So if you're listening to Newbie lessons and can breeze through them the push yourself and start working on Elementary. I'm preaching to myself here I know.
For some reason this seems more terrifying than when I originally signed up for Chinese classes in the first place. Maybe it's because I have some idea of what I'm in for now?
Aggie was terrific and very encouraging during our phone call. To assess my "level" she read a number of sentences and asked me to tell her the meaning in English. When we were done I got the results. She also said (as some others have) that my pronunciation was good. A little encouragement can do wonders to your enthusiasm and willingness to keep going.
Time to study. I get my first phone call in 3 hours.
再见，，
j
1 comment:
I'm really curious as to how the phone call system will work out for you.
It'll be interesting to hear about it.
I definitely agree about the pushing yourself thing.
Although this example is more specific to circumstance, I think it applies.
There were many times when I was in China when I would try to have conversations with people in Chinese. It's really easy to just kinda give up and stop listening. But, whenever I tried to just stick to it and keep going, I seemed to learn the most. I would suddenly find myself utilizing vocab I thought I had forgotten and doing a much better job of speaking than I thought possible.
I think a large part of this has to do with 'pushing myself' rather than resigning.
Every little battle counts.
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