Chinese Is So Tight

Trey Cousin

2A

10/14/14

“Chinese is so tight bro,”

“You should do it, it’s such a fun class, you learn about Chinese culture, plus it looks much better on a college transcript.”

These things that my friend told me about Chinese ultimately convinced me to enroll in Chinese 1 my freshman year with high expectations of an exciting year ahead. Unfortunately this expectation and excitement was crushed as soon as I grasped that fact that this class was a language class. I felt like an eight year old kid who drops the teddy bear out of the metal grasp in the vending machine that I yearned for. Little would I know that this “standard level” class would consume all my time during homework times. Sometimes I wondered and thought to myself why I picked this tormenting class. Even my parents inquired why I chose such difficult and challenging class like Chinese instead of the traditional route of Spanish.

Sometimes during the year I would drift off into a fantasy of me not taking Chinese, which tormented me like a leak in a house after a rainy night. Chinese was just that annoying dog that barked all through the night that would shut up. It just kept saying, “Hey, hey, hey, hey, I’m still here, and I’m not leaving till the end of the year. Don’t worry that’s just eight more months of me.”

The difficult part about Chinese was the fact that characters were so difficult and cumbersome. Sometimes the just different subtleties of a stroke in a character could lead my mind to think that this was “rice” but in actually this was a “cabinet.” As well as the characters, Chinese was the type of class that forced you to constantly write down characters, the meaning of this, as well as pinyin- the pronunciation of the characters. This repetition resulted in 30 minutes of homework just by copying the same thing over one hundred times. I felt like a maze runner who kept going into a dead end because I just couldn’t seem to find the end of tormenting class. Another setback to Chinese was the fact that during the first semester I couldn’t seem to be healthy. It just seemed like this was the class that was holding me back. Chinese was the roadrunner and I was the coyote. No matter how much I tried to do well in Chinese, my immune system didn’t want to cooperate, and my body couldn’t stay healthy. First I miss three straight days due to the flu, then two weeks later it happens yet again. What a deva vu! This absence of school deteriratote my ability to pronunciation Chinese words and sentences fluidity, and this also made me fall back in my other class, which didn’t allow me to focus on Chinese as much as I wanted to.

Second Semester. I was determined to get an A, and if I must say, this goal seemed to be all that I was focused on. Feeling like a hawk preying on a snake, I was determined and dedicated to achieving this goal. The first thing that I had to realize was the fact that if I wanted to get an A in Chinese I would actually have to be in Chinese.

 Therefore, I couldn’t be weak minded and if I was feeling “under the weather” I would have to “suck it up”. This phrase of “sucking it up” is very sentimental in my life because my Dad has constantly vocalized this phrase with a connation of strength. He would vocalize this to me to help me battle through injuries and difficult times.