Learning Chinese

My Chinese skills suck. It's shameful in fact. Writing is hopeless for me. I can read basic words, but given a newspaper, I have no chance. I can speak some, but my Canadian accent is a constant source of amusement for native speakers. I can understand basic Mandarin, but a newscast I have difficulty with.

I suppose it's partly my fault. I speak mostly English at home, even when spoken to in Chinese. On the other hand, I took Saturday school all the way to high school. When I was younger I always resented the fact that Friday nights were always spent studying. Now I resent the fact that I didn't work harder. But I wasn't a complete slacker and I did end up learning quite a bit. I just wished I learned more.

Lately, some of my friends have been signing up for language classes. A lot of them signed up for this in the summer, which I thought was insane, since I didn't want to give up my summer weekends cooped up indoors. So I decided to start taking classes in the winter with the Confucius Institute at Renison College, which is on the Waterloo campus. Class is only two and half hours every Thursday.

So far it's been quite good. There are only four students in the class which really accelerates the learning process. The teacher is excellent and knows how to teach and interact with the students. The class is mostly focused on reading and conversing, which I suppose are the best skills to know first. The down side is that they are teaching "Mainland" Chinese. I'm not used to their accent and some of their words. Since they are Mainland, the writing is simplified, which is harder for me to learn, since I had previously only learned traditional. But all in all, I'm pretty happy with the course. Now, if only my language skills improved to a point where I'm good enough to use it!

Convocation

It's the time of the year for Convocations!

I recently attended one at Queen's for my sister's graduation with a Bacheleor of Education. This entry is a bit of a rant, since I'm comparing it to my own crappy Convocation.

First, my convocation was almost 2 years ago (wow, has it been that long already???). Convocations at Waterloo are held in the PAC (Physical Activities Complex). For our year, they graduated everyone in the Engineering Faculty, including grad students, which totalled around 800-900 people. This meant that the whole floor area was filled with graduates and the stands were filled with families. Since there were so many people, they had to restrict guests to two per graduate and made available extra tickets by special request. On the actual day, the PAC was completely packed with people.

This led to the first problem: noise. This was compounded with the fact that I was in the very back row. I had to strain really hard to hear anything and even then it was difficult. The seating area was flat and the platform for the presentations was not raised very high, so we couldn't see very much either. Eventually, we all resorted to talking amongst ourselves and adding to the noise problem. This meant that the speeches were hard to hear and they didn't seem very engaging, but I really couldn't say either way. Because of the large number of graduates, the ceremony lasted a long time. So long in fact, that graduates were leaving mid ceremony to exit the premises. They also happened to present the Masters and Ph.D students last, and by then, the auditorium was half empty.

In contrast, Queen's graduation ceremony was held in an old hockey arena. Not as large as the PAC, but it felt much more intimate and inviting. They were also graduating similar numbers of people, but I suspect a lot of them didn't show up. Their acoustics was much better and this meant that I could actually hear the speeches. The speeches also happened to be pretty entertaining and inspiring. One of the honourary degrees was given to a chinese imigrant who reports/photographs for a Kingston newspaper and he talked about his interesting life. Then Masters/Ph.D graduates graduated first, followed by the undergrads. When the undergraduates were recieving their degrees, it got a little more rowdy, but not to an unacceptable level. It was a little boring when they were going through all the graduates, but luckily I had brought my time machine (as Victor likes to call it) along with me. No one left the building until it was all done. It felt like a relatively short and efficient ceremony. There was a reception with lot's of (free) food afterwards. Bonus!

Overall, the quality of the ceremony was obviously better than Waterloo's, which my parents and my sister agreed to as well. From what I hear, they've improved the graduating cermemony since my graduation (they even had Malcolm Gladwell speak at the Waterloo Arts Convocation), but I still think the level of professionalism and quality is much higher at Queens. Oh well, maybe the moral of the story is that I needed a time machine for my own ceremony.