A New Class

Today is the first day of classes at my home university in China, Nanjing University. Apparently it’s the Harvard of southern China…haha so they say. But its pretty cool, its been around since 1902. Took a little tour around the campus with my AIFS (American Institute for Foreign Studies) and we saw the park and the old part of campus. The old part of campus looked like it came from old China, it was really awesome, though they only use the buildings for housing administration offices. It was also raining while we took the tour last week, so it was amazing to see the campus in the rain, gave it a totally different look.

I was placed in level C3 Chinese, which is slightly intermediate level. My speech and writing class teachers were pretty engaging and really seemed like teachers that will help you learn a lot. My speech teacher is only 3 years older than me, she studied for a year at University of Pittsburgh, and has great jokes. My writing teacher is a man in his 40s that is really good at teaching, but does not really speak any English, which is good.

My class is truly an international class; I didn’t know that so many different people from so many different countries are trying to learn Chinese. People from Iceland, Germany, France, the US, Korea, and Canada are some of the countries that the people in my class are from. Its amazing the many things that you learn from people from different cultures and nations. They have a totally different outlook on life and they see America and Americans from a very different perspective. One parting thought, Chinese students are very studious, even at 11 at night they are still studying and in the weekends they hardly go out. One can find them studying at the library or in the classrooms of the university almost daily, non-stop throughout the year!!

--Ji