March 14: Outdoor Market, Dancers and Chinese

Jocelyn Writes:

Well, we have the whole nuclear family involved today... We will be off line this weekend because we are heading out of town on a nuclear family adventure (I bother with the word nuclear because..."family" on its own has come to mean Gavi, Ayden, Ben, Bruce, Caroline, Jenna, Emily, Mickey,Kile, Jonathan, Joe and Jennifer).

Bruce, the kids and I are off to the area around Luoyang to see the Longmen Caves and the Shaolin Si. "They say" (whoever "they" are) that the Longmen Caves are a spectacular parade of Buddhist figurines and reliefs (stay tuned for pics). There are 1350 caves, 750 niches and 40 pagodas....I am expecting we'll manage one or two. The Shaolin Si is a Buddhist Monastery and the birth place of Kung Fu--- we'll be watching all sorts of KungFu demonstrations. Stay tuned for the report...
Take Care,
Joc

Ben Says:

Today I went to an out door market with my mom. I scootered there on my new scooter. I didn’t go to school because my parents said I could take a day off. At the out door market, first there were a lot of motorcycles then there was a lady selling spinach. There was a lot of meat. The men were chopping up pork and beef. It was really disgusting. We came to a person who was selling mangos and tomatoes in baskets. Then I saw big pile of mops. There was an apartment with two little dogs playing in front of the door. I don’t think there are big dogs in China. You never see them.


Ayden Writes:

For today’s blog entry I will be writing about what I see on my way to school. First I usually take a cab to school, but I see many different things when I am in the cab. When I am in the cab, I see all of these dancers on the street dancing. Everyday I see something different. When I’m riding to school I usually see about two or three different dances. Each one is very unique. I will describe two for you.

The first one I see on my way to school is a slow kind of dance called Tai chi. The people doing the dance all have the same outfit. It is a dark, reddish pink velvet. The dancers put their hands up and then they move their feet. This all takes place really slowly. Sometimes I see them doing the same dance with swords. They do the dance over and over. It is kind of fun to watch.

The next dance that I see is a dance that involves fans. The dancers wear the same outfit that the people Tai chi wear. All of the people doing the dance are lined up perfectly straight in rows. The fans they use are very big and colorful. The dancers start by taking their fans and waving them around, then they wave the fans to themselves. This all happens really quickly. This dance is a lot more interesting because it is faster. All of the dances are a lot different from the kind of dance in America.

Gavi Writes:

Hi Everyone,

Last week I started actually being tutored in Chinese. My teacher’s name is Zhou Lao Shi (pronounced Joe) and he is also one of the three teachers that the BHS students have. Compared to the other languages I have studied (Hebrew, Spanish, English) Chinese is definitely the hardest. For one thing, many of the sounds are very similar to each other and if you say the wrong one you are saying a completely different word.

Then there are the tones. These are what really throw me off. There are four tones, rising, falling, flat and falling then rising. If you use the wrong tone on a word, even if you got the right pronunciation otherwise, you could be in big trouble! For example, the word “ma” with different tones can mean mother, horse, and can denote a question. As you can see, if you’re not careful you could easily end up calling you mother a horse which probably wouldn’t end very well.

Chinese writing is also an extreme challenge for me. Unlike other languages I have studied, Chinese has no alphabet. There are different characters for each word and you just have to memorize them. Zhou Lao Shi gives me about seven of these characters to memorize a night and the first night it took me over an hour to remember all of them. However, now I can do it in about 15 minutes. I’ve figured out that if I write the character over and over again while thinking the word to myself the character gets built into my muscle memory and my brain associates it with the word. Though it’s a little tedious it’s the only way I can figure out that works.

Reading Chinese can also be hard and frustrating because if you don’t recognize a character there is no sounding it out and looking it up is almost impossible. So really, the only thing to do is to ask someone who does know. This can be rather problematic when you are the only person in your family who can read any Chinese at all. However, although Chinese is extremely hard and exhausting to learn, I am having a lot of fun using it. It’s amazing how even after just a week of studying Chinese I can communicate much better with my desk buddy in school, and with people around town such as taxi drivers and store clerks. I think its so much more fun learning a language in a place where people actually speak it because there are so many opportunities to practice.

More later,
Gavi