This evening when I was standing in the classroom and listening to all those non-sense “b p m f d t n l a o e i u er…..” noise, I couldn’t believe I was actually doing this. For a moment, I was so grateful that I had gotten over this stage long time ago and don’t have to learn Chinese at this age just like these poor fellows.

My recent findings about Chinese is that it’s really a difficult language. And more I teach, more I felt this way. I kind of admire these people having such courage to do so. If I were them, I would have fainted 100 hundred times and lost my wills to keep going long ago. But look at them, they were looking at my mouth carefully and following my instruction so seriously like pupils in a primary school.

At the moment, I felt compelled to be a good teacher and tell them as much as I could. But with only 8 lessons and total 16 hours, I wonder how much I could give and how much they would battle with their memory to remember and how they are going to cope with all the funny words, pronunciation, grammar and cultural stuff. The size of their heads is after all that big, though we are told that the capacity of human being’s brain is incredible, but how many people really know about how to make best of use 1 % of their brain? If they didn’t know, how would you expect them to use the rest of 99%?

So I felt a bit sorry for them, apart from admiring them at the same time. I tried to find a better way to help them to memory and to practice more. But we’ve got a big class with 15 people. It’s really hard to get everybody a chance to practice every time. However, I saw the interests and a pleasant atmosphere in the classroom when I was there telling them how to shape their mouth and speak like a Chinese. They seemed happy to imitate what I showed to them, and for what they’ve done, it was encouraging enough for a teacher.

On the way back, I’ve got a new idea for the next class before we actually start to learn tones. I am going to teach them to sing the song “The Moon Represents My Heart” (月亮代表我的心). The thought about this is that I think they don’t really need to worry about tones as the pronunciation of lyrics will go with the melody. Hope that they will like it and one day when they actually go to China, find it very useful to get them accepted and being popular among the Chinese back home who speak crazy English.