Chinese language

I'm only up to 120 characters so far. I've been slacking big time. I'm going to have to cut it down to 5 characters per day for now because these bad boys just don't stick in my head the way I want them too. But, 5 characters per day is about 1800 in one year so that's not too bad.

Today, it's off to Xiamen for some shopping and site seeing. The vacation has begun, all two months of it.

Beijing?

I've been reading a bunch of articles lately that talk about how tourism is down in Beijing. Being so close to the Olympics tourism should be much higher. It got me thinking...personally I am afraid to go to Beijing during the Olympics. I have a friend there now who invited me to go and visit her but I just gave her the "maybe" answer. I've been reading all kinds of articles about police sweeps in bars and apartment complexes where foreigners live looking for visa violations, it scares me, and I'm completely legal with all the proper paperwork. Now, imagine someone who has never been to Asia before reading these same articles, do you think they want to go to Beijing?

Not leaving...

Got an email the other day. It's my decision if I want to go to Nanjing or not. I decided to stay here. In the long run Nanjing would be better, but when I think of leaving things become much more complicated.

Nanjing?

I might be moving to Nanjing in September. Ironically, that's where I requested to be placed initially. I got a call today and was asked what I thought about moving there. At first I said no, but after thinking I changed my mind. Nanjing is a much bigger city, the school is better, and Zhangzhou isn't so great. So, we'll see what happens.

Characters

I've been doing well with my daily repetitions on the Chinese characters I already know. However, I've been quite lazy with adding new material. I'm embarrassed to admit that so far I only know 110 characters. I've had enough time, but not the motivation to cram more info into my brain. I should be doing about 10 characters a day, but I've been doing about 10 a week. If I actually do 10 a day in 2 months I'll know an additional 600 characters for a total of 710. Well short of the 4000 I need to learn. At 10 characters a day it'll take me about 14 months to learn 4000. I have a feeling I won't reach near native fluency in 2 years.

It takes me quite a while to learn 10 characters. Basically, I learn the pronunciation and the stroke order for each character. Then I write the characters down 10 or so times each until I get the hang of it. I put the characters into Mnemosyne and go do something else. A couple hours later I go back to Mnemosyne to see how well I remember what I learned. On the question side I put the definition of the character. Once I see the definition I write out the character and pronounce the word out loud. If I get it correct I mark it as a two and Mnemosyne reschedules it for repetition. If I don't get it correct I mark it as a one or zero and redo it until I get it correct. This process takes quite a while. I've found that if I just try to memorize what the character looks like without learning to write it, it doesn't stick in my memory very well.

I could go the lazy route and just learn speaking and not reading and writing, but whats the fun in that?

Class is canceled, but don't tell the teacher...

I went to class this morning and I go to pickup the key to the room. They couldn't find the key so they gave me another one but that classroom was already spoken for so I had to go back and grab another. I finally got an empty room with about 5 minutes until class began, and I still don't see any of my students waiting for me outside the old classroom as they usually do. Fine I think, they are tired today they will filter in late. The bell rang and still no students. I called one of them up and she told me the class was canceled today. So my question is, why do all the students know class is canceled but I don't? Waste my time much?