The first year was hard enough -- it was designed for a total beginner to master Mandarin.
To that end, the grammar course twice a week had a writing test every time to make sure
the students memorize sixteen sentences of correct spelling and pronunciation symbols in both mainland China and Taiwan systems (a total of 32 sentences each week.)
The
reading course required the students to recite the article they learned in the
previous class in front of the professor who did not tolerate one single
mistake of pronunciation and castigated them if they did make a mistake. Together with the conversation course, if one fails
only one course, even if s/he wins As in all the other courses, the student fails
all the courses until s/he wins at least C (60 points out of 100) in every
course of the first year. Indeed, some students do
fail each year, and have to do all the Chinese courses in the first year again, together with new freshmen.
The second year was even harder. The students read all kinds of
Chinese articles in original – newspapers, academic journals, novels and even
classics. At that time, we didn’t have an electric dictionary, not to mention the Internet, so I had to
count the number of stroke of every Chinese character to look up a dictionary.
It took one hour to translate five sentences, and every class required pages of
reading in preparation. Classmates and I certainly organized a reading group to share the
burden, but even so, at the end of the day we needed to pass the exams – again, only one fail invites all fails, meaning not being able to move onto the third year.
I was commuting from home in a Tokyo suburb to the university in downtown
by taking two hours each way in totally crowded rush hour train to the extent I
feared my bones might break. The first class in the morning started at 8:30 am, so I had to
leave home at 6:30 am. Aside from having meals and some chores, all I could do was reading Chinese in addition to liberal arts and English teaching certificate courses.
The program was so Spartan that upon graduation that I didn't want to use Chinese anymore.
Today it was a deja vu experience after a couple
of decades I found myself speaking Chinese. I was immediately revisiting
my teenage days. Studying Chinese inevitably makes me feel very young. That's actually quite a nice experience.
加油！
加油！
