a little coffee

Last night, Chris and I had our third Chinese lesson with a lovely girl named Katherine and her friend, whose name I forget but it might be Alice so I’ll call her Alice.

Right now, I’m looking at the notebook where she wrote down all these useful words and expressions like “can this be cheaper?” and “I don’t know” in pinyin and doodles. It’s a big, three-subject notebook, a monster compared to these other small, thin booklets I see my students writing in, and this monster is tattooed in heavy black ink with bursts of short words and little pictures scattered across his surface, cramped together like a mural bloated with images of people’s faces, symbols and structures because the excited artist had so much to say so you must step back and observe from a distance, letting your eye find some way of making sense of these pictures, only there is no method exactly but sometimes a common theme like food words clumped together next to the days of the week characters and so you must make do with the spontenaity of all this doodling. 

So this is how our lessons go- Katherine asks us if we have any questions and Chris and I try to remember what situations we’ve been in the past week where we needed to say something we didn’t know how to say. Ah!  ”How do you ’say speak slower?’ ” And she writes the characters and then the pinyin and we practice saying it a few times, hoping, but knowing that (at least I) will forget the phrase once she piles on more Chinese and that I’ll have a difficult time trying to find that one phrase again. 

When Chris and I take a moment too long to think of something, she’ll start writing random words like “eye” and “chair” and “nose.” This is not at all what I had hoped for when we got a tutor. I expected, if not an actual text book of sorts, at least some method to our lessons. Like today we will talk about numbers and time and next week we will talk about food and shopping. Nope, nope. Just “do you have any questions?” Every so often Alice pipes up and offers a suggestion on what Katherine can teach us. 

Regardless of this disorganization (which someday will start surprising us less and less) I’m more inclined to make the effort of learning if there’s someone teaching me to pronounce the words properly. Very important in Chinese with tones and all. And who knows if what the phrase book says is what the people around Anyang say. So I tell myself over the long pauses when Katherine and Alice think of more words (“chair”) to teach us while Chris and I search for another useful phrase we should know.