Danjiang University is a great university in Taiwan. But i’m still not completely satisfied with my experience Studying Chinese here yet. I really have little to complain about. I’ve made some excellent friends, and my Chinese has been improving dramatically, I just feel like there is room for improvement. Dan Jiang (Tam Kang) University’s main Campus is in Danshui. Though i haven’t been there yet, i’ve heard it’s impressively beautiful. My campus however is an 8 foot building of blue and white striped stones in Central Taipei where most students study Chinese, though there are also classes for Japanese and some other Technical skills.
The campus is indeed kinda small. It’s unnecessarily segregated from the main campus, thus segregating us international students from potentially cultivating friendships with the taiwanese university students From Dan Jiang. The tuition is 25,000 Taiwanese Dollars for 4 months, which is slightly cheaper than other Chinese Language Programs in Taipei that last only 3 months for a greater fee.
The first day, I felt a bit intimidated to use my Chinese, because i haven’t used it much in a while. And then this old lady gave me a test and asked me all sorts of questions in Chinese to assess my ability. The strangest question was “what book did you use when you studied in China?” How am I supposed to remember that? i don’t pay attention to stuff like that. and it was a long time ago for me. and then i was moved to level 4 class to listen and finish my writing test. I understood about 75 percent of what the teacher was saying. But i’m not sure about the other 3 students in the class. they just sat there, listening in silence. She finally put me in Level 2, because even though my spoken Chinese is pretty damn good, i can’t write in Chinese half of what i can say.
We have 2 teachers. The first teaches from the end of the level one book, which is embarrassingly easy for me, and the other teaches us from the level 2 book, which is also pretty easy for me, but i really need to review this basic grammar and learn to write these characters to fill in the holes in my basic Chinese. The first teacher asks her students to call her “????” ( laoshi), which means “Beautiful Teacher Yang.” She say’s it’s because there’s another Laoshi, who gets the Nickname “little Teacher Yang.” so we can tell the difference since they have the same name. She likes to fish for complements about her looks. I heard that when she showed a class pictures of her wedding pictures her dress showed excessive cleavage and she pointed to it saying, “Oh, don’t look here.” Obviously trying to throw everyone’s attention at “here.” And when she makes examples in class sometimes she says something about herself being attractive.
She’s constantly picking on me. We had a rather annoying dialogue in class yesterday.
“Could you use chopsticks before you went to China?”
Me: “i’ve used chopsticks since i was a kid. it’s not difficult.”
“But isn’t it difficult for westerners to use them at first?”
Me: “i dont remember it being difficult ever, like i said i’ve used them since i was a kid. And i haven’t seen every westerner use them so i have no idea, I’ve never seen anyone have real trouble with them except little kids”
“oh so you forgot everything!? what’s wrong with you!?”
She then proceeded to teach us a Chinese idiom that means “to forget everything,” in order to illustrate her nonsense. I was too annoyed to write it down or try to remember it. I’m going to start calling her ?????”Big Teacher Yang.” Because she’s a big bitch.