Beefing Up Your Language Arsenal

吴璨 and I Outside the Wanda Plaza

Today was a sunny day, which is always a good sign. It may be Friday the thirteenth, but no worries. 吴璨 is on summer vacation, but we still woke up at 6:00 am because I wanted to go for a run at the school. My host dad drove me to school, I went for a run, I went to class, I had lunch, and I learned more about Chinese culture. I must note that since I’ve been in China I’ve tried a plethora of new vegetables. One of my favorites is wood ear mushrooms. I’ve had them at so many meals. My host parents keep serving me them because I eat copious amounts of them when they’re available. In America, I’m assuming they’ll be much harder to come by and will probably cost a whole lot more considering how niche they seem to be. Mushrooms aside, today is Friday, so we had a test at the end of the day instead of a cultural activity. I would consider tests a cultural activity, noting the importance and difficulty of exams in Chinese culture. For our test, there was both a written and an oral portion. I immediately got my score back and found out that I got 197 points out of 200. The three points I missed were from a few mistakes in my oral assessment. Speaking, I believe, is harder than writing because it requires quick thinking and impromptu responses, which are much harder to cohesively come up with in another language. After a long day and another exhausting test, my host dad met me outside the school. He was sitting on a yellow bike and taking a picture of something. I cautiously walked across the street, and he informed me that we were going to bike home. Driving home takes 45 to 50 minutes. Biking would probably take many hours, and traffic in China compared to America seems a bit more dangerous because of the weird fluidity and seeming lack of rules. All jokes aside, we didn’t actually bike home. In regards to the title, today Yang Lao Shi was doing a role play activity with Micah, my role play partner, and I. He said that the fluidity of our speech has improved, as well as our use of tones and intonation, but we were lacking one important aspect: a large language arsenal, or in other words, lots of additional Chinese vocabulary. Knowing grammar structures is very important, but also knowing copious amounts of words is vital. What is water, book, door, bed, smile, change, etc.? There are so many objects and experiences and emotions that a language can capture. Beefing up your language arsenal is essential. Start with the basics and then learn more nuanced and complex language. It’s a journey that never ends in both your native and target language(s). Here's another observation. In China, when you eat meat, there are often bones in the meat. The few times I've eaten fish, in addition to little pin bones, I've encountered whole skeletons. I generally shy away from the meat because I'm not a big fan of all the bones. After dinner, we went to Wanda Plaza, which is a large shopping mall near our home, to purchase some ingredients to make biscuits. Tomorrow there's a party at one of the host family's homes, so I offered to make biscuits, a signature Southern dish, to share. We went to 步步高超市, a large grocery store in the shopping mall. In the grocery store, there were lots of imported goods, including butter, different kinds of milk, candies, etc., in addition to native Chinese foods, such as lychee (one of my new favorite fruits), different kinds of rice, beans and peas, etc. Going to a grocery store is a great way to learn new vocabulary. I was pointing at everything and asking what it was called. I learned how to say jackfruit, pineapple, matcha powder, potato chips, lollipop, candy filling, Lego, and balloon. I definitely want to go back and explore all the foods and learn some more new vocabulary. After going to the grocery store, we explored the plaza a little more and visited one of my host mom's friends. My host mom's friend happened to work in a sports store, which had many familiar looking goods. I saw Asics, Adidas, and Nike brand clothing and shoes. I even saw the pair of running shoes I use being sold for 1090 yuan, which is very expensive. If you convert yuan to dollars, that's over 150 dollars for one pair of running shoes. When my dad bought my running shoes, they were not that expensive. Once again, globalization at its finest.