Шешімі: Reason for Accepting Scholarship

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How I learnt Chinese

I believe that random chance plays a more significant role in our lives than many people realise. The reason I started learning Chinese was a long string of fairly unlikely coincidences. Looking back, they all combine neatly to form who I am today and what I do, but that certainly wasn’t a strategic goal at the time. To find out about why I started learning Chinese in the first place, we need to wind the clock back almost 20 years.

For me, the journey probably started in junior high school, when I started practising martial arts. I found Japanese martial arts to be too rigid with set uniforms, a strict grading system and a training environment with numerous rituals, and switched to a different system. Who knows, if I had stuck to Japanese martial arts, I might have ended up with hacking Japanese instead. That would have been cool, too, but that’s not what happened.

My interest for the language came from a deeper interest in the system of thought behind the Eastern philosophy. I started thinking about and reading up on it. I studied translations of Tao Te Ching, listened and read everything I could find by Alan Watts, who has had a great impact on the way I think. In 2006, two good friends of mine told me that there was a new course at the university where you could study the Chinese language and culture intensively for one year. At this point, I had already studied at university for three years, but I felt that this was a good opportunity to take a break from that and learn some Chinese.

So I did. I took a study break from the teacher’s program and enrolled in a one-year intensive program. Some lessons focused on general proficiency, including textbook reading, translation and drilling. Most vocabulary learning was done at home and then used and/or tested during lessons. We also had lessons focusing more on translation into Chinese, which were meant to cover the productive aspects of learning, but fell short mostly because of the lack of class time, not because the actual lessons were bad. Since we were around 20 students, there was little one-on-one time with anyone who could actually speak Chinese.

My decision to continue studying Chinese in Taiwan was mostly a coincidence. My teacher in Sweden forwarded a note about a scholarship, and I applied for it without really expecting either to get it or to continue studying Chinese. When I actually received the scholarship, I had to go. You don’t turn down an offer of studying a language for one year with most costs covered.

Learning in a classroom is not enough, even if the classroom is located in a Chinese-speaking environment. Most language schools are fairly traditional and stay close to the textbook, focusing a lot on reading and vocabulary. Even though I spoke a lot in class, too (small class size is a blessing), that was far from enough. I limited my use of English to about once per week when I played games with a group of other foreigners. The rest of the time I spent with native friends, language exchange partners and foreign classmates whose Chinese was a lot better than mine. I also practised some sports, such as diving, which meant I got to know native speakers who were far from campus, both literally and metaphorically speaking.

After that year, I had reached some kind of conversational fluency, but I didn’t think my Chinese was good enough to make a living from. The decision, then, was to stay for another year, which would firmly put me in the advanced category, then go home and continue my teaching education.