School and Work Situation

Due to my complications with work and school here I had to go on a quick trip out of the country to renew my visa. Normally all I would have to do is go to the police department and get my visa stamped again for another 60 days. The reason that didn't work for me is because my grades in school have been pretty poor.

There are several reasons for this, including lack of effort on my end, but the major reason was out of my control. The wonderful Chinese Department at my Alma Mater decided to update to the brand new edition of the Chinese 301 textbook. While I would normally have been happy to hear this, due to the old version being 15 years old, I was furious. I spent 6 months translating the first half of the book for Anthony, the visually impaired student at CSULB who is studying Chinese.

When the book finally arrived near the end of September, I had to glance through it to see what the changes were and how severe they were. I was hoping that the changes would be minor, take a week at most to fix and I could continue with on schedule. This turned out not to be possible.

This edition has significant changes from the previous one, enough that I have to type it all over again. This is a serious problem since I didn't receive the new book until the 3rd week of September. I lost a month and a half from my schedule and have to start from the beginning. I hoped that I could still study and work but that turned out to be too naive of me.

If all I had to do was work, attend school and study, that would be challenging but attainable. Having to play catch up with work meant something was going to fall by the wayside. First it was sleep, then came homework and finally school. I skipped school the week of the 13th to type. I was able to get a lot done that week and the next. In fact, working 10 hour days I was able to get about a month's worth of work done in two weeks. I was able to get two weeks closer to my deadline, but at the cost of not studying.

It came down to a very difficult decision, but I dropped out of school. By missing so many days of class, they weren't going to renew my visa. My grades were also extremely low from trying to juggle all those balls in the air. My classmates were starting to get aggravated that I wasn't studying, and I just didn't care. Scholarship or not, MTC was not what I expected. The extra hour of class a day didn't help when we had 8 students in the class. Their materials all state that the average class size is 5 to 6 students. I later found this to be a lie. They will only open a class if they have at least 5 students. The average class size is 7 which is not too bad compared to my college class sizes. However here they don't separate students in the manner they should.

Western students have different strengths and weaknesses than Japanese or Korean students. My class had three Japanese students who scored upper 90's or perfect on every test. They had no difficulty writing, but major difficulty pronouncing the characters correctly. My pronunciation is much clearer than theirs, however I couldn't write very well. Since the tests are written, with only a small token section towards listening comprehension, I did poorly. As time went on, with less chance to study, I did worse. I finally made the decision not to return to NTNU.

I don't plan on stopping my study of Chinese though. I still plan on studying albeit at a different school. Its called Taipei Language Institute, and they have reasonable class rates for 1 on 1 instruction. That should help me work on my pronunciation and listening (which need some work) and a pace that will work for me. Most importantly though, I don't care about writing. Recognition is fine, I don't need to waste time writing characters.