Saturday, 12 June 2010

Meeting my language partner: 李倩 (Li Qian)

UIBE, Beijing, 29 ºC, hazy

One of the great elements of the Duke Summer programme in Chinese is the language partner programme. Language partners are Chinese undergraduate students who meet with you four times per week to have conversations solely in Chinese on daily topics. Today, after our first breakfast in the UIBE canteen, a pretty gruelling placement test and a brief welcome ceremony, I had the pleasure of meeting my language partner for the first time. 李倩 is a corporate finance student from Central China. She has an older sister, which is pretty rare in China, and she used to play the piano. These are just a few details I managed to understand.

Although 李倩 soon found out that I have only taken one year of Chinese, she spoke at normal conversation speed, making it very hard for my to understand most of her words! I tried very hard to direct conversation to the topics I do understand as she gave me a tour of the UIBE campus (this is the host institution for the programme). We then set about buying a Chinese sim card for my phone before going to eat dinner in one of the university canteens. In the canteen, there was an array of dinner options from 面条 (noodles) and 饺子 (dumplings) to pancakes and (soup). I opted for noodles, and had my first negative interaction with a local vendor. The man cooling pancakes mumbled something to me and 李倩 explained on my behalf that I am an English foreign language student. His reply: 他是英国人, 我是法国人! (Essentially, if he’s English, then I’m French). That was a pretty startling response to hearing that I am from England, but will likely be the first of many instances where there is some confusion (and perhaps mockery in this case?) at my lack of Chinese fluency.

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