Chinese lesson

 Yesterday, I had my first Chinese lesson at Sophia University.This is a course for the biginners and the class is thought by a native chinese speaker, who has experience of teaching Chinese more than 10 years. I do not recall her name but I really liked the teacher because she was very straight forward and active. It was my first time to learn Chinese and therefore I didn't know a word of it, except for "Thank you". But later I found out that I was mis-pronouncing this only word I thought I knew in Chinese ! The teacher taught us that the reason why many non-chinese speakers sometimes think Chinese is a loud language is because when people speak chinese, they use various voice ranges, from very high tone to low tone. In contrast to Chinese, it sounds pretty flat when we speak Japanese and that is because our voice tone stays at a particular voice range. I　understood what she meant when we learned different voice tones in Chinese. There are 5 voice ranges in Chinese and they all sounds differently. For example, one type of pronounciation starts from the highest tone and goes down to the lowest tone.   Because this was the first class and all the students had to introduce themselves to the others, we quickly learned the necessary words and phrases for self-introduction. First we learned our names in Chinese and then phrases like "How are you?" and "My name is ~", etc. We also learned some frequently used words like "Thank you", "See you", "Teacher", and so on. I　am not going to write them in Chinese here (sorry I am being a bit lazy here) but it was really exciting to write, hear, and speak a new language ! It reminds of me of my stay in France before coming to ICU. I went to France for a year to study French, and for the first few weeks of my stay, I was not able to communicate with people without my English-French dictionary in my hand. It is a bit frightening to be in a new environment without knowing a word of the language which is spoken there, but I　actually like the feeling of nervousness I　get when I　am in a such environment. I think it is because when I am in such situation, I am trying my best to adjust to the environment by fully using all my sences to learn the new language. I love to see the similarities and differences of languages and it always makes me happy to be able to communicate with people with their own language. I don't know how far I can advance my Chinese, since I also have to continue studying English and French. (and also Japanese!) But Chinese seems very interesting and fun to learn... and it definitly is a very useful language since it is one of the frequenty used languages in the world. In any case, I am going to do my best to learn the language and see how it goes :)