small world after all

This week has been a bit of a whirlwind. My classes started on Monday, so I have now finished four whole days of Chinese class. I have class for about three hours a day, and then I go home and have about three hours of homework to do for the next day. We actually had our first test the second day of class! So, it's a pretty intense learning environment. But the thing about intense learning environments is that you either do or die. I have to stay focused and do all my work, or else I'll get lost pretty quickly. As a result, I feel like I have learned as much in the past four days as I did in an entire month in the States!

I was pretty anxious before the first day of class. First, I was worried that I had been placed in the wrong level. I knew I didn't do very well on the language placement test last week, and I was worried that either 1.) I would be placed in a very low-level class, and that it would all be pretty boring to me, and I would have to go through the headache of being transferred to another class, or 2.) everything was going to be just as difficult as that first test, and I would spend the entire year wondering what the heck was going on. But, it seems like the school is doing a pretty good job of putting students in the right place. I've found that the class I'm in is a pretty good level for me. I'm not at the top of the class, but I'm certainly not at the bottom, either. I have already learned most of the grammatical structures we've talked about in class so far, but I'm learning tons of new vocabulary, which is something that I really needed. So, ultimately, I know enough to know what the teacher is saying (most of the time) but I'm still being challenged to learn more and more.

I was also kind of worried that I would be the only (or one of the few) Westerners in my class, and that I would be surrounded by Japanese and Korean students who would all be able to talk to each other, but that I would be left completely out of the loop. Not the case at all! My class is made up of students from everywhere: Germany, Kazakhstan, Columbia, Finland, Russia, France, the Ukraine, as well as Korea and Japan. And the really reassuring thing that I've discovered this week is that most of them were worried about exactly the same things I was anxious about--about their placement, the difficulty of understanding the teachers, and even the most basic things, like where to get food on campus. I don't know why it surprises me to find out that everyone is worried about the same things I'm worried about, but for some reason, I always think I'm the only one freaking out. But I've discovered this week that we're all kind of in this process of discovery together. And I think we're all finding that there's really not that much to be worried about, after all.