So it is 4a.m. and can you guess what I am doing? Chinese homework. I just thought I’d let you know.
Entries tagged as ‘Chinese’
Can I talk for a minute about how mad I am?
May 11, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Frustration.
It’s 3:30 in the morning and I am at school. I am desperately, frantically, hopelessly, despairingly–scribbling Chinese characters into my iPhone’s 词典 (that’s dictionary if you don’t read Chinese) so that it can tell me what the character is and what it means and how to pronounce it, so that I can then understand the problem on my homework worksheet, so that I can then painstakingly try and figure out the answer in a similar one-character-at-a-time fashion.
For those of you who didn’t know: being that it was my last quarter at UW, and being that I had always wanted to make the time to take Chinese; I convinced the Chinese professor to give me an add code to take Chinese 103, even though I had not taken Chinese 101 or Chinese 102. No sweat, I thought. I got this. I’m smart enough to push my way through it and catch up.
Fuck was I wrong. Yes, that is how strongly I feel about this. Enough to swear. I am so mad. I’ve always believed that if I just worked hard enough, or if I just put enough effort into something, that I could do anything I want to and do it well. I am not doing well in this Chinese class and I am on the verge of dropping it. I tried and tried and tried to do my homework tonight to the best of my ability and I simply couldn’t. I know it will be all wrong and that’s honestly the best I can do. If I were to stay here until 7:30 in the morning and get no sleep and then drive home and change for work and eat no breakfast and then drive straight back to class–maybe; just maybe I might get my homework right.
But I did that all last week and I still flunked my last test. Because guess what?! For all of my memorization of the patterns and words that we learn in class, the test features words that the students learned last year that I still don’t know. So I’m on the cusp of saying something I think I’ve probably never said in my life, “I give up.”
Better to withdraw and cut my losses than tank my GPA further goes the reasoning. I’ll talk to 老师 tomorrow and see what she thinks I should do. I suck and I hate it. Fuck my life.
