Numbers and Chinese

Today in class we started the numerical portion of the course (the full title of which is Analytical and Numerical Methods of Differential Equations). One of the things that I have always liked about math (at least as long as you don't learn anything too complicated) is that you can get an answer which is either right or wrong. There is something extremely satisfying about getting to the end of a problem, whipping out a calculator, and getting the correct number as an answer. So, when I knew what I got myself into with this class, I thought that the analytical portion would be something to suffer through and the numerical portion something to enjoy.

You learn something new everyday, and today I learned that I was wrong about that. Maybe part of it has to do with the difference in teachers, but I liked the endless equation manipulation so much more. Oh well, there's not much that I can do about it, I have to learn the material. Hopefully we will be doing a lot of MATLAB work; I am fairly comfortable with the programming aspect even if I am not with the actual math.

Alright, enough of math.

One of the things I have been trying to do since coming here is use Chinese as much as possible with strangers. It has ranged all the way from successful (negotiating for change with which to do laundry) to not-so-successful (getting to the front of a line at dinner and have my prepared sentence come out in a weird jumble of non-Chinese and English). It has actually been a lot easier than I expected to find people to speak Chinese with (I was under the impression that everyone would want to speak English to me in order to practice). It can be hard though; I think people often assume that my vocabulary is bigger than it really is, so even if I say a correct sentence I can't understand the answer.

Yesterday I had a better chance to use my Chinese in a little better of a setting. After going to office hours, Matt (the other person in our group doing the Chinese minor who is not a native speaker) and I went to dinner, and decided to sit with someone random and try to hold conversations with them. We picked a girl sitting by herself (Matt pointed out that it was easier for him to understand girls from having more female Chinese teachers, something that I had never really thought of before), and after a little bit of a false start got her permission to join her.

We picked the right person to practice with, since she was friendly and a Chinese major (I often wonder if Chinese math and science student have the same apathy towards their native language that I see all to often in the engineering department). Our conversation with her was not very smooth, because of the limited vocabulary issue, but it was great to have a relaxed conversation with someone who couldn't speak very much English (when speaking with Chinese people in our group I definitely notice that when the conversation gets a little rough I tend to switch back to English).

Right now I am going to meet a friend from my spring semester Chinese class, who is here studying Chinese for 6 weeks. Not only are we here at the same time, but we are also staying in the same group of buildings, so I will probably get to see her more than just today.

Not sure what's on the schedule as far as adventures for the next couple of days. The rest of the week I will probably spend most of my time on course work, but I'm sure this weekend we will be doing more exciting stuff (still on the list: Peking duck and karaoke)