Well let’s do one more then. I’ll continue the ‘try to get healthy and see when they start disturbing me so I’ll do the job of me being reprogrammed and grab another beer’ streak tomorrow I guess. I find this really ridiculous, but it’s very important apparently.
So let’s write something nonsensical. There are many gaps that can be filled, and then they have gaps that can be filled, etcetc. It’s all a bit of a complete mess. Let’s add today what our ‘beloved’ (lol) Ting aka my classmate aka 婷 was so excited about. So it had something to do with my notes right.
So I was twenty-seven here. Yeah so there was an oral presentation. What class was it again, I used to remember these things a bit better. 宋 was the teacher. I don’t know man? Dude I’m getting old. I do have a score list here and could look it up. It was one of them ‘teaching Chinese as a second language’ courses. Anyway, whatever it was, it’s not too important. So there was an oral presentation. It was group work, our group had three people. So this time we had just split up tasks and made our own presentations; It depends, groupwork was really hard in the beginning, simply because, for example, I would not know where the places were where we would meet up sometimes, that kind of weird stuff. I mean often it was McDonalds, but sometimes it was e.g. in some coffee shop that I would simply not know the name of until later. Problems that no one thinks of, but are real.
So I had made a ppt. I’m bad at those, because I used to have big problems guessing how much you can say in a let’s say 5 minutes, so I always added way too much. And as far as I remember I asked 婷 if it was okay, and showed her my ptt. It was probably a few pages, and always added a lot on it, and then for the stuff I would double check tones on and shit there were coloured marks on the Chinese (I still always have bright coloured markers with me, simply for this particular reason), and then add the 漢語拼音 (the phonetic transcription) above the characters (like furigana in Japanese). It’s how I essentially learned a huge chunk of my ‘more advanced’ Chinese, of which I forgot half by now, which is obviously not too surprising after the planned DonkeyBrained nonsense.
So I showed her and asked if it was okay (I mean she’s the native speaker in the end right, and not me, obviously). Well first of all I had to delete at least half of it lol, apparently it was way too much.
Me: Is this ok?
Her: No, delete more.
Me: How about this now? Is this okay?
Her: No, delete more.
That’s a bit how that went. And it went on for a while. She was really excited about it though, I don’t think she’d ever seen the notes of a foreigner. And even 宋 told her something along the lines of:
They have to do a lot ‘ey?
And I was honestly just thinking:
This is like a normal day in my life when it comes to Chinese presentations guys, hello?
Yeah. It makes the big reasons the experts came up later with and explained to the populace of ‘the deep reasons why I learned Chinese’ all the more ridiculous. Soon I’ll post some stuff, so you can actually see my notes. The ones you’ll see are of a slightly different type, but they’re my actual, real notes, so you can check for yourself and just judge for yourselves.
You can see first-hand how deeply you’ve been fooled. And what they took away from me in the name of genius, sciencific experiments, public safety, social relations, donkeybrains, medical hallelujah and what not during the past decade. Because remember that in the end I have no linguistic feeling, and will never be capable of mastering a second language. Don’t be fooled, what you are reading now is not English, this is actually Dutch and most of you are simply bilingual.
Yup.
I applied and got accepted for a translation department here. I have really no idea what to do. Translation is not ideal; actually I don’t like it that much. However, the point is that it is doable, and that is at least something. Everyone who asks me in real life (I do talk regularly to maybe two people or so still) what I think of translation and that department altogether I tell the same thing to be honest:
It’s not my first choice. But it’s doable. And that’s at least something.
I might have to produce a ppt or two there right. I’ll post one here in due time, so you can actually see what that looked like some fifteen plus years earlier.
