That time I cried in Mandarin class

An anecdote in honor of hitting a 150-day streak on Duolingo

My first fall in Taiwan, I took Mandarin classes at the Taipei Chinese Academy. It was two hours a day, four days a week, with at least an hour of homework each night, and in between I noodled on their app, quizzing myself on characters and memorizing vocabulary. There were some aspects I found absolutely delightful: that the characters of words related to water have little splish-splashes in them; that the word for turkey is formed by the characters for fire + chicken, while train is fire + car; that there are no tenses, plurals, or object pronouns. The grammar is entirely logical, much more so than English. But then there was the listening.

Any one syllable in Mandarin can have approximately one bazillion meanings depending on its tone and what it’s combined with, so grasping the meaning of a spoken sentence depends on context and experience. I’m guessing! Because I biffed every listening exercise. My teacher would slow down the recordings for me specifically, as the other two students seemed to have less trouble, and still my mind would short out, simply go white, cognition unreached. One November day, I got every single one wrong, and to my horror, tears of defeat fell onto my workbook. The lesson stopped while my classmates and 24-year-old teacher rushed to comfort me, as you might a toddler. I’d never failed so thoroughly at an academic pursuit; I’d never worked so hard at something with so little to show for it. “Don’t worry. I’m also struggling so you are not alone. You probably miss home,” a classmate texted me that night. “It will come to you one day.”

Snapshot: Some of my homework in December 2022. There was a time I could easily read this back to you, and sadly that time has already passed.