Typhoon #2: Ketsana

I'm currently trying to dry off in my apartment after wading through the pouring rain brought by Typhoon Ketsana. It hit the Philippines pretty badly, and is now heading for Vietnam. The name was submitted by Laos, and the Chinese translation (by the Macanese government) is 凱薩娜. The first character means "triumphant march" (as in military music), the second is just used as a surname (sa4), but the last character, depending on how it's pronounced, can be either a character used in a name, or it can mean "to move, shift." However, it's a phonetic translation rather than a literal one, so I wonder what "Ketsana" actually means in Laos.

Tracking Ketsana

It's a pity that the weather absolutely sucks, because today we had a visit from a group of NYU students studying abroad in Shanghai as part of Stern's "Business and Political Economy" program. They have a long break for the National Day holidays, so some of them are touring HK and Macau. We met a few on Saturday at the Fulbright retreat, then today they came to talk with Austin's and Susan's classes in the morning, followed by lunch in the library cafe and something of a casino tour. I have to say, for anyone interested in international business, the program is pretty awesome - you study abroad in London and Shanghai, plus they're getting a trip to Buenos Aires next spring.

As for my classes, I still feel like I'm trying to cram a lot of material into my students' heads, but with repetition and reinforcement, it's getting there. A good example is vocabulary - they're very good and memorizing definitions and such, but I've been trying to teach them different ways of learning new words, e.g. playing Freerice.com, looking for roots and related words, etc. Today while we were watching a Youtube video, one guy commented that the narrator's voice was very boring, so I taught them the word monotone, relating it to monogamy (a vocabulary word they already learned from the reading).

I'm also trying to get them to actually use the words so they become part of their working vocabulary, e.g. asking questions using those words, or having them write sample sentences. As much as it sounds like busy work, it's a better test of their knowledge than multiple-choice questions. After grading her first reading comprehension quiz last week, Susan realized that Chinese students are incredibly good at guessing the right answer for MC and T/F questions, but looking at their short-answer responses, they might not have any idea what the book was actually saying!

As for my own lessons in Chinese, we're going to have US Consulate-funded classes starting in a few weeks, with just us ETAs. I'll be in an "intermediate" group with Susan and Amy, although if I'm really going to make major progress, I may have to follow Susan's example and hire a private tutor. There are plenty of students from mainland China, even from the northern areas (so they have more standard accents), so it shouldn't be hard to find someone. I'm not quite as ambitious about my language study (Susan's aiming to take the HSK), but even with just the intermediate lessons and my own self-study I'm sure I'll be better by the end of this year than I was before, even at the peak of my Chinese school knowledge =P