school, here I come!

I’m excited! I got accepted to Northern Illinois University. So I’ll be studying Anthropology with a minor in Chinese studies. I can’t wait actually. I really want to start officially learning Mandarin with a teacher.

On that note, today I picked up two great books to help with learning Chinese characters. I’m too lazy to find them online and link you to them, but one of them is called The First 100 Chinese Characters and it goes through 100 characters, tells you the correct strokes and how to write them, then gives you the entire page to copy them down a couple of times for repetition. The second book is really cool I forgot the name exactly but it’s something like Learning Chinese Characters and they give you the characters, they sometimes give you pictures for the characters for example the character for the word tent actually looks kind of like a tent so they have a picture of a guy sleeping in a tent and the draw the character over the shape of the tent. They also tell you the compound characters that make up the character and then they give you a little story with those compound characters to help you memorize. And, they also give you the correct way to right the characters. Pretty cool!

I can’t wait to start learning more Chinese…I love it! According to my book The Chinese Language: Its History and Current Usage the average rate of learning characters is about 30 a week. And it will take about 2,400 characters to learn to understand 99% of modern Chinese. On top of that, it will take about 3 years before I can expect to being to read newspapers. Fun stuff!!!

Take care everyone!

college daze

I finally sent in my college application. It’s fun taking a year off. I think school is bogus in general but I guess if I wanna get anywhere in this world (I hate this world) then I better go. So my plan is to do anthropology as an undergrand, and for my graduate (Masters) I have to pick a sub-field and this is the tough one for me. The two choices I’m really diggin’ (no pun intended) are Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology.

I’m definitely minoring in Chinese studies so that means my area of work would most likely be China. I’ve always had an obsession with China and this is cool because I’ll get to learn Mandarin in a classroom. At the moment I’m kind of teaching myself through books, cds, computer programs…etc but being very lazy about it. I need to get with the program.

My goal is to ultimately do work in China. If I do my graduate in Cultureal Anthro then I’m not sure what I’d do in China. Living in a Chinese community and doing ethnographic fieldwork would be interesting although I don’t know how much fun writing a book would be. I’d live with them just for the fun of it. Plus, I’m pretty sure this has been done many of times. Also, I’m pretty sure you need a PHD for that kind of work. Working with the 50+ ethnic minorities in China would also be fun but then I shouldn’t be learning Mandarin I should be learning the language of one of the ethnic groups.

Archaeology is self explanatory really. I’d do field work in China. The only problem with this is that I think it’d be fun however the work seems tedious and rather boring in some respects. Like, doing field work for all those hours and not really finding anything important. The good thing about Arch though is that from what I gather (and what my teacher at MCC said) was that you can start doing fieldwork with just a Bachelors.

There is another problem with all of this. I’m unmotivated. All this stuff I read about how our culture is fucking up the world, as well as other things like how expensive school is and how you really don’t need it. Plus the fact schools don’t teach you what you need to know to survive. I want to help other people. I’d really love to work with indigenous peoples and communities to help them with rights, land…etc. This thing would fall under Cultural Anthro which would be good

I really just want to go to China and immerse myself with their culture and make friends there and study. I’d love to help them out to with the way there government is and everything.

Basically, I’m going to school for Anthropology but a little confused as to what I really want to do with the degree. All I know is that my area of focus would most definitely be China. In the near future I’ll make a blog post as to why I’m so interested in China and how I got interested.

Zàijiàn rén! (Goodbye people)