So, with the start of my adventure only 20 days away, I still can't seem to convince myself that I'm actually going to China!!! I've been working towards this for over a year now and the application process started more than 8 months ago. The program that I'm participating in is called NSLI-Y, or National Security Language Initiative for Youth (http://www.nsliforyouth.org). It's sponsored by the US State Department and provides full scholarships to high school students to study "critical languages" abroad. Critical languages are those less commonly taught languages for which there is a large demand for language professionals. NSLI-Y provides scholarships to study Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Hindi. These 7 languages are spoken by huge populations, yet not commonly taught in the US! In my school at least, the most popular foreign languages are Spanish and French. Recently we started offering Chinese, but not many students take it. In fact, when I tell people I'm in Chinese class, sometimes people are surprised because they were never even aware that we have Chinese classes!
Critical languages are a lot different from English in their grammatical structures, sound systems, and writing systems. Having taken 2 years of Spanish and 3 years of Chinese, I can honestly say that Chinese requires a totally different way of learning because it doesn't use any familiar letters and words. Chinese has a completely unique way of writing, through picture-like characters, and speaking, with tones and totally foreign sounds that had never come out of my mouth before. The memorization of characters is the hardest for me, and each character is an intricate pattern of lines and strokes. Just one missing dot, line, or curve can completely change the meaning of the character! But the beauty of the language is revealed in these 80,000 complicated characters- the patterns are not random at all and the more you study the language the more you discover how thought-out every character seems (unlike English which makes 0 sense sometimes).
Not only is the language so different, but so is the culture and way of thinking. And that's what I'm mostly excited for this summer. I want to experience this culture on the other side of the world- one of the oldest cultures, dating back to more than 5000 years ago! This culture that I identify myself with (my fathers family is Chinese), yet know so little about.
So, as I'm getting ready to embark on this adventure, I'm both nervous and excited. I'll be posting blog updates on this trip as I go!!
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