My Chinese Lesson

Thursday is Sze-En's off day. That's the only day is is free of tuition, piano lessons and church activities. Every Thursday, after school, she will decide what to do for the rest of the day. she usually has tons of homework and Kumon, so sometimes she does her homework first, and other times she chooses to sleep. yep, sleeping is one of her hobbies.

Last Thursday, i saw her doing her Chinese homework. She really hated writing Chinese characters so much that she refuses to read Chinese storybooks and even when someone (whom she knows speak English very well) ask her something in Mandarin, she will reply in English.

From my perspective, her handwriting is very neat. I kept pestering her to teach me some Chinese. One of the ways to encourage her to to do what she does, which at that moment was writing a Chinese character over and over again.

Finally she gave in to my pestering and said " okay lah... bring a paper". I honestly didn't know where my mom kept all her stationery and so i told her I don't know where to get one. She refused to budge and told me to look for it. Finally I checked in my laptop bag and found an A4-sized paper.

She wrote the character "da", which means "big" in English. It was a simple character. When I was in my primary school days, one of the subjects they forced us to take was "People's own Language". For me, it was Chinese. I hated it so much till I asked my mom to write a letter to the school asking them to allow me not to attend the class. My mom did write that letter, but I still had to attend the classes. I remembered I either got very high marks (more than 90%) or very low marks (less than 10%), sometimes 0% too. Weird right? Actually, when I did had high marks, it meant that I copied someone's paper, and when i got low marks, it meant I tried the test without the help of anybody. See how bad my Chinese was.

After writing "da' she checked and marked my paper. i have "A-" for the 1st character... yay!!!!!

Then she asked me to write my Chinese name. My middle name was so difficult to write. She gave me a "B" for that. :(

Later she asked me to write "jie-jie" (big sister), ke-ke(big brother) and "ti-ti"(younger brother).

For homework she gave me this :-

I think it's the Chinese Character for "heart". Today's Tuesday. I'm going to meet up with Sze-en again on Thursday, her off day. That's when she is going to ask me for my homework. Sigh! I still haven't started on it yet.