Fili’s world

The Olive Tree [gan3lan3 shu4] (link - flash movie)

Don’t ask me where I’m from
My home is far away
Why do I travel?

I travel far away, I travel…

For the birds flying up on the skies,
For the clear stream between the mountains,
For the wide green grass,

I travel far away, I travel…

There’s another reason
There’s another reason
It’s for the olive tree that I dreamt about, the olive tree.

Why do I travel?
I travel far away, I travel…

-

Me, Tuesday, 16:10, at the Chinese Garden - the Hebrew University Chinese forums :
“Nin hao,

I’ve just come here from Taiwan after wondering around Asia for a while [...]
Now that I’m here, I miss Taiwan and want to go on with my Chinese [...].
Is there a possibility of joining up classes without being a formal student? Has anybody ever done anything like that before? What courses are there for studying Chinese at Jerusalem?

Thanks in advance,
fiLi”

Lin, Tuesday, 16:23 :
“Hi fiLi,

My name is Lin, and I’m a Chinese teacher. I’m running off to catch my class now, but I just wanted to say that I’ll be happy to have you in my class, next class is on Thursday [...].
When you come to class please come see me (students say I’m nice so I could personally huanyin (welcome) you.

Lin”

-

Everybody stares at me, so I ask - “what class is this?” to which they all reply together “Chinese class”. I go on with “what kind of Chinese?” and get “Spoken Chinese” in return. They wait for me to turn around and leave, so I sit down with “Oh, cool, sounds interesting”. A guy asks me “is this how you choose all your university classes?”. Bahh…

-

Lights down, windows shut, laptop connected to large speakers and a projector, and Lin gives the signal. Oh my god, is this how they study Chinese? This is SO neat. The whole class, about 30 Israelis start kareokeing Chinese songs that are running on the screen. To my amazement, the songs sound familiar, starting from a love song that I’ve heard a few times (link) and on to an emotional song that My Sweetie used to sing to me (link). That’s so different than what I was doing in my Chinese studies at TLI. Wonderful.
Lin is a hyperactive cute Chinese teacher that speaks excellent Hebrew. I was captured by her personality instantly, as every other student in class was. The guy next to me, seeing my amazement, whispered in my ear that they do this a lot. Later on he went on to tell me that when somebody is having a hard time understanding Lin’s explanation she would usually reply with “oh, okay, don’t worry about it, let’s sing!” and that one time somebody knocked on the door and asked Lin to turn down the volume because the next class is doing a test, so she turned down the volume while nodding, waited for the person to close the door, then turned up the volume again with “heh, let’s just sing again”. Cute.

Although they use simplified characters and a somewhat different vocabulary, I’m not too far behind and I could catch up with them in no time. Reading sentences off the screen and translating them to Hebrew is a nice exercise after months of intense pronunciation practice and repeating grammar so much.

So, I’m going to be taking those Chinese lessons for a while. Keep my Taiwan connection alive with lively Lin.