Kayla Cindric

The growth I experienced in Chinese class was learning how to answer the phone, have a conversation over the phone, set up appointments with others, and ask someone to return my call. What this looks like is that I can fluently speak and type the correct sentences in Chinese. It looks like I understand and comprehend others are saying and responding to what I or others said. I have not used this skill in any other classes.

In 10th grade Chinese 2 class, we learned how to answer the phone and initiate a phone conversation, set up an appointment with a teacher or a friend on the phone, ask for a favor, and ask someone to return my call and Lesson 6 in our Chinese book helped us know these sentences. We first learned the new vocabulary words (生词) in Chinese that are used in the sentences in the dialogue in our Chinese textbook. We then, learned the sentence structure in Chinese and put the words in that structure. Instead of saying, “I’ll wait for you at the office”, we say, “I, at office, wait for you.” (Subject+time+area/place+verb+object)After we learned these sentences, we finally took the test over it all. The biggest challenge was remembering the structure of the Chinese sentences. I kept putting the words in the wrong place in the sentence. I would put the word in English form “I wait for you at school”, but in Chinese it’s supposed to be “I, at school, wait for you.” I overcame this challenge by taking each letter of each word of the sentence structure and created the “word” “STAVO” and it helped me to know how to create the Chinese sentence.

My artifact would be Lesson 6 test. It fits the story because it shows how much I have grown and learned in just a few months and how much I have improved in my Chinese. Before this lesson, I did not know how to say, “I must prepare for a Chinese test” or “I’ll call you after I get back” and other things too. In my test, I got a 63.5 out of 60.  It shows how much I know now and how I had learned these sentences and the sentence structure.

My second artifact is my quizlet speller screenshots. These screenshots show how much I have improved my typing and my Chinese sentences. It showed that it took a long time and which sentences I was having trouble with and how I have improved in them. It took me a while to learn, “This afternoon I am going to have a test”:今天下午我要考试。 In Chinese 要means going to have and 有 means have and I kept putting 有where 要should be so it showed that I improved on that sentence.

These artifacts show how much I have improved. If I were to take a test or the quizlet speller on Lesson 6, I would not know what any of the terms or sentences mean and I would not do well on it, but if I were to do them again, I would do very well at them both because I have learned so much and know what the terms and sentences mean.

Knowing how to answer the phone, have a conversation over the phone, set up appointments with others, and ask someone to return your call in Chinese will help me in the future because if I need to email or call my Chinese teacher, she and I will both know what each other are talking about. If I decide to go to a university in China or go somewhere that speaks Chinese, I can use these skills and knowledge to the test and set up an appointment or have a phone conversation. I still have to develop this skill by continuing to speak Chinese so that I won’t forget it. (If you don’t lose it, you’ll lose it.) I have so much to learn in Chinese to truly have a conversation about anything. Knowing Chinese and learning it will be so helpful considering Chinese is such a widespread language and knowing it, will get me far in future careers.