What are you passionate about?

Ah, finally someone who is passionate about something!

I can relate to these comments. I would even go so far as to say that most of the teachers I ever met weren’t really teachers, by my definition. For example some of them did what I would call ‘testing’ rather than ‘teaching’: they’d go around the classroom gertting people to read from the book, correcting the mistakes, and asking questions to keep people on their toes. I remember one geography teacher in particular.It could not have been more boring – just reading from the book (the geomorphology lessons were the worst!)No color, no discussion, no personality, just stick to the book. I’m sure he was as bored as we were. The man simply wasn’t what I’d call a teacher.

Ken Carroll

I’m passionate about science communication, higher education, travel, politics.. tea.. standard stuff I suppose.

I just posted a long comment to you guys tonight about my horrid experiences with the Chinese language classes at Indiana University, but I think as unhappy as their “punish first, explain later” tactics made me, Chinese Pod has made me happier in this past week than I’ve been in a year. I think about my lessons all day at work and here I am at 2:30 in the morning still listening to your Chinese Pod-crack.

Just today I was meeting with a group of faculty (I’m a higher-ed administrator.. work with graduate students) and we were talking about how if the level of intellectualism was higher on campus, we’d have a better learning environment. But we know that intellectualism and curiousity are not just about being smart.. so what is it about?

I tend to think that insatiable curiousity for learning (on campus or in life) goes along with an expanded worldview. However, you can travel and not expand your worldview (think the sterotypical american tourist), and you can go through higher education and not expand it either (think our president.. oh did I type that out loud?).

So.. I don’t really have an answer for why we are passionate or why some are more curious learners than others. But I do know that what I love the most about ChinesePod is that it lets me work the way my brain works at any one time and fills a need for whatever aspect of my Chinese I want to work on.. listening, testing myself, writing, reading, memorizing vocab, understanding a grammar pattern…

There are many reasons I want to learn Mandarin, but in part it’s because Chinese seems mysterious.. all those characters and so different-sounding from English. True, I now know enough to know that the “secret” conversations my husband’s family has aren’t as exciting as I once thought, but now I can at least tell when they’re talking about me and answer back.

I also love that because I only know a little Chinese, I have to be clever in order to express what I want.. which is usually to poke fun at my husband (you(3) da(4) du(4)ze), but I suppose we all have our language needs and desires that drive our passions!

Erika Lee

“the goal comes first and then you see, you do not see first”
I always remember this mantra from a management consultant. My goal in learning Chinese goes back to when I was first exposed to it in Singapore years ago. I became fascinated by the Chinese characters and developed the idea that I could learn them without learning the language. This was a very irrational view, though I came across a series of books that took a very rational approach to them hanzi. Put in a lot of energy into it but failed miserably, and I gave up.
Many years later I started to learn the language in a more traditional way, but still with the overarching goal of being able to read, going into a bookshop, or now online, pick up a book, read news, whatever, is really what drives me. This took me half-way through the HSK ladder, but the fallacy of knowing 2000 characters to read 90% of what’s out there being what it is, I still have a long way to go and undiminished motivation.
This summer, I was the best man at the wedding of my former Chinese teacher, stayed with the family for a few weeks and realized how much of a gap there was between my intellectual knowledge and my practical skills, though progress was quite rapid. So, while keeping the original goal, I decided to focus on spoken Chinese, since at the end of the day, that’s what people see first. Incidentally, it also reflects more profund changes in my life, reaching out to others a lot more.
That’s just about when I came across ChinesePod, changed my addiction from writing Chinese characters to talking to my mp3 player every day for a good hour. I’m really addicted, and the more levels I get into, the more it feels like that.
Can’t further explain what drives my passions, except when I’m into something, much like ‘Mike in Jubei’, I want to know everything about it and get proficient (if not professional). I used to play African drums (hand-drums), was into it for 10 years, founded a band, practiced several hours a day until such time as any further progress would require that I stop everything else (including my job).
With Chinese, I used not to have a functional goal -incidentally, it’s funny how often people have been asking me that question. I now want to make use of the language for work, be it China or otherwise, but I don’t think it would be enough to motivate me if I didn’t have a passion for it.

Oomens: Santa Cruz has an excellent professional science communication degree. If you’re more interested in research, the top school is Madison, Wisconsin (quantitative-focus), and Cornell (qualitative-focus) is hanging in there. Another option is to write 3 science news articles, then apply to be a member of the NASW (Nat. Assoc. Science Writers) who have a yearly conference and web/email resources to get you started.

Ken and all: Yes, I know not everyone has the same college language experience (fortunately), but because of it, it makes me extra-glad to have found Chinese Pod to supplement, even drive, my studies.

I can go on and on about theories of what higher education should and shouldn’t do, but I’ll just say this.. the debate is always whether colleges should be about training and achievement or about learning/expanding worldviews/teaching people to become engaged and learned citizens.

True, there are snotty, priviledged college kids, but that is often more about class issues (at least in my experience) than about who is actually smarter than who. I don’t have the research in front of me to give you exact data, but there is a huge class divide making its way though colleges.. the best example I can think of is our school of journalism who ripped up and expanded their auditorium (displacing faculty offices) — not to add more seating, but instead to add larger, more comfortable seats for “today’s student expectations.”

I guess what I mean when I say “we need a litte more intellectualism,” is a little more focus on the ability of students here to see outside of their world, to think critically about issues, to embrace diversity in all aspects of life and to be curious about learning. A little less focus on the U.S. cultural forces of materialism, alcohol and entertainment, at least while in physically in class. I don’t think that’s too much to hope for.. for the balance to be shifted a little bit more towards the former, a little less towards the latter.

Enough of my rants.. I’m just glad to be part of all y’all’s community and in a positive learning experience once again. Thank you Ken, Jenny and CPod team!

Erika Lee

I’m passionate about: the mental cultural and linguistic development of Australian cockatoos magpies and ravens, raw ginger, tolerance, restoration of domestic knitting machines, the historical social role of hand knitting in different countries, calling a spade a spade, unix servers, talk radio, avoiding footwear, non-visual patterns, Palm PDAs, open standards, spranging, basil, IT heterogeneity interoperability and disability access, solitude, structured documents, pipe smoking, medieval European dance music, ragtime, throat singing, microscopy, cool weather, the sea, non-interference, dark rye bread, thinking, sharing.

I think the passion that drives my Chinese study is two-fold, one aspect being an attraction to the visual arts that has led me over the years far from European languages to the more exotic, decorative writing systems of the Middle East and Asia, the other being a cryptological side, the fun of having a page full of strange symbols to entice you and slowly seeing that page become more and more intelligible. I’m making pretty good progress in reading (though I agree with the writer who said expecting 2000 characters to get you to the point where you can read 90% of anything is a joke. It will barely get you out of textbooks, nowhere near anything authentic, and at that level, reading the newspaper or a book on Buddhist art or what have you has stretched my dictionaries, all of them, to their limits).

To the person who said they didn’t major in a foreign language because they didn’t want to go into foreign language as a career, those of us who were foreign language majors are still trying to figure out how to go into a foreign language career because, even if the old adage that “those who can’t, teach” is true, my professors didn’t have that idea and were more interested in having us admire their unattainable skills and stunning careers than developing our own skills, sad to say.

Chinesepod is good because it gives broader exposure to topics and allows for continued access to native speech, and if I get the job I’m interviewing for this week at a medical clinic locally, I may really need to start hitting speaking and medical alot more seriously than I have been. (And yes, I did go through my complicated definition of “how fluent am I?” in the cover letter, and that seemed to go over okay this time.) The blogs are good because now we’re in a community of people who at least understand the attraction to the language, can swap tips on how to proceed in studying, and the like. In my experience, apart from my ESL students who are doing the reverse language study, studying Chinese outside the university environment is rather isolating. The immigrants are usually enthusiastic to hear that you are interested in their language and culture, and they share your developing bicultural identity that comes from knowing another country’s pop culture and current events. I get the impression sometimes that outside of that community with people who don’t interface at all with immigrants or have no interest in multicultural topics of any sort usually are at a loss with you. You just may seem a bit eccentric to them at best, in some cases threatening depending on how nativist their sentiment gets. Anyone with any prejudices against immigrants, legal or illegal, anyone with any racial prejudices against Asians, is going to treat you the same way they’d treat the groups they don’t like. So here on the blogs, it becomes a supportive environment to aid study and where we all understand why this is important.

I’m passionate about Chinese dialects. I’ve developed somewhat of an obsession. I’m also passionate about tones, phonetics, (vintage) dance, learning, teaching (!?), knowledge sharing, fiction (trashy and cultured) and anything I can get my brain around.

I agree with Chris

I am incredibly passionate about chinese…but the stories too long to go into now…

you can probably tell how passionate i am from some of my recent posts…and one older post

We all owe ChinesePod a debt of gratitude

I am passionate about people and understanding them. The more I learn of other languages and cultures the more I find that we are all on the same planet but live in different universes (universes with a lower case “u” as opposed to “The Universe). Many years ago I was a Boy Scout (still am deep down inside) and we were always taught to leave our campsite in a better condition than when we found it. That task is looking more awsome all the time. My family name, “Mrotek” comes from the Polish root meaning “babbler” or “one who babbles”. Perhaps my ancestors were present at the construction or destruction of the biblical Tower of Babel. If so it is only right that I be one of those who contribute to repairing the resulting damage and help make this world a more understanding and forgiving place. Thank you fellow C-Podders and C-Poddies. You are my inspiration!

P.S. There, Aric, now you shouldn’t feel so bad about “Queen”