Disatisfaction. I am upset.

I am not terribly pleased with my academic program at the moment. I know that CET is about cramming a lot of knowledge into my head so that I have a good foundation for studying Chinese in the future, but I have my own goals for Chinese studying. My goals... well, are mostly already accomplished. I am able to communicate in Chinese with Chinese people, using no (or minimal) English. Every time I have a conversation with a Chinese friend I hear them use a word I don't know, and I want to add those words to a list study that, ensuring that the things I study are actually what people talk about. However, concerning the vocabulary I am actually studying now, very little of it is useful to me. I readily admit, there are a few words that are good, but the majority of the vocabulary in my class are not things that I am going to use. We are studying subjects that I am not going to talk about. I don't even have conversations about AIDS, lung cancer, or old folks homes in English, much less in Chinese.

That is just one factor of it though. The other is time. I don't like my schedule the way it is. Specifically, I would prefer less time spent studying, and more time with friends. There are friends in the city that I have wanted to get together with since this semester started over a month ago, and I still haven't had the ability to see them. There are half a dozen people outside of China that I want to skype chat with, but I have spoken to only one of them since starting my spring semester. That conversation (just last night) made me realize just how easy it is/will be to lose the friends that I was so close to in the past, and there are some people that I really don't want to lose. And Beijing still has so many parks and museums that I still want to see. Every week there are live bands, or lectures, or community clubs that I want to go to, but EVERY WEEK I am instead stuck studying a bunch of words, many of which I have no desire to learn.

I like the three part combination of study, work, and play, but right now the time I have to play is not enough, and the time spent studying is too much. (Working 6-8 hours a week is just about right for now) There are so many more things I want to do in this city, but every day I spend learning half of a new lesson. And it is not even that I spend that time studying, but more that I don't have to time/energy/motivation afterward to study the words I feel I need in order to round out and fill in my vocabulary. I seriously have a few lists of words (of food things, of political issues that I would like to be able to discuss, of words that are useful in personal relationships [trust, commitment, and the like]) that I want to learn on my own, but I am so busy being force-fed the words from the text book that by the time I am done learning those each day I am sick of studying, and would rather just zone out with a movie or on facebook rather than learn more new words. I like to think of myself as a person of impressive capabilities (obviously not true all the time, as any reference to reality will prove), but there is a limit to how many words I can (want to?) learn and retain in a single day.

I am so ready for spring break. I am gonna climb a holy Buddhist mountain in Sichuan and hug a panda. I don't want to be a full-time student anymore. I would rather be a part-time student. Rant over.