Chinese Lessons

I've been taking Chinese lessons for about 7 months now which is far better progress than my 2 weeks of Russian lessons.

My teacher is from a school that was designed for teaching Chinese to foreigners like myself, so the lessons are catered to covering typical foreigner activities.  For example, they tell you early on how to say 'Where is McDonalds?'  or 'Where is Starbucks?'   I was embarrassed for us Westerners to realize this was so important to our lives in Beijing that it had to be included in the curriculum.  But, maybe not surprised.

I did receive a surprise one day though.  In the second or third lesson I was reading out a list of words that I didn't know with the intent of simply learning pronunciation.  As I went through each word he told me the meaning....

Shuiguo - fruit
wubai - five hundred
xiaojie - prostitute!

This school found it was necessary that all foreigners learned how to pronounce prostitute in perfect Chinese.  That was even before learning about McDonalds! 

Most lessons were pretty standard after that.  I tried my hardest to do my homework in between lessons and after I finished the first book of material, which put me at slightly above not knowing anything, I had to write an exam.  This exam was not too difficult.  I had to fill in the blanks, fix bad sentences, put the proper tones on words, etc.  I got the results back the following week and he told me I got a 95%!  I sat back in my chair, folded my arms over my chest and nodded my head proudly. 'Not bad' I said.  He replied with 'yes, it's ok'.  I joked and said 'only ok?' with a smile.  He looked directly at me, straight face...'yes, only ok'. well, my arms dropped with my pride and I sat up straight.  This guy doesn't mess around