Sa-Shai Daniels' Portfolio

In Chinese class I have grown greatly in my ability to recognize Chinese words and phrases by reading and or hearing. I’m really proud of this because now in class I understand what my teacher is saying when she speaks in Chinese, and when we are reading from the textbook I know how to say each character and am aware of what each they mean. Chinese class is the only class that I am able to practice this skill in because it is the only class that I read and speak Chinese in.

The learning endeavor that has helped me the most to grow this year is the spellers that we do for homework and the quizzes we take on Quia the following day. Quizlet is a website devoted to helping make studying easier for students. Speller is one of the programs offered. It provides the user with audio of someone saying the characters and the English meaning, and my job as a student is to type in the correct pinyin based on what I hear and see. These homework assignments are basically required study sessions for quizzes which we take on a website called Quia. Using Quia allows us to type characters instead of write them since the world is so electronically inclined and in the future this is probably how we’ll be doing most of Chinese writing. This is our Chinese homework almost every day of the week so I am able to get a lot of practice reading, typing, and understanding new terms. The two artifacts that I would provide to show my growth would be a screenshot of finished Quizlet spellers because they show the work I put in daily, and a screenshot of my grade on a quiz after practicing on Quizlet the night before because it shows the positive result of my hard work. These two things do a very good job of showing what I’ve been able to accomplish in Chinese class because. This method of studying forces me to study because I know that I’m going to be taking a quiz the next day. Because it’s a homework assignment and there is an impending quiz to worry about I tend to study a lot more than I would if left to my own devices.

One of the most important things we learn is pinyin. Pinyin is the form of Chinese characters written using the alphabet. For example the word “you” in Chinese would be “你,” but the pinyin would be “nǐ.” We generally learn pinyin and characters in relation to a certain subject matter. Recently we’ve started lesson ten which is about transportation. One of the phrases we learned is “bus stop” which is “汽车战” in characters and “qìchē zhàn” in pinyin. Another word we phrase we learned was “airplane ticket” which is “飞机票” in characters and “fēijī piào” in pinyin.

This growth allows me to be more confident in Chinese class because I actually know the source material. I no longer have to worry about being called on and looking like an idiot because I don’t know the answer. My new found confidence in Chinese class helps me perform better in class and makes me feel a lot less insecure. I think the skills I’m learning now are going to help me in the long run because I’ll always be able to make my own Quizlet to study with and then I’ll learn to be more confident in other classes as well as Chinese. Obviously I’m not going to be fluent anytime soon, but I know that if I keep studying every night eventually it’ll pay off in a big way. The more I practice the better I get, and that is exactly what I plan to do.