Veggie Dinners - Herbivores

On Friday night Emilia, Maria, Rebecca and myself had dinner at The Herbivores, a small vegetarian/vegan place in Central.

It was realtively easy to find, but note that walking from Central Station to Herbivores will take you up several hills at a 45 to 55 degree angle. If you are wearing shoes like this:

make sure to bring someone to hold on to for the walk.

(I swear I actually saw a lady wearing these shoes the other day!  They could have been imitation Louboutins, but with two concept stores and 11 retailers in Hong Kong, I'm inclined to believe they were real).

This review notes that Herbivores is small - and it is. When we arrived at about 8:30pm, the inside table (tables? I didn't venture inside, but the shop is quite narrow and I only saw one long table in the middle of the shop with about 10 people) were full, so the four of us sat at the single outdoor table.

The food was good, but the prices for a main meal started at $148. When you live on campus and a meal and dessert and a drink doesn't even total $50, you forget what the price of a 'normal' dinner is.

I ordered a rice omelette, made with mushrooms and served with a pasta-style tomato sauce. The parsley belonged back on the tree though, not on my plate.

We spent dinner talking about the finer points of second language acquisition in bilingual environments (like Sweden) as opposed to monolingual environments (like the US or Australia), and about how burnt Emilia got on her hike that day.

Although the dessert options were tempting, we walked back down the hill to one of my new favourite places - Yoppi - for make-it-mix-it-yourself frozen yoghurt.

Closing remarks: I had bought the bag earlier that day from H&M. I would like to revise my earlier comments on shopping - if you go to the H&M at Sha Tin on a weekday as soon as it opens (at 10:30), you won't have to wait for a changeroom. I bought two dresses and a bag within an hour. Excellent.

Classes - Week 1 Review

OK, week one classes: COMPLETE!

Once my classes can be finalised (not until next week when the Add/Drop period opens unfortunately) I will post about enrollment drama and HOW TO GET THROUGH ENROLLMENT AT CUHK WITHOUT PERMANENT SCARRING, but for now, I'll just give a run-down of the classes I'll most likely be enrolled in for the duration of the semester.

Linguistics

Language Disorders - Taught by Patrick Wong, this class looks like it will entail a lot of reading and a lot of learning (our textbook "Foundations of Communication: Sciences and Disorders" is nearly 900 pages), but therefore I think it will be extremely rewarding. Patrick has practiced as a neurologist and researcher in the field of Langauge Disorders, with both child and adult patients. From aphasia to cleft-palate to every-part-of-the-throat/tongue-being-cut-out-due-to-cancer-from-smoking, he has seen it all and, in the US, has taught it all. Now he is back in HK, continuing his research into why children with cochlear implants (which these days are near-perfect replacements of the human ear) do not develop normal language functions at the same rate as their hearing peers.

Acquisition of English as an L2 - Taught by Helen Zhao. We spent the first lecture talking about L1 acquisition and establishing some foundations about how a child learns their first language (and historical theories of this process i.e. Skinner and his rats, Chomsky etc). This course is actually offered by the English department, but future students DON'T BE FOOLED! There is a lot of linguistic theory to be learnt, and the course will also focus on research methods as to how L2 is acquired, and to what degree it is acquired in different people (due to motivation, aptitude, anxiety) etc. It will also focus on effective methods of teaching L2, English being the target language of L2, so in the class there are also many students whose major is English Teaching.

Semantics - Taught by Candice Cheung. Semantics will be tough, I can tell. Our first task that lesson was to unpack the semantics of the meaning of the word 'mean(s)'. Like "I know what you mean" as opposed to "smoke means fire" as opposed to "I mean to go to every lesson". Pretty intensive stuff.

Languages

Japanese - New Practical Japanese II. Well, it seems that the grammar is fine, but I have SO much kanji study to do...

Korean II - Oh dear. Oh dear. Some new words. Some new grammar. Now I actually have to start spelling things correctly! >_< But the teacher is brilliant, and he is very patient with our small class of 8 students.

Don't ask about Cantonese or Putonghua. I'll learn from my roommate and my new friends. Sorry brain, no holiday for you until June!

Introductions

So, I'm Sophie, I'm 24, and as of January 2013 I'm going to spend a semester studying at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I only found out about my acceptance yesterday (Grrrr), and though it is not official yet, I figured I'd start this blog anyway to at least record the timeline of the application process (that will be the next post).
This blog is for family, friends and future exchange students wanting to know more about CUHK. I have found blogs about a post-grad student's time at CUHK, and a few posts about a Danish girl who went there as part of GLOBE, and a few videos on YouTube about the dorms, but there is nothing really comprehensive. So that's what I want this blog to be:

Sophie's Comprehensive English Guide To Studying And Living At The Chinese University of Hong Kong As An Undergraduate For One Semester.

There's probably a million blogs in Chinese about CUHK, but I can't really read Chinese... yet!

Why CUHK?

Because their Linguistics and Modern Languages Department is AMAZING.

Next year I will (hopefully) graduate from a Bachelor of Languages degree from the University of Adelaide, and then go on to post-graduate study, and then make a career for myself in academia. However, my university does not have a particularly robust Linguistics department e.g. we have one course called 'Morphology and Syntax' taught over a 12-week semester. CUHK has FOUR semester-long subjects of M&S, so their students obviously get more than just the 'quick and dirty' version we have to whip through at uni. CUHK offers a range of undergrad linguistics courses that are simply not available in most universities in Australia until post-grad level, so I think I have made a good decision on a good university in that respect. Also, I have been studying Japanese for two years now, and in December I will be taking JLPT Level 4. I studied Mandarin up until high school (but in Australia that doesn't necessarily mean we actually learned anything) and I have been studying Korean on my own for about a year. So now... let's study Cantonese and traditional characters! Wooooo! I am actually really excited about this - I am yet to meet a language I don't like. Of course, languages are difficult, but they are also beautiful and rich and diverse, and seeing as they will be my bread and butter in the future, for me, it is a rewarding investment.

Anyway, I'll be taking six courses over the semester: four linguistics courses, and two more just for fun!

More to follow soon.

~ Sophie