her face, her name is Ethel Zhang, she is 22 years old and is a teacher by profession and teaches Chinese in Shanghai Normal University, she was here for two months time and we were told to learn as much Chinese as possible within this short period of time. She wore spectacles and was very nervous because it was her first day in our college. After the class was over, all of us gathered and surrounded her just to speak to her, we all were so very excited, for most of us it was a first time that we got to interact with a foreigner.

The very first day we had a tough time pronouncing the letters and it was very confusing for all of us, it felt as if our tongues were all tied up by chowmein! We all were laughing at ourselves the way we pronounced the letters, even our new Chinese could not control herself and joined us…We were all thankful to her for bearing our mistakes and correcting us because the way we dissected the Chinese language, it was horrible.

Well, as time passed we did learn a lot of Chinese words and pronunciations; we also learnt how to write small sentences and paragraphs about us. Now we are confident enough that even if we were visiting China we will not lose our way and will reach our destination safely.

We would say that time really flew by, and two months are almost over, we enjoyed our Chinese session with Ethel ma’am, we really do not want her to leave but things are not in our control, even she says that it has been a very good experience for her and even she would miss India and all of us a lot. We will miss her a lot and also the Chinese language, it was in short a very wonderful session and we did enjoy Ethel ma’am’ s company, just disheartened by the fact that her stay in India and as our Chinese ma’am in our college cannot be extended.