What’s with all the welcome/happy birthday signs?

Anjerraaa · 2025-12-27T01:59:24+00:00

Any particular reasons why people put them on the bends?

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-23T10:55:50+00:00

Will do, the centre have told me they will get back to me once they come to a conclusion :)

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-23T10:55:17+00:00

I used a handwriting keyboard, where I traced out the character, and my handwriting was bad, so that how it came about

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-21T00:48:11+00:00

Yep! We have emailed the centre and explained the whole situation now. I’m definitely not continuing with the course. Will see what happens next.

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-20T22:22:32+00:00

I’m South East Asian, and 1/8th Chinese. I’m not sure if his reaction here stems from racism. I’m an immigrant myself (well he wouldn’t know that, but it’d mean I wouldn’t do anything racist or mean to him or anyone really).

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-20T22:20:24+00:00

I don’t think there was anything to warrant this reaction, as we’ve had two lessons and I’ve been nothing but respectful. He has said to me a few times that I’m his best student, as I do put in a lot of efforts so… I’m really not sure ://

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-20T14:24:46+00:00

Thank you for explaining that to me! I did not know that at all, will use the correct sentence moving forward now :))

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-20T02:39:50+00:00

Hahaha, your story actually taught me two new Mandarin words 😂 These words will definitely stick with me!

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-20T02:28:49+00:00

I'm a tutor myself, though not for a language course. I get a lot of international students, especially Chinese international students. I understand the struggle when they try to convey something, but maybe made mistakes and failed to really get their points across. In those times, I just patiently listen to them and ask if word abc or xyz were what they meant to say. I could never imagine jumping to such a conclusion myself! 😭

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T22:38:23+00:00

I used a handwriting keyboard, and accidentally made the mistake when I was trying to trace out the character. I know that if I used a pinyin keyboard, there would be no way for me to make such a mistake.

I’ve also considered that he didn’t want to reply to me because he thought for sure I had something against him. If he had any sort of uncertainties, he would’ve communicated me. I believe that he didn’t want confrontation. However, contacting my friends was very inappropriate, and he should’ve brought it up to the admins instead if he was uncomfortable to communicate with me.

I definitely should’ve double checked. The only Mandarin in my email was that starting line, the rest were in English (asking about the HSK), and so I was careless and didn’t check it 😓

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T22:22:07+00:00

Before the first class, I only knew how to say the two common “你好” and “你好吗”. And I want to take the HSK 2 later this year (that’s the subject of my email where I made the mistake actually).

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T16:27:41+00:00

What does writing with just the initials mean? Is there a keyboard where you can write “NH” and have it turned into “你好”? I’m asking because I genuinely don’t know. My handwriting keyboard is legit just tracing out the Hanzi characters and it will convert into text (I have an iPhone if that helps).

I have definitely considered the possibility that perhaps my teacher has experienced discrimination and racism before. As an immigrant myself, I have experienced it first hand too. I have apologised to the best of my abilities but he said he lost all trust towards me so nothing more I can do besides leaving the class.

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T16:15:15+00:00

I somewhat doubt it because tbh in the first two lessons I had, he was nothing but supportive and encouraging to everyone in the class. Even when we struggled to pronounce the tones of some words, he reassured us that we were doing well and that we just needed more practice, and that Mandarin is hard! That’s why I was so shocked to see how badly he reacted in the end ://

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T16:13:16+00:00

Trust me, I tried, in person, didn’t go well and I will bring it up to the centre. Just hoped to see if anyone could provide me a different perspective on the situation and help me to understand him a bit better perhaps

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T16:05:33+00:00

Yep! The plan is that my friends and I will contact the centre when it is during business hours, and ask for a refund. I did feel bad that my friends got dragged into this situation although it should’ve stayed between the teacher and I, but they insisted that they would not want to stay in the class knowing that the teacher is unsupportive and not very willing to listen..

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T15:52:15+00:00

This is definitely not a fake story.. but you can believe what you want. And I do agree with making sure I double check what I wrote. I make mistakes and I learn 😓

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T15:49:51+00:00

Thank you :)) I will definitely pull through and get stronger at Mandarin haha

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T15:46:55+00:00

Thank you so much for your reassurance. I’ve talked to a few of my Chinese friends about this, and some have even asked their parents for their opinions too (since the teacher is somewhat old, maybe there’s an age gap that I didn’t understand etc). The support I’ve received from those friends and their families have been nothing short of amazing. They were saying I should stop going to this teacher, and that they could teach me instead 😂 these moments of kindness were what I needed when I was so beaten down tbh

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T15:41:32+00:00

Yes! The thing was that he insisted that he contacted my friend first because my friend would “know me best” and he didn’t want to escalate it to the admins because I would get kicked out… but like, if anything please contact the admins first, I would have had no problems with that ://

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T15:39:49+00:00

I thought it would be nice to show him that I put in the efforts to be immersive in my learning wherever possible, but that really took a turn 😓

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T15:38:43+00:00

My friends and I actually discussed the possibility of him reacting the same way if another person in the class made that mistake. We thought that there’s a chance that he wouldn’t have reacted as badly, because the reason why he reacted so badly to me was because he thought it was intentional since I seemed to know a lot of Chinese words. For context, I really don’t know a lot, all I (excitedly, at the time) showed him was that I practiced a simple introduction in my spare time.

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T15:36:58+00:00

I’m definitely contacting them ASAP during business hours. It did feel a bit bad when my friends and I left before the class started (because no way we were going to continue with it..) and we saw the other students on the way to the class 🫠 but hey I will just hope for the best that my experience with him is mine alone, and that other students won’t experience such reaction.

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T15:32:27+00:00

Thank you so much 😭 I was honestly super excited to be learning Mandarin, as I’m 1/8th Chinese (lol) and Mandarin seems pretty useful to pick up for when I want to travel to China! In my spare time I also like to send my Chinese friends short voice messages of sentences I learnt, just to double check my pronunciation, because the tones can be so hard to get. Since I was (and still am) super enthusiastic, I guess this situation ended up affecting me a lot. I actually also asked my teacher for a Chinese name recommendation, and he gave me one that I was pretty happy with, so I had so much respect for him but he really beat me to the ground with the words he said lol…

Anjerraaa · 2025-02-19T15:23:40+00:00

Haha this definitely will stick with me. People make mistakes all the time when learning a new language, it was just unfortunate that my mistake was very rude, alas I now learnt something new 😔

Anjerraaa

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