Mandarin Students Practice Their Skills

After the visit to the temple, we continued to the New World Mall where we participated in a supermarket scavenger hunt. We split up into two teams and ran around the market trying to find everyday Chinese items such as tapioca pearls, durian, dried tangerine peels, and star anise. We used our Mandarin skills to communicate with the market’s cashiers and workers to help us find these unique items. Although we found it challenging at times to communicate effectively, each team found all of the items and was successful in completing the task at hand. The next and most challenging job was to go to the food court downstairs and film ourselves ordering food in complete Mandarin. Our objective was to use a few of our essential vocabulary words and sentence structures while staying in the target language and effectively ordering our lunch. Although it was uncomfortable at first, because recording conversations in a non-native language can be unnatural, all students were able to effectively order their lunch and earn solid, great experience by putting our Mandarin skills to the test. This experience, compared to a classroom setting, was helpful for furthering our listening and speaking skills in an authentic environment. We genuinely believe that this opportunity will help each of us achieve our full potential as Mandarin students.

This trip provided our class with a highly educational, cultural, and comprehensive experience, and we cannot wait until the next time we can put our Mandarin abilities to the test!

Story Provided by Lucy Patton '21 and Lucy Steinman '21