7th week was the speech contest week, so we all were super busy with the preparation. I was definitely amazed and grateful by how much effort HBA teachers put into helping us prepare for this contest. I was assigned a specific teacher to help me with my draft. On Monday, we spent the danbanke just fixing my entire essay, trying to find ways to make it more interesting. I originally decided to talk about one of the reasons why I pursued the learning of Chinese, but the teachers said the topic wasn’t deep enough for sannianji, so we decided to come up with another way to change my essay. On Tuesday, we decided to discuss the stereotypes between Chinese and Vietnamese, and how, even considering how close the two countries are geographically, heavily the media influence the way people think about certain things and form stereotypes. My topic ended up being “The story between me and my big fat neighbor,” which pretty much summarized the satirically humorous way Vietnamese people usually refer to China. Because we spent so much time on the speech, we didn’t have to write an essay that week, and our koutou baogao was also the speech! It was through this contest preparation that I got more aware of some of the tiny mispronunciations I usually made, especially between j,q and c,z, and also between the first tone and fourth tone. On Sunday, when I went to perform, I was so nervous at first and talked a little fast (I barely made the time requirement of 5min!) but I was glad the speech went smoothly and ended up with a second prize!
Besides the speech contest, on Wednesday Gu Laoshi from Williams went to visit HBA, and we got to listen to his speech about ways to learn Chinese. On Saturday we also went to see some Chinese acrobatics (zaji). Even though it was my third time seeing a performance of this type, it still impressed me so much as to how much effort each of these performers put into their performance, and how risky their daily jobs are.