Dear Mercat Tours,
Well, as it turns out, I probably do owe you a debt of thanks. Although you rendered me incapable of NOT attending the speech competition, you are probably also responsible for ensuring I turned in a respectable-ish performance when placed in front of my entire year group and told to speak. People laughed and even did so when I intended them to, and all appeared to understand what I was saying.
I do have a slight bone to pick however: as it turns out, a year working for you also means when faced with a group of people staring at me awkwardly, I start to improvise. This works very well in English, where grammar comes naturally, but produced a few awkward moments in Chinese, as my teacher pointed out that entertaining as watching me attempt to improvise in Chinese was, grammatical it was not. Turns out learning a speech word for word is actually quite a lot of work, and the adrenaline rush off public speaking in a language which is not your native one is quite something.
It was all in all a very Chinese affair. From 8am - midday, we sat in a lecture theatre, listening to students deliver three minute speeches on subjects ranging from 'My Chinese Experience' to 'How to Study Chinese', with varying degrees of success. The only variety was provided by the beginners, who were not trusted to lecture in Chinese, and therefore either sang songs or dressed up as chickens and did a little dance instead, and the occasional performance of particular note (one guy delivered much of his through the medium of song). I didn't really pay a huge amount of attention - prior to my speech I was entirely focused on delivering it, and after delivering it, I almost instantly relaxed into reading Harry Potter in Chinese again...
However, it was definitely an interesting experience, and I now have a red velvety furry certificate thing which states that I attended the 21st Speechmaking Competition of DUT International School, and was placed into the third group within my category.
Yours sincerely,
Hannah Theaker
It turns out that some of what the compere had been mumbling was actually useful... He finished by saying 'mumble, mumble, office, mumble', which after a week I have finally deduced that what he meant was 'those who were given furry certificates should go to the office to collect their prizes.' I am now the proud owner of not just a red furry certificate, but also a book of Chinese papercuts, and dubious English descriptions of the qualities of animals of the Chinese zodiac.
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