I have absolutely loved learned Mandarin at LWC. Without having the option to learn it as a Saturday morning activity I would never have tried it, and yet it has become the main focus of my undergraduate degree and I would not have found my academic passion until a good while later in life without it. I will be eternally grateful to Mrs Zhang (张老师), the Foundation and Mrs Badger for organising the activity.
I have grown up with a poster of the world map up on the wall at home, because the very idea of travel really excites me. Yet my dreams had always focused on American, African or European travel because I knew next to nothing about Asia. Until I joined LWC, I had never really considered the prospect of travelling to the East when I was older, let alone learning an East Asian language like Mandarin for my degree. I had always loved Spanish and knew from an early age that I would continue it throughout life. However, I will always remember the random Sunday evening in Second Form when my Mum suggested I try the school’s Mandarin club as my activity that next term. I’m one of three children, and we had all been permitted to try one paid activity at the school, whether that be music lessons for an instrument or, in my case, language classes. I had agreed because I was not musically inclined and had met a girl that previous year who used to learn Chinese during her time in Singapore. Ironically, she had hated Mandarin and had been forced to learn it by her parents, but the unfamiliarity of the language intrigued me, and I decided to sign up alone at age 12, without the group security of my friends.
As stated, I had never studied Mandarin before, and I really did approach the lessons as a club at the beginning. I did do the homework, because I enjoyed it, but it took me those next two terms (if not a year) to get to grips with the pinyin alphabet and Mandarin tones. I couldn’t write much from memory, but I could say the odd sentence.
By the end of third Form we had to choose GCSE options, and I was fortunate enough to have started Mandarin at the same time as both some beginners and some more advanced students who had lived and learned the language in Singapore for a number of years. Our group had collectively attended the same sessions, as it had worked best with our Saturday timetables, and our teacher suggested we turn the club into a GCSE class by adding lessons 6pm-7pm on a Monday and Thursday evening in addition to the Saturday mornings.
I had never felt as proud as I had felt on the morning I discovered my achievement of a grade 9 in my Mandarin GCSE. I had taken the GCSE in Lower Sixth rather than alongside the rest of my GCSEs in Fifth Form, because I had been finding the balance of all those subjects quite hard and I hadn’t started the subject in First Form, like I had the others. This turned out to be a great decision for me, as I felt my language ability had hugely improved throughout the summer of 2019, when I organised and experienced a Chinese homestay in Chongqing, and I had tested my knowledge before my exam by setting up beginner online Mandarin tutoring lessons on Zoom in the midst of the 2020 COVID-19 Summer Lockdown, teaching a Scottish businessman basic Mandarin from scratch and perfecting my tone pronunciation.
Not every university offers Mandarin as an undergraduate degree, and I was overjoyed to discover that you don’t need to have an A level to undertake the challenge. In fact, you can study a Mandarin undergraduate degree from a beginner level, pre-GCSE!
I am so excited to be studying my passion for my degree, and I cannot wait to live and study at a Chinese university in Beijing for my year abroad in the third year. None of this would have been possible without help from the Foundation, Mrs Badger and Mrs Zhang, all of whom have created a fantastic opportunity for the students at this school and have genuinely changed my life for the better.
Rianna Harris, outgoing Head of College and Sternian.
