CRAWLING AROUND ON the floor pretending to be a panda then slithering like a snake are not things I do very often. But there I was on a Monday morning doing just that, with 17 adults watching me, laughing.
This was a Putonghua class where, although there is still plenty of rote learning, there's also scope for different teaching techniques and much merriment.
On this particular occasion, I was performing various Chinese words that my classmates had to guess correctly.
Role-play is another technique used to bring light relief to the difficult task of remembering words.
One day I was a doctor trying to get to a mountain village to perform an emergency operation on a woman who'd been gored by a bull. On another, I was a mother on a train with a child suffering from travel sickness.
Before arriving in Beijing to start my studies I already knew about some of the language's difficulties.