His calling is teaching: how a student from China studies Russian and teaches Chinese

The path to pedagogy for the student of Penza State University Li Shutian was thorny. First, having entered the Medical Institute and studied for five years, the young man from China realized that his vocation was to teach. Now he is studying in the fourth year of the Institute of International Cooperation in the study field "linguistics" and at the same time teaches Chinese at a secondary school.

Li Shutian came to Penza in 2012.

“At first it was difficult and scary - I did not know the language at all, although before the trip I tried to find something on the Internet and read it. But gradually, step by step, I found friends, found myself, learned to live in another country. Ignorance of the language is one of the key difficulties for an international student. The social base provided by Penza State University is also important. In this regard, we were comfortable: the teachers of the department “Russian as a Foreign Language”, representatives of the Institute of International Cooperation helped us,” shared the student from China.

The Penza region and the Chinese province of Gansu are united by more than 20 years of friendship and cooperation. The choice of the university by Li Shutian was largely due to the existing agreement on twin-cities between Lanzhou and Penza. Also, Penza State University has been working on academic exchange with Chinese universities for many years, which also increases the number of students from China.

The native of the northern province of Gansu did not have a big difference in perceiving the climate, as it often happens with people from the Middle East or India:
“I know what snow and rain are like, we have similar weather, it was much easier for me in this regard and I didn’t have to readjust for the harsh Russian winter. I already arrived in Penza in October with warm clothes.”

Li Shutian can talk about the Russian language and literature for hours:
“Of course, the difference between our languages is enormous. Starting from phonetics and ending with morphology. As experts say, only professional linguists can afford to compare languages with each other. Any language is complex, but the specifics of Russian implies the presence of some features that are not found in Chinese: for example, prefixes, suffixes and endings. It is very difficult to understand them until now - sometimes I still get confused in them. I use the best advice I have received from my teachers: if you want to learn a language, speak it, no matter how you do it. In no case should you be shy, practice solves a lot.”

Already in the 2nd year, Li became one of the best students in his year and he began to participate in conferences. The young man was interested in science. In the future, he plans not only to complete the master’s degree course, but also to take a post-graduate course. He sees comparative aspects of the Chinese and Russian languages as the topic of the bachelor's work, and then the master's and candidate's theses.

He is already gathering material for future work: Li has been trying himself for the third year as a teacher of a second foreign language at secondary school No. 78 in the city of Penza. He teaches Chinese to Penza schoolchildren. Here, too, there are already some achievements and victories: young "Sinologists" are waiting with great pleasure for the lessons of "Mr. Li". He managed to find a common language with the pupils:
“We learn to write hieroglyphs at the lessons, the children really like it, they met enthusiastically my proposal to conduct a lesson on the comparative analysis of poetic works of great Russian and Chinese poets. I will not hide, not only pupils of 5-7th grades study with me. I learn from them and I discover new things for myself.”

Learning the Russian language is impossible without immersion in Russian culture and history. That is why the future linguist began to watch documentaries in Russian about the history of the development of the Russian Empire.

“I like documentaries, I watched “Ekaterina”, “Boris Godunov”, “The Romanovs”. First, it is listening practice: I listen to how the words are pronounced and improve my pronunciation. Secondly, this is an opportunity to get acquainted with the history of the state where I am now living and working. The adaptation period has been replaced by a habit, and now it’s even difficult for me to say where it would be easier for me to live. Over the 11 years of my stay in Russia, I got used to Penza, the university, and friends,” Li notes.” I fell in love with Russia for its amazing scale and nature. I really like to travel, and during this time I have visited more than 20 cities in Russia: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Saratov, Irkutsk, Nizhny Novgorod and others. In the Penza region, I really liked the Tarkhany Museum – I’ve been there twice. I really like to go to museums in different cities and see how cities developed. I’ve been to Baikal, although not even all Russians saw this miracle of nature. And when I return to China to teach Russian, I will definitely tell my future students not only about the beauty of the language and styles, but also about the beauty of nature and the richness of culture,” Li Shutian sums up.

Yulia Gerasimova, Natalia Tolkacheva
"University newspaper", No. 5 (1787) dated June 1, 2023