My Chinese At Its Best Competition

A few weeks ago, my school put on a competition clumsily translated into English as "My Chinese at its Best" where we compete with other students at our level for a chance to win cash prizes. Two of my classmates and I signed up as a team, calling ourselves "We Won $3000" which would have been the cash prize for 3rd place (we had initially considered, but decided against naming ourselves "We Won 1st Prize" on the off chance we didn't actually get the 1st prize).

They had some really interesting challenges, one where I had to write a Chinese character with my finger on the back of one teammate, that teammate had to guess what it was and write in on the back of another teammate. Or another challenge where we played "telephone" and had to whisper a very long phrase to one teammate, that teammate in turn would whisper it to the third to see which team came out with the accurate phrase, every word intact. These were really hard. On the other hand, we totally aced the dictation challenge, thanks in large part to my Japanese teammates who already have a pretty good background in Chinese characters.


Team "奪得三千塊" (roughly translated as "We won $3,000") posing before we pummelled all the other teams with our expertise in Chinese and lightening fast reflexes in the lightening rounds.

Incidentally, we placed 4th, and sadly we didn't win $3,000, but we certainly had a great time.