My biggest fear came true... re-entry- 邯鄲學步

Had the chance to give a small talk... brown bag kinda thing today about the future and present trends as I know in instructional technologies base on my years of blah blah blah.

I might not be an excellent teacher or speaker... throughout the years, I have given some all right grade kinda presentations.

Today was the worst... because... it was the first time in my life to give a presentation in CHINESE. OMG...  8-O

Though... I speak Mandarin and Taiwanese in my everyday life, throughout the entire presentation, I found... uncontrollably.. thoughts, expressions and ideas forming in English.

I was on the stage trying to convey my ideas except for... it's a Taiwanese audience.

I heard English phrases slipping out of my mouth time and again... till... finally... I gave up refraining myself using English phrases because that seems to be the only way to get senses semi-completed.  8-X

When I was preparing for the talk, one of the biggest obstacle I came across was to find the Chinese translation for all the terminologies.

For instance, mental model... I live in mental model theory for all these years.  Yet, I had no clue what mental model is in Chinese...

Also.. so they say... mental model is 心智模式...

I also have no concept at all what "concept map"?   In other words, I have no 概念 what 概念圖 is in Chinese.

It was not until when I started talking did I realize that... it is not only the Chinese versions of the academic jargons that I am clueless about... I am also at a loss when it comes to the expressions associated with the usage of these jargons.  Might have something to do with the fact that... these are the things I learned in my adult life with usage exclusively in English.

The whole thing got me totally in shock and brought me further down into the dasein of my 邯鄲學步 state... me no speaking English, now... neither could I do Mandarin and Taiwanese in stand-alone version.  8-O lol sigh

It also reminds me of the experiences I had when I first went to Vancouver...

When I tried to speak English, I would first write the sentence out in that vacuous space in my head before I could read it out loud.... the same time I tried to learn the qwert keyboard.

Now, the inverse of what happened almost 20 years ago... except for this round... couldn't figure out how to put things in Chinese and type them ㄅㄆㄇ.... 8-O lol

On a second thought, such gotta be some pretty common experiences... so they might have named it... "en-entry cultural shock."

Got me a good shock....

On another second thought, well... my life is very much normalized today sharing issues commonly experienced by the normals... 8-O lol