My First Chinese Lesson

Today I had my first Chinese lesson. The teacher, Meiling (MAY-LING), is a Chinese woman, who teaches my Uncle, Aunt, and cousins Chinese as well. The kids learn Chinese at school, but the private tutoring on the side I’m sure improves their speech. I’m doing the same thing. I will be in Beginner Chinese when I start school.
Meiling knows some English, but I wouldn’t call it fluent. She can probably understand everything I say, but cannot answer in a full sentence. It’s mostly broken English, although her vocabulary is very large. She is probably in her 50s, and wears what we would consider ‘Grandma’ clothes. She has very crooked teeth, but I’ve noticed that most Asians do. Her English is very hard to understand, although when you can decipher what she is saying, it is pretty good grammar when she says a whole sentence.
The first thing I did was repeat after her. I don’t really know what we were saying, but it just sounds like ‘ba’, ‘pa’, and ‘ma’. I’m thinking it was similar to letters of the alphabet,…like phonetic type stuff? Also, both Uncle Mark and Aunt Pam had warned me of this habit that Meiling has: burping in mid-sentence. In our first lesson she did is like 4 times!!! The first time she did it, I stumbled over the word I was saying because I almost burst out laughing!!! My eyes I'm sure were huge and my mouth was on the edge of a smile, because I had been anticipating this 'burp'! It was disgusting, because she is just talking along and then out pops a burp, but she seems to not notice, and just keeps talking without a blink of an eye!!! It's quite strange to me, but belching in China isn't considered rude, so I guess there is no need to address it or apologize for it. hahaha
My homework was numbers 1-10, ‘hello, how are you?’, and ‘I am very well, thank you’. We learned all of that in an hour. Chinese is HARD!