Halfway done

Today is my halfway point with my classes as well as my entire trip to Taiwan. It's been an interesting time for sure and I've adjusted to many things. I feel like I'm making a little bit of progress with Chinese...and then I'll learn something new and realize how much I don't know. I've stopped focusing so much on the characters. I need to learn them for my class, but I'm not spending any extra time learning characters that are not going to be on my tests.

I have exactly 6 weeks left as of today and am tyring to fine tune my learning and also take advantage of being "immersed" in the country, culture and language. I'm learning a lot from my classes, but I'm also studying my Fluenz Mandarin DVD, other books, from the Internet and also learning from many people here in Taiwan. That is so much information to cover and was taking me many hours every day just to review everything that I had learned up until this point.

So instead of studying from so many sources, I'm creating a "xiao ben hei se de shu" or "little black book". I'm writing down all of the important words and phrases that I will hopefully use, and using this as my study guide. It is small and can even fit in my pocket. I bought a small pen (hen xiao de bi) that fits with it nicely so I can write down and add new things to it when needed.

If I was younger and had two years, I think that I could learn to speak and read Mandarin Chinese pretty well. In the past 6 weeks I've learned a hell of a lot, but that's just scratching the surface of the language. It's so different from Western languages, but an interesting challenge for sure.

Jim