At the risk of sounding like a total nerd (which I totally am anyway), I'm hereby declaring my undying love for studying!
No, seriously. I know I've been very ungrateful, always complaining and whining during exam periods or assignments' deadlines, but in fact I've been taking those for granted. Afterall, after 16 years of studying, it's bound to happen sometimes.
Since then, I was focused on finding a job. It certainly didn't occur to me that it would be this hard, or this ridiculously frustrating. Even after getting jobs, there were still other things needed to be settled. And let's just say that these other things haven't worked out very well either.
In short, I decided to take up studying again, in the form of enrolling myself in a language school. My parents have encouraged me to learn chinese for as long as I could remember, but since I've been in school and I've been taking up internships and in the midst of still trying to be young and have fun, I just haven't gotten around to actually doing it.
Afterall, it wasn't really an urgent necessity, at least that's what I thought. I have a couple western friends who speak perfect chinese, that ought to put me to shame, but I'm not called shameless for nothing. I could always give blank look to people who talked to me in chinese, and in a sweet tone said, "oh sorry, I'm not from around here." Usually accompanied with some winking action. That ought to do the trick. They either would find me adorable and try their best to speak broken english, or they would...well, leave me alone. Which is fine by me.
Sometimes pretending to be Japanese works too. Except for that one time when someone approached and asked me whether I'm from Japan, and I shamelessly said yes, and then he started speaking fluent japanese and I was stoned. Epic fail!
Well, anyway, now seemed like a good time to finally learn the language so I did. It's just been a week, but I'm loving it so far. I missed being in a class, with the textbook, notepad and pen in hand, just learning something new. Speaking out, making mistakes, making notes, and all that jazz. Of course, the most awesome thing is finally finding out things I didn't know before.
I still think it doesn't sound quite right when I do speak chinese, I always feel that people might laugh or find me incredibly awkward and unnatural, but I suppose everyone feels the same way the first time around. Right?
Or maybe not. I was having dinner with a chinese friend a few days ago and I was practising some words, and he just laughed at me the whole time. "You sound like a caucasian speaking chinese!" he said. Very unhelpful. Well, it's not my fault my tongue isn't exactly designed to speak my supposedly-mother-tongue.
Still, I enjoy the process very, very much.
