Chinglish and Me

So, I speak Chinglish. This is when I carefully construct an entire sentence in Chinese, and say it, only to end it with an English phrase, or word, that I just don't know the equivalent to in Chinese. Wikipedia calls it codeswitching, but I just call it not knowing the Chinese word for stuff. Granted, I'm not bilingual, but I'm getting there. Also, don't you just love how you're trying to go to bed. And you'll go on Wikipedia just to get a detailed episode list of the Prisoner, and then, three hours later, you're reading about how Napoleon couldn't get an erection? I mean, this thing is crazy. Um, sorry, back to the point. So, I've been trying to practice my Chinese again, you know, get back on the old wagon while I've got some time for myself, and while I haven't completely forgotten everything I learned, I'm certainly not getting any better at speaking it. People always ask me if Chinese is hard. And I always tell them, yeah, it is. But, it's easier to me than Spanish that I've been learning for almost a decade. It's like any language. You practice, you get better, you don't practice, you get worse. It takes practice, hard work, and dedication. If you don't have all of those, you won't get any better. I'm trying to work at it, one day, I hope to truly be fluent. Until then, 我 是 study.




















There is an Old Chinese saying, "Study is like paddling upstream: If you're not moving forward, you're moving backward."