The speak Mandarin campaign

I think I've spoken more mandarin here than I have my entire life. Of course I kinda expected it before I left. Here, you'd probably have to be able to speak Mandarin to get by. Especially since 7 of the exchange students are from Hong Kong, of which 5 of them come from mainland China. Of course, I still find it difficult to speak Mandarin, but being sorta forced to do it is useful. If you know what I mean. And you know, most of the time when I'm with those bunch of Singaporeans/ Indonesian/ Hong Kongers, mandarin comes in handy whenever we wanna say those "美国人... blah, blah, blah..." So, well, it's good to practice my mandarin. Oh and I must not forget to mention, I watched a chinese show with chinese subtitles. Perhaps Love. Not bad eh, totally chinese experience. hehe.

Today, we met 2 pretty interesting americans. Both of them can speak mandarin. The first, we met at the outdoor recreation center. He's taking chinese literature. Can u imagine? I bet he's chinese is better than mine. And if i remember correctly, he spent a couple of months in 北大. And he's a rock climber so he was promoting rock climbing. I'm going to sign up for a rock climbing trip at Taylor Falls. I really hope I can go.

The second guy we met while waiting to watch the Perhaps Love movie. He just came up to us and started speaking to us in chinese. Of course we were very impressed. And when he found out that some of us were from Singapore, he started adding "la"s at the end of his sentences. He's another interesting fella. In addition to mandarin, he know a little bit of Hokkien and Cantonese. And he's learning Japanese now. Also, he can write in both fan ti and jian ti, though he said he prefers fan ti. And from what I gathered, most of the languages he knows were self-taught. Right before we entered the room to watch the movie, he even said "selamat malam" to Chris after finding out that he's Indonesian. (Btw, the linguistic guy is also called Chris.) Wow. These people makes me wonder what the heck am I doing. I'm supposed to be trilingual but I'm so afraid to use my languages. Maybe I should try to use both of my "foreign languages" more while I'm here.

Gina