Over the Top

My Final Exam for my Chinese class is this Friday. Things have gone so quickly and we've covered so many things that I feel like I've been in a tornado the past few weeks. My ability of reading Chinese and listening to Chinese has improved a bit, but my spoken Chinese (hence "communication") has gotten much worse. Needless to say, I'm pretty pissed off considering I've been spending at least 6 hours a day working on Chinese and I'm actually getting worse with my speaking abilities.

I'm not one to give up on anything I've set my mind to until I've given it 100% of my effort. So today I signed up for a new Chinese class that starts next week that is only a Chinese speaking class. It meets twice a week for two hours each day (unlike my current 5 days a week, 3 hours a day class). It is an 8 week course, but because we are moving to Paris in February, I'll only be able to attend for 6 weeks. I want to give it all I've got because I've worked extremely hard on learning this language and at the very least, I'll be able to say, "I gave it all I had". In addition to this new class, I'm also going to be doing some volunteer work in Taipei over the next 6 weeks so that should give me every opportunity available to really "do" this Chinese thing.

Oh yeah, why the Over the Top picture? Well if you watch this video, it should answer all of your questions: Over the Top