For obvious reasons, it’s not easy to study a language in an immersion program. It’s especially hard when you pledged to speak only the language you are studying. There have been so many days where I’ve been so frustrated by my inability to adequately express myself/understand what people around me are saying/tendency to lapse into Cantonese whenever I’m grasping for words in Mandarin. I’ve often worried that all of this hard work won’t pay off in the end and I’ll have made zero progress with my language ability by the time my year abroad is up. Silly, I know; obviously I’m going to make some sort of progress. But that’s hard to remember when you’re struggling to communicate with those around you.
Tonight, though, I saw a light at the end of a very long and dark tunnel. A good friend and I were able to successfully spend the majority of the night speaking only Mandarin Chinese. This might not seem like a big deal, particularly in light of the language pledge we both signed, but we didn’t even have to resort to our usual “怎么说。。。？“ in order to be understood. Sure, not all of our grammar was spot on and there were times when we had to pause for longer than two seconds to think of the correct word to say, but the point is we understood each other. And that, I know, is a definite sign of 进步。
(今天晚上，我很高兴因为我和我的朋友可以只说中文！我们说的时候，我们没有很重要的问题。我可以听懂他，他也可以听懂我。我觉得我们说中文说得不错。我们有进步！太好了！）
