我学中文！

我学中文每天在工作和每天晚上在家。 我会说普通话，和我也写中文一点点！

Ok, hopefully no actual Chinese speakers will read this because I guarantee that likely makes very little sense and certainly is nowhere near grammatical (even how I think it translates to English makes limited sense so I'm not going to even bother). But you wouldn't have known if I hadn't told you, would you?! Impressed, aren't you?! Anyway, if it isn't obvious already I am learning Chinese. It is fun. It is interesting. It may be useful, even lucrative someday. Most importantly, it gives me something to do to pass the time at work everyday (although I'm starting to discover that this blog can do that too!).

Besides the above reasons, I have wanted to learn a language for a while. I took French for something like 35 years in middle/high school and college, mais je peux parler jusque un peu en francais :( (hey look at that, I actually wrote half a sentence!) When I came to Chicago I signed up for German 101, but got cold feet after a week and dropped out, switched into a French 103 class at the last possible moment, and coasted through to satisfy my language requirement. I then spent the next 3.66 years here without touching a language class - to my regret. What an opportunity..wasted! I could have learned any of a large number of languages, but instead I chose to just be...lazy. It's especially annoying because I think that, without exception, every single person I have met since coming here speaks at least 4.2 languages, and can understand another 10. In all seriousness, I really cannot think of a single person I have met that isn't bilingual - that's a lot of people. I'll admit, I sometimes do feel inferior being my smalltown, monolingual self.

So yeah, since I have so much free time at work I decided to make use of it. I decided a while ago that Chinese and Arabic are by far the two best languages to learn if you are just going to randomly pick a language to study, and for a variety of reasons I would rather learn the former. I might even run with this, as Cornell has a program in East Asian Law that may be worth checking out, and maybe I could study abroad/do work involving Chinese law etc. I'm surprised by how much I've learned (at least I feel like I've learned a lot, until I run into a friend on the bus who speaks Mandarin...) If I can find the time as a busy law student, I hope at the very least to take a REAL Chinese language class at Cornell. 再见，我的朋友！