a little triumph

Today I gave my first presentation in Mandarin Chinese. My roommate left to catch a flight at five this morning, so I wasn't exactly what you could call awake for the most part, but I did it. Mandarin has to be one of the hardest languages ever. The grammar is pretty logical (although I haven't figured out how yet) and some of the words make sense (like the word for cat almost sounds like meow) but there are four different tones that give completely different meanings to the same word. I think tones went out the window in the presentation (which was about me, where I live etc) so I pretty much got the 'well at least she tried,' look afterwards, but you know what, I was proud of myself. I find languages really hard to pick up and even harder to remember but somehow I managed to talk for almost five minutes (well, read but that's pretty hard too since it's phonetically very different from English) without giving up. It was shocking but it gave me a little hope. The most exciting thing is when you're in a public place and you suddenly recognise a word or phrase in someone's sentence and you feel like turning to any random that happens to be in the vicinity and being like, 'did you hear that?! They just said they 'don't have' something or other!' It's a small step, but at least it's a step. Thankfully there are no midterms for my mandarin class. Or at least I hope not.