Karaoke Time!

This afternoon I caught the train with Andrew into the city to join a few others for some karaoke! It's been a while since I last caught a train and probably one of the first times I've used the new AT Hop Card!

The platform was actually a bit busy because school had finished, but fortunately there were seats for Andrew and me!

We got to the karaoke bar early and so we went in and got started before Tsun Hei and Stephanie arrived, and later Laura and John.

We all took turns singing songs. Most of them were Chinese songs.

There were actually some nice Chinese songs! I had to Sound Hound them so I could try find them when I got home.

I did try sing some Chinese songs, but I had to search up the pinyin for them!

John and I were the only two who couldn't read the Chinese, so we managed to get a few English songs in there too!

Struggling to Understand

As mentioned earlier, one of my New Years Resolutions is to

9. Sit the HSK Chinese exam

which essentially means IMPROVE MY CHINESE! 

This year I actually want to make an effort to improve my Chinese. There's no time as the present as they say, and if I don't start now, I'll never get better.

I found a Chinese class to attend, and so my dad and I attended. It turned out to be a conversational group, where there was a conversation/discussion led by a Chinese teacher. There were a few students there, and then my dad and I. Yeah, a bit odd for a 25-year-old to bring along his dad, but I thought my dad would be interested and in the end he helped me out quite a bit!

The other students were either Cantonese speakers or non-Chinese people who had lived in China for a few years and were wanting to keep their Chinese up. All of them had much better Chinese than me, so I was struggling to keep up and understand everything!

Fortunately the conversation wasn't as difficult as one between fluent speakers, but with my limited Chinese, I could still only understand a few things and would take too long to try figure out what something meant.

To be honest, it was a little soul-crushing! It's how I felt when I first started attending church. I'm used to it now, and people do help translate for me, but it is quite depressing when you feel left out because you can't understand and realise how bad your Chinese really is.

I know the only way to improve though is to practise, practise, practise, but I think I might need a more structured class with homework, tests, etc. to help push me!

The quest continues...

Woops...

My New Years Resolution was to update my blog more regularly, and here I am already apologising for not having updated it since New Years!

SHAMEFUL!

Anyway I'm going to try fill in the gaps over the next couple days and get this blog up-to-date before it's too late!