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...