It got me thinking about how much of a fail I was at taking Chinese last semester, even though I passed the course and received credit. Basically, it all started because as an international studies major and linguaphile, I figured taking Chinese 101 would be a great opportunity to broaden my language capabilities. Evidently though, my brain only has the capacity to perform Latin based languages, because I totally sucked. I didn’t like that there was no conjugation, or pattern at to the words. The characters to me seemed like random memorization, and I could only seem to recognize around 50 of the little scribbles out of the thousands in the language by the end of the course. There seemed to be no structure, but the pure memorization required didn’t end there, you hadn’t to learn the Romanized pinyin, phonetically written to resemble the obscure sounds of the words. My displeasure didn’t stop there, I honestly didn’t like the sound of the language either, and I struggled with the accent, a problem I didn’t encounter with French or Spanish. Therefore, I curse the Mandarin language, but not its culture.. the only aspect of the course I found interesting. So unless the Chinese appreciate a warm greeting, I’ll totally be doomed when China takes over the world like the rest of you. Until then, I plan to pursue the languages of the great continent of Europe (a decision made at the end of last semester), and maybe one day I’ll try to reconquer China’s true Great Wall.