This is a Chinese Language program for computers. It's essentially all I have seen of China since the last post.

This was written before my first class:

台球 - Billiards

Tonight I went to a Chinese pool hall. . .

Me talk pretty one day – I think I’m going to have to curtail my listening to music because it is stimulating parts of my brain that ought to be dying. (I had the thought of translating The GZA’s “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth” into Chinese. I likely still will because it’ll be interesting.) I feel like I’m going to lose my ability to speak English. It’ll all be put into memorizing important Chinese words – like 紧张 (nervous). The entire purpose of the language pledge, I think, is two-fold. While we are surely devoting more parts of the brain to Chinese, we are doing so by destroying the English-speaking parts in order to make room.

The most frustrating part of all of this is that I know that in about twenty years science will have developed a pill that allows you to remember everything you read and hear. Or at least something that will dramatically increase our ability to memorize information. However, that sort of invention will be obsolete by the time it is created. Indeed, by the time the memory pill is manufactured, we will have such a seamless interaction with sources of information that memorization will be a useless skill.

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Since then, I have done nothing but eat, sleep, and study Chinese. I, for some reason, cannot remember the words. It is very difficult and I'm not keeping up with the class. Hopefully, I'll get better at this, because right now I'm just desperately hanging on. However, I am improving and can have survival-level conversations with other English-speaking students in Chinglish. Since we can only speak Chinese, it is useful to be able to ask people if they want to "Leave Buy Food Want?"