Friday, November 24, 2006

Black Friday

Originally posted on xanga.

I went to Target this morning and it wasn't so bad.  I only missed out on 1 item.  Although this item was the reason I went there, I may still have been able to get it if I hadn't bumped into other ppl and started to chat.  I passed by a neighborhood Best Buy after my shopping at Target and was glad I wasn't part of that madness.  Now, back to work.  Yes, my client is working today and so must I.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Learning Chinese

Originally posted on xanga.

My Chinese speaking skills continue to decline as I get older.  The opportunity for me to speak Chinese has become non existent these days.  The only times I do speak is when I order food at a Chinese restaurant.  So my vocabulary gets smaller each week, month, urgh.  Having grown up in the US, my Chinese writing and reading skills are very poor.  I can't read a Chinese menu!  I have to go on memory and even that is starting to fade with age.

So, I've made it a point to speak to my daughter in Chinese only.  That's hard since my Chinese sucks and I end up using a lot of English anyways.  So I decided that I should learn to write and read Chinese to help improve my Chinese.  My goal is to eventually read a Jin Yong (Louis Cha) novel(s).

Having my old beginning Chinese books from my college days (easy As), I started to learn Chinese writing/reading.  I thought that if I got 500-700 characters down in the next couple of years, I should be good to go.  Well, I found out that I need 1500-1800 characters to just read the newspaper.  Plus, I am learning Traditional Chinese.  So, if I do learn these, I'll have to relearn 2000+ for their Simplified counterpart.

Wish me luck.  I hope to do all this by the age of 40.  That'll be around the time my daughter rebels and wants to stop learning Chinese.