一 ， 二 ， 三

Today I had my first calligraphy class.  I was most mortified on Friday night to discover that I was incapable of carrying on a conversation in Chinese and then it got worse on Saturday when I was looking through my daughter's new year speech for my husband's company and I could recognize but not identify most of the characters of the speech.  Humiliating.  Mortifying.  What did I do with 2 years of my life?  I keep on making a mental note to put my Chinese CD's back in the car to listen to, and freudeanly keep "forgetting".

Anyway, one of my Chinese speaking friends here convinced me to start calligraphy classes at the calligraphy centre, and today was my first class.  Each class we "master" 6 characters with the brush and ink.  Mine were 一， 二 ， 三， 工， 正 ， 王。Arguably you can't get any more simple than that.  And yet.  I covered page after page of character and finally went right back to doing more of 一， 二 ， 三，since the simple fact of doing a vertical stroke rather than a horizontal one was eluding me - 2 hours later.

I'm of course doing something completely different to Benny Lewis  who has undertaken to learn Mandarin in 3 months (I have suggested that his best bet would be to get in contact with Cecilie and her Happy Jellyfish language bureau - I'm sure his Chinese teachers have no idea what on earth to make of him and his - in their views - unconventional ways of learning).  It's fascinating watching his progress.  Of course there are all sorts of nay-sayers but I must say I'm firmly in his court and think he's going about things in absolutely the right way.  The only way to learn a language is to immerse in it and to constantly keep yourself outside of your comfort zone.  Not easy.  I must say he has motivated me to do one of two things - either go back to doing some chinese, or to re-launch my French studies in anticipation of our next Swiss holiday.

In the mean time, just in case I have a chance of getting bored here (or there or anywhere), I've enrolled myself for a M Ed degree.  I was toying with the idea of doing a Masters in guidance in Councelling, and the information evening for both was at the same time, and the syllabus for the M Ed just instinctively spoke to me so much more strongly.  I've been reading "Finding your own North Star" by  Martha Becks, which had been lent to me by a friend who knew I was looking for "what next".  It's quite interesting her approach of following intuition and gut in things rather that just doing what is expected of you and what you think you "should".  I've had so many "shoulds"in my life for so long, that it's about time to let go of them all.